Of the windows of the village there was one yet more
often occupied; for on Sundays from morning to night,
and every morning when the weather was bright, one
could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile
of Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous
humming could be heard at the Lion d’Or.
One evening on coming home Leon found in his room
a rug in velvet and wool with leaves on a pale ground.
He called Madame Homais, Monsieur Homais, Justin,
the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief;
every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the
doctor’s wife give the clerk presents?
It looked queer. They decided that she must be
his lover.
He made this seem likely, so ceaselessly did he talk
of her charms and of her wit; so much so, that Binet
once roughly answered him—
“What does it matter to me since I’m not
in her set?”
He tortured himself to find out how he could make
his declaration to her, and always halting between
the fear of displeasing her and the shame of being
such a coward, he wept with discouragement and desire.
Then he took energetic resolutions, wrote letters that
he tore up, put it off to times that he again deferred.
Often he set out with the determination to dare all;
but this resolution soon deserted him in Emma’s
presence, and when Charles, dropping in, invited him
to jump into his chaise to go with him to see some
patient in the neighbourhood, he at once accepted,
bowed to madame, and went out. Her husband, was
he not something belonging to her? As to Emma,
she did not ask herself whether she loved. Love,
she thought, must come suddenly, with great outbursts
and lightnings—a hurricane of the skies,
which falls upon life, revolutionises it, roots up
the will like a leaf, and sweeps the whole heart into
the abyss. She did not know that on the terrace
of houses it makes lakes when the pipes are choked,
and she would thus have remained in her security when
she suddenly discovered a rent in the wall of it.
It was a Sunday in February, an afternoon when the
snow was falling.
They had all, Monsieur and Madame Bovary, Homais,
and Monsieur Leon, gone to see a yarn-mill that was
being built in the valley a mile and a half from Yonville.
The druggist had taken Napoleon and Athalie to give
them some exercise, and Justin accompanied them, carrying
the umbrellas on his shoulder.
Nothing, however, could be less curious than this
curiosity. A great piece of waste ground, on
which pell-mell, amid a mass of sand and stones, were
a few break-wheels, already rusty, surrounded by a
quadrangular building pierced by a number of little
windows. The building was unfinished; the sky
could be seen through the joists of the roofing.
Attached to the stop-plank of the gable a bunch of
straw mixed with corn-ears fluttered its tricoloured
ribbons in the wind.
