The flames, however, subsided, either because the supply had exhausted

itself, or because it had been piled up too much. Love, little by

little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneath habit; and this

incendiary light that had empurpled her pale sky was overspread and

faded by degrees. In the supineness of her conscience she even took her

repugnance towards her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the

burning of hate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still

raged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, and no help

came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, and she was lost in the

terrible cold that pierced her.

Then the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herself now far

more unhappy; for she had the experience of grief, with the certainty

that it would not end.

A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could well allow herself

certain whims. She bought a Gothic prie-dieu, and in a month spent

fourteen francs on lemons for polishing her nails; she wrote to Rouen

for a blue cashmere gown; she chose one of Lheureux's finest scarves,

and wore it knotted around her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with

closed blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on a couch

in this garb.

She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair a la Chinoise, in

flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted in on one side and rolled it

under like a man's.

She wanted to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and

a supply of white paper. She tried serious reading, history, and

philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start,

thinking he was being called to a patient. "I'm coming," he stammered;

and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the lamp. But

her reading fared like her piece of embroidery, all of which, only just

begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other

books.

She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any

folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she

could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid

enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.

In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called

them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the

corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of

old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all

over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils,

her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on

her temples, she talked much of her old age.




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