They were three full, exquisite, splendid days, a real honeymoon.

They stayed at the Hôtel de Boulogne, on the harbor. And there they lived with shutters closed and doors locked, flowers on the floor and fruit drinks on ice, which were brought up to them from morning on.

Toward evening, they would hire a covered boat and go have dinner on an island.

It was the hour when, from along the dockside, one can hear the echo of the caulkers’ mallets striking the hulls of the ships. Smoke from the tar would rise from between the trees, and on the river one saw broad patches of oil undulating unevenly beneath the crimson glow of the sun, like floating sheets of Florentine bronze.

They would go down among the moored boats, whose long oblique cables would gently graze the top of their own.

The noises of the city would imperceptibly recede: the rumbling of carts, the tumult of voices, the yapping of dogs on the decks of ships. She would untie her hat, and they would land on their island.

In the end, Léon had sworn not to see Emma again; and he reproached himself for not having kept his word, considering all that this woman might still draw down upon him in the way of trouble and talk, not to mention the jokes his fellow clerks traded around the stove every morning. Besides, he was about to be made head clerk: the time had come to be serious. And so he gave up the flute, exalted sentiments, and the fancies of the imagination; —for in the heat of his youth, every bourgeois man has believed, if only for a day, for a minute, that he is capable of boundless passions, lofty enterprises. The most halfhearted libertine has dreamed of sultans’ wives; every notary carries within him the remains of a poet.

He became bored, now, when Emma suddenly burst into sobs on his chest; and, like people who cannot endure more than a certain dose of music, his heart would grow drowsy with indifference at the din raised by a love whose refinements he could no longer see.

She stood there lost in a daze, no longer aware of herself except through the beating of her arteries, which she thought she could hear outside herself like some deafening music filling the countryside. The earth beneath her feet was softer than a wave, and the furrows seemed to her like immense brown billows unfurling. All that her mind contained of memories and thoughts was pouring out at once, in a single burst, like the thousand parts of a firework. She saw her father, Lheureux’s office, their room back there, another landscape. Madness was stealing over her; she grew frightened and managed to take hold of herself again, though confusedly; for she did not remember the cause of her horrible state of mind, namely, the question of the money. She was suffering only because of her love, and she felt her soul slipping away through the memory of it, just as the wounded, in their last agony, feel the life going out of them through their bleeding wounds.

Night was falling, rooks were flying overhead.