When he came home in the middle of the night, he did not dare to wake

her. The porcelain night-light threw a round trembling gleam upon the

ceiling, and the drawn curtains of the little cot formed as it were a

white hut standing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles looked

at them. He seemed to hear the light breathing of his child. She would

grow big now; every season would bring rapid progress. He already saw

her coming from school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on

her jacket, and carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to

be sent to the boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to

be done? Then he reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the

neighbourhood, that he would superintend every morning on his way to his

patients. He would save up what he brought in; he would put it in the

savings-bank. Then he would buy shares somewhere, no matter where;

besides, his practice would increase; he counted upon that, for he

wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to be accomplished, to learn to play

the piano. Ah! how pretty she would be later on when she was fifteen,

when, resembling her mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats

in the summer-time; from a distance they would be taken for two sisters.

He pictured her to himself working in the evening by their side beneath

the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers; she would look

after the house; she would fill all the home with her charm and her

gaiety. At last, they would think of her marriage; they would find her

some good young fellow with a steady business; he would make her happy;

this would last for ever.

Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her

side she awakened to other dreams.

To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a

new land, whence they would return no more. They went on and on, their

arms entwined, without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there

suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and

ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose

pointed steeples were storks' nests. They went at a walking-pace because

of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of

flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the

chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of

guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps

of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled

beneath playing waters. And then, one night they came to a fishing

village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and

in front of the huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live

in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a

gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and

their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and

star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in the

immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood

forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and

it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and bathed in

sunshine. But the child began to cough in her cot or Bovary snored

more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep till morning, when the dawn

whitened the windows, and when little Justin was already in the square

taking down the shutters of the chemist's shop.




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