The following day was frightful, and those that came after still more
unbearable, because of her impatience to once again seize her happiness;
an ardent lust, inflamed by the images of past experience, and that
burst forth freely on the seventh day beneath Leon's caresses. His
ardours were hidden beneath outbursts of wonder and gratitude. Emma
tasted this love in a discreet, absorbed fashion, maintained it by all
the artifices of her tenderness, and trembled a little lest it should be
lost later on.
She often said to him, with her sweet, melancholy voice-"Ah! you too, you will leave me! You will marry! You will be like all
the others."
He asked, "What others?"
"Why, like all men," she replied. Then added, repulsing him with a
languid movement-"You are all evil!"
One day, as they were talking philosophically of earthly disillusions,
to experiment on his jealousy, or yielding, perhaps, to an over-strong
need to pour out her heart, she told him that formerly, before him, she
had loved someone.
"Not like you," she went on quickly, protesting by the head of her child
that "nothing had passed between them."
The young man believed her, but none the less questioned her to find out
what he was.
"He was a ship's captain, my dear."
Was this not preventing any inquiry, and, at the same time, assuming a
higher ground through this pretended fascination exercised over a man
who must have been of warlike nature and accustomed to receive homage?
The clerk then felt the lowliness of his position; he longed for
epaulettes, crosses, titles. All that would please her--he gathered that
from her spendthrift habits.
Emma nevertheless concealed many of these extravagant fancies, such as
her wish to have a blue tilbury to drive into Rouen, drawn by an English
horse and driven by a groom in top-boots. It was Justin who had inspired
her with this whim, by begging her to take him into her service as
valet-de-chambre*, and if the privation of it did not lessen the
pleasure of her arrival at each rendezvous, it certainly augmented the
bitterness of the return.
* Manservant.
Often, when they talked together of Paris, she ended by murmuring, "Ah!
how happy we should be there!"
"Are we not happy?" gently answered the young man passing his hands over
her hair.
"Yes, that is true," she said. "I am mad. Kiss me!"
To her husband she was more charming than ever. She made him
pistachio-creams, and played him waltzes after dinner. So he thought
himself the most fortunate of men and Emma was without uneasiness, when,
one evening suddenly he said-"It is Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn't it, who gives you lessons?"