She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed

around her showing his anxiety-"Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?"

Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table,

sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head.

Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long

consultations together on the subject of Emma.

What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all

medical treatment? "Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame

Bovary senior.

"She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she

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were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have

these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her

head, and from the idleness in which she lives."

"Yet she is always busy," said Charles.

"Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against

religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from

Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Anyone who

has no religion always ends by turning out badly."

So it was decided to stop Emma reading novels. The enterprise did not

seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through

Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had

discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply

to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous

trade? The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During

the three weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged

half-a-dozen words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at

table and in the evening before going to bed.

Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville.

The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on

end and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses

from the church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths,

where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold,

together with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends

fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground

between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky straw

stuck out.

Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks through the bars

of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same place and unwilling

to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the shop front of the

chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and the people pushed

in less to buy drugs than for consultations. So great was Homais'

reputation in the neighbouring villages. His robust aplomb had

fascinated the rustics. They considered him a greater doctor than all

the doctors.




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