From the very first scene, he enthralled them. He clasped Lucie in his arms, he left her, he came back, he seemed in despair: he had outbursts of anger, then moments of infinitely sweet elegiac huskiness, and the notes that slipped from his bare throat mingled with sobs and kisses. Emma leaned forward to watch him, scratching the velvet of her box with her fingernails. She absorbed into her heart the melodious laments that drifted along to the accompaniment of the double basses like the cries of the shipwrecked in the tumult of a storm. She recognized all the intoxicating delights, all the agonies, that had nearly killed her. Lucie’s voice seemed the echo of Emma’s own consciousness, and the illusion that so charmed her, something from her own life. But no one on earth had loved her with such a love. He had not wept, as Edgar was weeping, on that last evening, in the moonlight, when they had said to each other: “Tomorrow; tomorrow! …” The hall shook with shouts of “Bravo”; they began the entire stretto again; the lovers sang about the flowers on their graves, about their vows, their exile, their destiny, their hopes; and when they uttered their final farewell, Emma gave a sharp cry that merged with the vibrations of the closing chords.

“Now, why,” asked Bovary, “is that lord persecuting her so?”

“But he isn’t!” she answered; “he’s her lover.”

“But he swears he’ll take his revenge on her family, whereas the other one, the one who came on a little while ago, said: ‘I love Lucie and I believe she loves me.’ Besides, he walked off arm in arm with her father. Because that was her father, wasn’t it, the ugly little man with a cock’s feather in his hat?”