*A devotion said at morning, noon, and evening, at the sound

of a bell. Here, the evening prayer.

Charles could not go on like this. Madame Bovary took strong steps.

Ashamed, or rather tired out, Monsieur Bovary gave in without a

struggle, and they waited one year longer, so that the lad should take

his first communion.

Six months more passed, and the year after Charles was finally sent to

school at Rouen, where his father took him towards the end of October,

at the time of the St. Romain fair.

It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him.

He was a youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in

school-hours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory,

and ate well in the refectory. He had in loco parentis* a wholesale

ironmonger in the Rue Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays

after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at

the boats, and then brought him back to college at seven o'clock before

supper. Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother with

red ink and three wafers; then he went over his history note-books, or

read an old volume of "Anarchasis" that was knocking about the study.

When he went for walks he talked to the servant, who, like himself, came

from the country.

*In place of a parent.

By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once

even he got a certificate in natural history. But at the end of his

third year his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study

medicine, convinced that he could even take his degree by himself.

His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer's she

knew, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his

board, got him furniture, table and two chairs, sent home for an old

cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with

the supply of wood that was to warm the poor child.

Then at the end of a week she departed, after a thousand injunctions to

be good now that he was going to be left to himself.

The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him; lectures

on anatomy, lectures on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on

pharmacy, lectures on botany and clinical medicine, and therapeutics,

without counting hygiene and materia medica--all names of whose

etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to

sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.




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