But this was the examination time, and the farmers one after the other

entered a kind of enclosure formed by a long cord supported on sticks.

The beasts were there, their noses towards the cord, and making a

confused line with their unequal rumps. Drowsy pigs were burrowing in

the earth with their snouts, calves were bleating, lambs baaing; the

cows, on knees folded in, were stretching their bellies on the grass,

slowly chewing the cud, and blinking their heavy eyelids at the gnats

that buzzed round them. Plough-men with bare arms were holding by the

halter prancing stallions that neighed with dilated nostrils looking

towards the mares. These stood quietly, stretching out their heads and

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flowing manes, while their foals rested in their shadow, or now and then

came and sucked them. And above the long undulation of these crowded

animals one saw some white mane rising in the wind like a wave, or some

sharp horns sticking out, and the heads of men running about. Apart,

outside the enclosure, a hundred paces off, was a large black bull,

muzzled, with an iron ring in its nostrils, and who moved no more than

if he had been in bronze. A child in rags was holding him by a rope.

Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps,

examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice. One

who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he

walked along. This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de

la Panville. As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he came forward quickly,

and smiling amiably, said-"What! Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?"

Rodolphe protested that he was just coming. But when the president had

disappeared-"Ma foi!*" said he, "I shall not go. Your company is better than his."

*Upon my word!

And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily,

showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in

front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire.

He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their

dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had that

incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think

they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations

of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for

social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric

shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his

waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at

the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters.




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