She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the
heart.
Charles prescribed valerian and camphor baths.
Everything that was tried only seemed to irritate
her the more.
On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity,
and this over-excitement was suddenly followed by
a state of torpor, in which she remained without speaking,
without moving. What then revived her was pouring
a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms.
As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles
fancied that her illness was no doubt due to some
local cause, and fixing on this idea, began to think
seriously of setting up elsewhere.
From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp
little cough, and completely lost her appetite.
It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living
there four years and “when he was beginning
to get on there.” Yet if it must be!
He took her to Rouen to see his old master. It
was a nervous complaint: change of air was needed.
After looking about him on this side and on that,
Charles learnt that in the Neufchatel arrondissement
there was a considerable market town called Yonville-l’Abbaye,
whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a week
before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place
to ask the number of the population, the distance
from the nearest doctor, what his predecessor had
made a year, and so forth; and the answer being satisfactory,
he made up his mind to move towards the spring, if
Emma’s health did not improve.
One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying
a drawer, something pricked her finger. It was
a wire of her wedding bouquet. The orange blossoms
were yellow with dust and the silver bordered satin
ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into
the fire. It flared up more quickly than dry
straw. Then it was, like a red bush in the cinders,
slowly devoured. She watched it burn.
The little pasteboard berries burst, the wire twisted,
the gold lace melted; and the shriveled paper corollas,
fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the
stove, at least flew up the chimney.
When they left Tostes at the month of March, Madame
Bovary was pregnant.
Chapter One
Yonville-l’Abbaye (so called from an old Capuchin
abbey of which not even the ruins remain) is a market-town
twenty-four miles from Rouen, between the Abbeville
and Beauvais roads, at the foot of a valley watered
by the Rieule, a little river that runs into the Andelle
after turning three water-mills near its mouth, where
there are a few trout that the lads amuse themselves
by fishing for on Sundays.
