包法利夫人Part 2

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footbath, or leeches. It was not that he was afraid of
surgery; he bled people copiously like horses, and for the
taking out of teeth he had the ‘devil’s own wrist.’

Finally, to keep up with the times, he took in ‘La
Ruche Medicale,’ a new journal whose prospectus had
been sent him. He read it a little after dinner, but in about
five minutes the warmth of the room added to the effect
of his dinner sent him to sleep; and he sat there, his chin
on his two hands and his hair spreading like a mane to the
foot of the lamp. Emma looked at him and shrugged her
shoulders. Why, at least, was not her husband one of those
men of taciturn passions who work at their books all
night, and at last, when about sixty, the age of rheumatism
sets in, wear a string of orders on their ill-fitting black
coat? She could have wished this name of Bovary, which
was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the
booksellers’, repeated in the newspapers, known to all
France. But Charles had no ambition.

An Yvetot doctor whom he had lately met in
consultation had somewhat humiliated him at the very
bedside of the patient, before the assembled relatives.
When, in the evening, Charles told her this anecdote,
Emma inveighed loudly against his colleague. Charles was
much touched. He kissed her forehead with a tear in his

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eyes. But she was angered with shame; she felt a wild
desire to strike him; she went to open the window in the
passage and breathed in the fresh air to calm herself.

‘What a man! What a man!’ she said in a low voice,
biting her lips.

Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him. As
he grew older his manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut
the corks of the empty bottles; after eating he cleaned his
teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a gurgling
noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter,
the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always
small, up to the temples.

Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-
vest unto his waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw
away the dirty gloves he was going to put on; and this was
not, as he fancied, for himself; it was for herself, by a
diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation. Sometimes, too,
she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a
novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the ‘upper ten’
that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was
something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation.
She confided many a thing to her greyhound. She would
have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the
pendulum of the clock.

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At the bottom of her heart, however, she was waiting
for something to happen. Like shipwrecked sailors, she
turned despairing eyes upon the solitude of her life,
seeking afar off some white sail in the mists of the horizon.
She did not know what this chance would be, what wind
would bring it her, towards what shore it would drive her,
if it would be a shallop or a three-decker, laden with
anguish or full of bliss to the portholes. But each morning,
as she awoke, she hoped it would come that day; she
listened to every sound, sprang up with a start, wondered
that it did not come; then at sunset, always more
saddened, she longed for the morrow.

Spring came round. With the first warm weather, when
the pear trees began to blossom, she suffered from
dyspnoea.