In Madame Dubuc's time the old woman felt that she was still the

favorite; but now the love of Charles for Emma seemed to her a desertion

from her tenderness, an encroachment upon what was hers, and she watched

her son's happiness in sad silence, as a ruined man looks through

the windows at people dining in his old house. She recalled to him as

remembrances her troubles and her sacrifices, and, comparing these with

Emma's negligence, came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to

adore her so exclusively.

Charles knew not what to answer: he respected his mother, and he loved

his wife infinitely; he considered the judgment of the one infallible,

and yet he thought the conduct of the other irreproachable. When Madam

Bovary had gone, he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one or

two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from his mamma. Emma

proved to him with a word that he was mistaken, and sent him off to his

patients.

And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she wanted to make

herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited all

the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many

melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after as before, and

Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.

When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without

getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did

not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself

in conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that

Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became

regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among

other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony

of dinner.

A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of the lungs, had

given madame a little Italian greyhound; she took her out walking, for

she went out sometimes in order to be alone for a moment, and not to see

before her eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far

as the beeches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion which forms an

angle of the wall on the side of the country. Amidst the vegetation of

the ditch there are long reeds with leaves that cut you.

She began by looking round her to see if nothing had changed since last

she had been there. She found again in the same places the foxgloves and

wallflowers, the beds of nettles growing round the big stones, and

the patches of lichen along the three windows, whose shutters, always

closed, were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts,

aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound, who ran round

and round in the fields, yelping after the yellow butterflies, chasing

the shrew-mice, or nibbling the poppies on the edge of a cornfield.




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