Would this misery last for ever? Would she never issue from it? Yet

she was as good as all the women who were living happily. She had seen

duchesses at Vaubyessard with clumsier waists and commoner ways, and she

execrated the injustice of God. She leant her head against the walls

to weep; she envied lives of stir; longed for masked balls, for violent

pleasures, with all the wildness that she did not know, but that these

must surely yield.

She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart.

Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried

only seemed to irritate her the more.

On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and this

over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which

she remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was

pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms.

As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her

illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea,

began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere.

From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp little cough, and

completely lost her appetite.

It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and

"when he was beginning to get on there." Yet if it must be! He took her

to Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous complaint: change of

air was needed.

After looking about him on this side and on that, Charles learnt that

in the Neufchatel arrondissement there was a considerable market town

called Yonville-l'Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a

week before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask the

number of the population, the distance from the nearest doctor, what

his predecessor had made a year, and so forth; and the answer being

satisfactory, he made up his mind to move towards the spring, if Emma's

health did not improve.

One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer,

something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding bouquet.

The orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin

ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared

up more quickly than dry straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the

cinders, slowly devoured. She watched it burn.

The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted, the gold

lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas, fluttering like black

butterflies at the back of the stove, at least flew up the chimney.

When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame Bovary was pregnant.




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