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When the cloth was removed, Bovary did not get up, nor did Emma; and as she contemplated him, the monotony of the spectacle gradually drove all compassion from her heart. He seemed to her puny, weak, worthless, in fact a poor man in every way. How could she get rid of him? What an interminable evening! She felt numbed, as though by something stupefying like the fumes of opium.
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.
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?”
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