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.

Had they nothing else to say to each other? Yet their eyes were full of a more serious conversation; and while they forced themselves to find commonplace remarks, they felt the same languor invading them both; it was like a murmur of the soul, deep, continuous, louder than the murmur of their voices. Surprised by a sweetness new to them, they did not think of describing the sensation to each other or of discovering its cause. Future joys, like tropical shores, project over the immensity that lies before them their native softness, a fragrant breeze, and one grows drowsy in that intoxication without even worrying about the horizon one cannot see.

When the card game was finished, the apothecary and the doctor would play dominoes, and Emma would move to another chair, lean her elbows on the table, and leaf through L’Illustration. She had brought along her fashion magazine. Léon would sit down next to her; they would look at the pictures together and wait for each other at the bottoms of the pages. Often she would ask him to read some poems to her; Léon would declaim them in a languid voice, which he would carefully let die away at the love passages. But the noise of the dominoes interfered; Monsieur Homais was good at the game, he would beat Charles by a full double six. Then, having reached three hundred, the two of them would stretch out in front of the fireplace and soon fall asleep. The fire was dying down in the embers; the teapot was empty; Léon was still reading. Emma would listen to him, absently turning the lampshade, its gauze painted with Pierrots in carriages and tightrope dancers with their balancing poles. Léon would stop, indicating with a gesture his sleeping audience; then they would talk to each other in low voices, and the conversation they had would seem the sweeter to them because it was not overheard.

What exasperated her was that Charles seemed unaware of her suffering. His conviction that he was making her happy seemed an idiotic insult, and his certainty of this, ingratitude. For whom, then, was she being so good? Wasn’t he himself the obstacle to all happiness, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp-pointed prong of that complex belt that bound her on all sides?

The wan light from the windows was fading in gentle undulations. The pieces of furniture, each in its place, seemed to have grown stiller and to be sinking into an ocean of shadow. The fire was out, the clock ticked on, and Emma vaguely marveled that these things should be so calm while within herself she felt such turmoil. But between the window and the sewing table, there was little Berthe, tottering in her knitted booties, trying to reach her mother, to catch hold of the ends of her apron strings.

From then on, the memory of Léon occupied the center of her feeling of weariness; there it sparkled more brightly than a fire abandoned by travelers on the snow of a Russian steppe. She would rush up to it, she would crouch down next to it, she would delicately stir its embers, so close to dying out, she would look all around for something that could revive it; and the most distant memories, as well as the most recent events, what she was feeling and what she was imagining, her sensuous desires, which were dissipating, her plans for happiness, which were cracking in the wind like dead branches, her sterile virtue, her disappointed hopes, the litter of her domestic life—she gathered all of it up, took it, and used it to rekindle her sadness.

And yet the flames died down, either because the supply of fuel was exhausted or because too much was piled on. Little by little, love was extinguished by absence, longing smothered by routine; and the incendiary glow that had reddened her pale sky was covered over in shadow and by degrees faded away. In the torpor of her consciousness, she even misunderstood her feelings of repugnance for her husband to be yearnings for her lover, the scorching of hatred for the rekindling of affection; but since the storm continued to rage and her passion burned itself to ashes, and since no help came and no sun appeared, night closed in completely around her, and she remained lost in a terrible, piercing cold.

It was the beginning of October. There was a haze over the countryside. Mist lay along the horizon, between the outlines of the hills; and elsewhere it tore apart, rose, vanished. Sometimes, through a gap in the haze, one could see the roofs of Yonville under a ray of sunlight in the distance, with its gardens by the water’s edge, its courtyards, walls, and church steeple. Emma would half close her eyes so as to distinguish her own house, and never had this poor village where she lived seemed so small to her. From the height on which they were standing, the whole valley appeared to be one vast, pale lake, evaporating into the air. Clumps of trees jutted up at intervals like black rocks; and the tall lines of poplars, rising above the fog, were like its shores, stirred by the wind.

Beside them, among the pine trees, a dusky light eddied above the grass in the warm atmosphere. The reddish earth, the color of snuff, deadened the sound of their steps; and the horses, as they walked, pushed the fallen pinecones before them with the tips of their iron shoes.

The material of her riding habit caught on his velvet coat. She tipped back her head, her white throat swelled with a sigh; and weakened, bathed in tears, hiding her face, with a long tremor she gave herself up to him.

The evening shadows were coming down; the horizontal sun, passing between the branches, dazzled her eyes. Here and there, all around her, patches of light shimmered in the leaves or on the ground, as if hummingbirds in flight had scattered their feathers there. Silence was everywhere; something mild seemed to be coming forth from the trees; she could feel her heart beginning to beat again, and her blood flowing through her flesh like a river of milk. Then, from far away beyond the woods, on the other hills, she heard a vague, prolonged cry, a voice that lingered, and she listened to it in silence as it lost itself like a kind of music in the last vibrations of her tingling nerves. Rodolphe, a cigar between his teeth, was mending with his penknife one of the bridles, which had broken.

She said to herself again and again: “I have a lover! A lover!” reveling in the thought as though she had come into a second puberty. At last she would possess those joys of love, that fever of happiness of which she had despaired. She was entering something marvelous in which all was passion, ecstasy, delirium; a blue-tinged immensity surrounded her, heights of feeling sparkled under her thoughts, and ordinary life appeared only in the distance, far below, in shadow, in the spaces between those peaks.

Then she recalled the heroines of the books she had read, and this lyrical throng of adulterous women began to sing in her memory with sisterly voices that enchanted her. She herself was in some way becoming an actual part of those imaginings and was fulfilling the long daydream of her youth, by seeing herself as this type of amorous woman she had so much envied. Besides, Emma was experiencing the satisfaction of revenge. Hadn’t she suffered enough? But now she was triumphing, and love, so long contained, was springing forth whole, with joyful effervescence. She savored it without remorse, without uneasiness, without distress.

But she was so pretty! And he had possessed few women as ingenuous as she! This love, so free of licentiousness, was a new thing for him and, drawing him out of his easy ways, both flattered his pride and inflamed his sensuality. Emma’s rapturous emotion, which his bourgeois common sense disdained, seemed charming to him in his heart of hearts, since he was the object of it. And so, certain of being loved, he stopped making any effort, and imperceptibly his manner changed.

He no longer spoke those sweet words to her that had once made her weep, nor did he offer her those fervent caresses that had once driven her wild; so that their great love, in which she lived immersed, seemed to be seeping away under her, like the waters of a river being absorbed into its own bed, and she could see the mud. She did not want to believe it; she redoubled her affection; and Rodolphe made less and less of an effort to hide his indifference.