Madame Bovary

Leon soon put on an air of superiority before his comrades, avoided their company, and completely neglected his work. He waited for her letters, re-read them, wrote to her. Instead of lessening with absence, his longing to see her grew, so that at last on a Saturday morning he escaped from his office. When, from the summit of the hill, he saw the church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the wind in the valley below, he felt that delight mingled with triumphant vanity and egoistic tenderness that millionaires must experience when they come back to their native village. He went rambling round her house in the dark; a light was burning in the kitchen; he watched for her shadow behind the curtains, but nothing appeared. Mere Lefrancois, when she saw him, uttered many exclamations — she thought he had grown and was thinner, while Artemise, on the contrary, thought him stouter and darker. He dined alone in the little room as of yore, but without the tax-gatherer; for Binet, tired of waiting for the Hirondelle, had definitively moved his meal forward to five o'clock, though he still declared the rickety old concern was late. Leon knocked at the doctor's door. Madame was in her room and did not come down for a quarter of an hour. The doctor seemed delighted to see him, but he never stirred out that evening, nor all the next day. Leon saw her alone only at last, very late, behind the garden in the lane — in the lane, as she had the other one. It was a stormy night, and they talked under an umbrella by lightning flashes. Their separation was becoming intolerable. 'I would rather die!' said Emma, writhing in his arms, weeping. 'Adieu! adieu! When shall I see you again?' She promised him that she would find, by no matter what means, a regular opportunity of seeing one another at least once a week. Some money was coming to her. On the strength of it she bought a pair of yellow curtains with large stripes for her room, whose cheapness Lheureux had commended; she dreamed of a carpet; Lheureux declared that was not quite drinking the sea, and politely undertook to supply one. She could no longer do without his services — twenty times a day she sent for him, and he put by his business without a murmur. People could not understand either why Mere Rollet breakfasted with her every day and paid her private visits. Rollet was the letter-drop; Lheureux the instrument of spending she could not yet pay for. It was about this time, the beginning of winter, that she seemed seized with great musical fervour. One evening when Charles was listening, she began the same piece four times over, each time with much vexation, while he, not noticing any difference, cried: 'Bravo! Very good! You are wrong to stop.' — 'Oh, no; it is execrable. My fingers are quite rusty.' The next day he begged her to play again. She stopped mid-piece: 'Ah! It is no use. I ought to take some lessons — but twenty francs a lesson, that's too dear!' Charles giggled stupidly and suggested one might find artists of no reputation who were often better than the celebrities. 'Find them!' said Emma. He went to Barfucheres the next day. Madame Liegard had assured him her three daughters at La Misericorde had lessons for fifty sous apiece from an excellent mistress. Emma shrugged and never opened the piano again. But whenever she passed by it while Bovary was present, she sighed: 'Ah! my poor piano!' And when anyone came to see her, she informed them she had been forced to give up music for important reasons. People commiserated. They spoke to Bovary about it; they put him to shame. The chemist weighed in with Rousseau: mothers ought themselves to instruct their children — an idea still rather new, but that would end by triumphing, like mothers nursing their own children, and vaccination. So Charles returned once more to the question of the piano. Emma replied bitterly it would be better to sell it. This poor piano, that had given her vanity so much satisfaction — to see it go was to Bovary like the indefinable suicide of a part of herself. 'If you liked,' he said, 'a lesson from time to time — that would not after all be very ruinous.' — 'But lessons are only of use when followed up.' And thus it was she obtained her husband's permission to go to town once a week to see her lover. At the end of a month she was even considered to have made considerable progress.