Unconsciously, Leon, while talking, had placed his
foot on one of the bars of the chair on which Madame
Bovary was sitting. She wore a small blue silk
necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric
collar, and with the movements of her head the lower
part of her face gently sunk into the linen or came
out from it. Thus side by side, while Charles
and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those
vague conversations where the hazard of all that is
said brings you back to the fixed centre of a common
sympathy. The Paris theatres, titles of novels,
new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes,
where she had lived, and Yonville, where they were;
they examined all, talked of everything till to the
end of dinner.
When coffee was served Felicite went away to get ready
the room in the new house, and the guests soon raised
the siege. Madame Lefrancois was asleep near
the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand,
was waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the
way home. Bits of straw stuck in his red hair,
and he limped with his left leg. When he had
taken in his other hand the cure’s umbrella,
they started.
The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw
great shadows; the earth was all grey as on a summer’s
night. But as the doctor’s house was only
some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night
almost immediately, and the company dispersed.
As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the
cold of the plaster fall about her shoulders like
damp linen. The walls were new and the wooden
stairs creaked. In their bedroom, on the first
floor, a whitish light passed through the curtainless
windows.
She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond,
the fields, half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking
in the moonlight along the course of the river.
In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were scattered
drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses
on the chairs and basins on the ground—the
two men who had brought the furniture had left everything
about carelessly.
This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange
place.
The first was the day of her going to the convent;
the second, of her arrival at Tostes; the third, at
Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth. And each
one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new
phase in her life. She did not believe that things
could present themselves in the same way in different
places, and since the portion of her life lived had
been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived
would be better.
Chapter Three
The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk
on the Place. She had on a dressing-gown.
He looked up and bowed. She nodded quickly and
reclosed the window.
Leon waited all day for six o’clock in the evening
to come, but on going to the inn, he found no one
but Monsieur Binet, already at table. The dinner
of the evening before had been a considerable event
for him; he had never till then talked for two hours
consecutively to a “lady.” How then
had he been able to explain, and in such language,
the number of things that he could not have said so
well before? He was usually shy, and maintained
that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and
dissimulation.
