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.