She would always see him out as far as the foot of the front steps. When his horse had not yet been brought around, she would stay there. They had said goodbye, they did not go on talking; the fresh air surrounded her, lifting in disarray the stray wisps of hair on the nape of her neck or tossing her apron strings so that they snaked like banners about her hips. Once, during a thaw, the bark of the trees was oozing in the yard, the snow on the tops of the buildings was melting. She was on the doorsill; she went to get her parasol, she opened it. The parasol, of dove-gray iridescent silk, with the sun shining through it, cast moving glimmers of light over the white skin of her face. She was smiling beneath it in the mild warmth; and they could hear the drops of water, one by one, falling on the taut moiré.

So he was happy, without a care in the world. A meal alone with her, a walk in the evening on the big road, the gesture of her hand touching the bands of her hair, the sight of her straw hat hanging from the hasp of a window, and many other things that Charles had never suspected would be a source of pleasure now formed the continuous flow of his happiness. In bed, in the morning, and side by side on the pillow, he would watch the sunlight passing through the down on her blond cheeks, half covered by the scalloped tabs of her nightcap. Seen from so close, her eyes appeared larger to him, especially when she opened her eyelids several times in succession as she awoke; black when in shadow and dark blue in broad daylight, they seemed to hold layer upon layer of colors, denser deep down and lighter and lighter toward the enameled surface. His own eyes would lose themselves in those depths, and he would see himself in miniature down to his shoulders, with the silk scarf he wore around his head and the top of his half-open nightshirt. [...]

The garden, longer than it was wide, ran back between two clay walls covered with espaliered apricots

He could not refrain from constantly touching her comb, her rings, her scarf; sometimes he would give her great full-lipped kisses on her cheeks, or a string of little kisses up her bare arm, from the tips of her fingers to her shoulder; and she would push him away, with a weary half smile, as one does a clinging child.

Before her marriage, she had believed that what she was experiencing was love; but since the happiness that should have resulted from that love had not come, she thought she must have been mistaken. And Emma tried to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words “bliss,” “passion,” and “intoxication,” which had seemed so beautiful to her in books.

Perhaps she would have liked to confide in someone about all these things. But how does one express an uneasiness so intangible, one that changes shape like a cloud, that changes direction like the wind? She lacked the words, the occasion, the courage.

If Charles had wished it, however, if he had suspected it, if his gaze, just once, had read her thoughts, it seemed to her that her heart would have been relieved of its fullness as quickly as the ripe fruit falls from an espaliered tree at the touch of a hand. But while the intimacy of their life grew ever closer, an inner detachment formed, which loosened her ties to him.

Meanwhile, acting upon theories that she believed to be sound, she kept trying to experience love. By moonlight, in the garden, she would recite all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart and would sing melancholy songs to him, with a sigh; but she would find that she was as calm afterward as she had been before, and Charles seemed neither more loving nor more deeply moved.

She would wonder whether there hadn’t been some way, through other chance combinations, of meeting a different man; and she would try to imagine those events that had not taken place, that different life, that husband whom she did not know. All of them, in fact, were unlike this one. He could have been handsome, witty, distinguished, attractive, as were those, no doubt, whom her old schoolmates from the convent had married. What were they doing now? In the city, amid the din of the streets, the buzz of the theaters, and the lights of the ballrooms, they were leading lives in which the heart expands, the senses blossom. But her own life was as cold as an attic with a north-facing window, and boredom, that silent spider, was spinning its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart. She would remember the days when the prizes were given out, when she would step up onto the stage to go collect her little wreaths. With her hair in a braid, her white dress and her prunella-cloth shoes showing beneath, she looked charming, and as she returned to her seat, gentlemen would lean over to pay her compliments; the courtyard was filled with barouches, people were saying goodbye to her from the carriage doors, the music teacher bowed to her as he walked past with his violin case. How far away it all was! How far away!

The night was dark. A few drops of rain were falling. She breathed in the damp wind, which cooled her eyelids. The music of the dance was still humming in her ears, and she made an effort to stay awake in order to prolong the illusion of this luxurious life that she would soon have to leave behind.

How long the next day was! She walked in her little garden, going and coming along the same paths, stopping in front of the flower beds, the espaliered tree, the plaster curé, contemplating with amazement all these things from the past that she knew so well. How distant the ball already seemed to her! What was it that put such a distance between the morning of the day before yesterday and the evening of this day? Her trip to La Vaubyessard had made a hole in her life, like those great chasms that a storm, in a single night, will sometimes open in the mountains. Yet she resigned herself: reverently she put away in the chest of drawers her beautiful dress and even her satin shoes, whose soles had been yellowed by the slippery wax of the dance floor. Her heart was like them: contact with wealth had laid something over it that would not be wiped away.

And so remembering that ball became an occupation for Emma. Each time Wednesday returned, she would say to herself as she woke: “Ah! A week ago … two weeks ago … three weeks ago, I was there!” And little by little, the faces became confused in her memory, she forgot the tunes of the contra dances, she no longer saw the liveries and the rooms as distinctly; some of the details vanished, but her longing remained.

[...] Charles had no ambition! A doctor from Yvetot, with whom he had recently found himself in consultation, had humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, in front of the assembled relatives. When Charles told her the story, that evening, Emma flew into a rage against his colleague. Charles was moved. He kissed her on the forehead with a tear. But she was fuming with shame; she wanted to strike him, she went into the hallway to open the window, and breathed in the cool air to calm herself.

“What a pathetic man! What a pathetic man!” she said softly, biting her lips.

After the weariness of this disappointment, her heart remained empty, and then the succession of identical days began again.

So now they were going to continue one after another like this, always the same, innumerable, bringing nothing! Other people’s lives, however dull they were, had at least the possibility that something would happen. A chance occurrence would sometimes lead to an infinite number of sudden shifts, and the setting would change. But for her, nothing happened, God had willed it! The future was a dark corridor, with the door at its end firmly closed.

One day while tidying a drawer in anticipation of her departure, she pricked her fingers on something. It was a piece of wire in her wedding bouquet. The orange-blossom buds were yellow with dust, and the satin ribbons, with their silver piping, were fraying at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry straw. Then it lay like a red bush on the embers, slowly being consumed. She watched it burn. The little cardboard berries burst open, the binding wire twisted, the braid melted; and the shriveled paper petals, hovering along the fireback like black butterflies, at last flew away up the chimney.