"But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute her?"

"No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!"

"Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on

before said, 'I love Lucie and she loves me!' Besides, he went off with

her father arm in arm. For he certainly is her father, isn't he--the

ugly little man with a cock's feather in his hat?"

Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began

in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master

Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie,

thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that

he did not understand the story because of the music, which interfered

very much with the words.

"What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be quiet!"

"Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning against her shoulder, "I like

to understand things."

"Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried impatiently.

Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, a wreath of orange blossoms

in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed

of her marriage day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the

little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not she, like

this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had been joyous,

without seeing the abyss into which she was throwing herself. Ah! if

in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the

disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some

great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty

blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness. But that

happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire.

She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So,

striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this

reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to

please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when

at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared in a

black cloak.

His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he made, and immediately the

instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury,

dominated all the others with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal

provocations at him in deep notes; Lucie uttered her shrill plaint,

Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the middle register, and the

bass of the minister pealed forth like an organ, while the voices of the

women repeating his words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were

all in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, and

stupefaction breathed forth at once from their half-opened mouths. The

outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with

jerks to the movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left

with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of

his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she thought must have an

inexhaustible love to lavish it upon the crowd with such effusion.

All her small fault-findings faded before the poetry of the part

that absorbed her; and, drawn towards this man by the illusion of the

character, she tried to imagine to herself his life--that life resonant,

extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if fate had

willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With

him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she would have travelled from

capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the

flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each

evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden trellis-work she would

have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung

for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked

at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at her; it was

certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength,

as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out,

"Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour

and all my dreams!"




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