The curtain fell.

The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the fans, made the air more suffocating.  Emma wanted to go out; the crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with palpitations that choked her.  Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.

He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated.  Her husband, who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement.  At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath—­

“Ma foi!  I thought I should have had to stay there.  There is such a crowd—­SUCH a crowd!”

He added—­

“Just guess whom I met up there!  Monsieur Leon!”

“Leon?”

“Himself!  He’s coming along to pay his respects.”  And as he finished these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box.

He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will.  She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon the green leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the window.  But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a few hurried words.

“Ah, good-day!  What! you here?”

“Silence!” cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.

“So you are at Rouen?”

“Yes.”

“And since when?”

“Turn them out! turn them out!” People were looking at them.  They were silent.

But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the characters more remote.  She remembered the games at cards at the druggist’s, and the walk to the nurse’s, the reading in the arbour, the tete-a-tete by the fireside—­all that poor love, so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless forgotten.  And why had he come back?  What combination of circumstances had brought him back into her life?  He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair.

“Does this amuse you?” said he, bending over her so closely that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek.  She replied carelessly—­