prompt:
Chapter: He had recently read a eulogy on a new method for curing club-foot, and
as he was a partisan of progress, he conceived the patriotic idea that
Yonville, in order to keep to the fore, ought to have some operations
for strephopody or club-foot.

"For," said he to Emma, "what risk is there? See--" (and he enumerated
on his fingers the advantages of the attempt), "success, almost certain
relief and beautifying of the patient, celebrity acquired by the
operator. Why, for example, should not your husband relieve poor
Hippolyte of the 'Lion d'Or'? Note that he would not fail to tell about
his cure to all the travellers, and then" (Homais lowered his voice and
looked round him) "who is to prevent me from sending a short paragraph
on the subject to the paper? Eh! goodness me! an article gets about; it
is talked of; it ends by making a snowball! And who knows? who knows?"

In fact, Bovary might succeed. Nothing proved to Emma that he was not
clever; and what a satisfaction for her to have urged him to a step by
which his reputation and fortune would be increased! She only wished to
lean on something more solid than love.

Charles, urged by the druggist and by her, allowed himself to be
persuaded. He sent to Rouen for Dr. Duval's volume, and every evening,
holding his head between both hands, plunged into the reading of it.

While he was studying equinus, varus, and valgus, that is to say,
katastrephopody, endostrephopody, and exostrephopody (or better, the
various turnings of the foot downwards, inwards, and outwards, with the
hypostrephopody and anastrephopody), otherwise torsion downwards and
upwards, Monsier Homais, with all sorts of arguments, was exhorting the
lad at the inn to submit to the operation.

"You will scarcely feel, probably, a slight pain; it is a simple prick,
like a little blood-letting, less than the extraction of certain corns."

Hippolyte, reflecting, rolled his stupid eyes.

"However," continued the chemist, "it doesn't concern me. It's for your
sake, for pure humanity! I should like to see you, my friend, rid of
your hideous caudication, together with that waddling of the lumbar
regions which, whatever you say, must considerably interfere with you in
the exercise of your calling."

Then Homais represented to him how much jollier and brisker he would
feel afterwards, and even gave him to understand that he would be more
likely to please the women; and the stable-boy began to smile heavily.
Then he attacked him through his vanity:

"Aren't you a man? Hang it! what would you have done if you had had to
go into the army, to go and fight beneath the standard? Ah! Hippolyte!"

And Homais retired, declaring that he could not understand this
obstinacy, this blindness in refusing the benefactions of science.

The poor fellow gave way, for it was like a conspiracy. Binet, who never
interfered with other people's business, Madame Lefrancois, Artemise,
the neighbours, even the mayor, Monsieur Tuvache--everyone persuaded
him, lectured him, shamed him; but what finally decided him was that it
would cost him nothing. Bovary even undertook to provide the machine
for the operation. This generosity was an idea of Emma's, and Charles
consented to it, thinking in his heart of hearts that his wife was an
angel.

So by the advice of the chemist, and after three fresh starts, he had a
kind of box made by the carpenter, with the aid of the locksmith,
that weighed about eight pounds, and in which iron, wood, sheer-iron,
leather, screws, and nuts had not been spared.

But to know which of Hippolyte's tendons to cut, it was necessary first
of all to find out what kind of club-foot he had.

He had a foot forming almost a straight line with the leg, which,
however, did not prevent it from being turned in, so that it was an
equinus together with something of a varus, or else a slight varus with
a strong tendency to equinus. But with this equinus, wide in foot like
a horse's hoof, with rugose skin, dry tendons, and large toes, on which
the black nails looked as if made of iron, the clubfoot ran about like
a deer from morn till night. He was constantly to be seen on the Place,
jumping round the carts, thrusting his limping foot forwards. He seemed
even stronger on that leg than the other. By dint of hard service it had
acquired, as it were, moral qualities of patience and energy; and
when he was given some heavy work, he stood on it in preference to its
fellow.

Now, as it was an equinus, it was necessary to cut the tendon of
Achilles, and, if need were, the anterior tibial muscle could be seen to
afterwards for getting rid of the varus; for the doctor did not dare to
risk both operations at once; he was even trembling already for fear of
injuring some important region that he did not know.

Neither Ambrose Pare, applying for the first time since Celsus, after an
interval of fifteen centuries, a ligature to an artery, nor Dupuytren,
about to open an abscess in the brain, nor Gensoul when he first took
away the superior maxilla, had hearts that trembled, hands that shook,
minds so strained as Monsieur Bovary when he approached Hippolyte, his
tenotome between his fingers. And as at hospitals, near by on a table
lay a heap of lint, with waxed thread, many bandages--a pyramid of
bandages--every bandage to be found at the druggist's. It was Monsieur
Homais who since morning had been organising all these preparations,
as much to dazzle the multitude as to keep up his illusions. Charles
pierced the skin; a dry crackling was heard. The tendon was cut, the
operation over. Hippolyte could not get over his surprise, but bent over
Bovary's hands to cover them with kisses.

"Come, be calm," said the druggist; "later on you will show your
gratitude to your benefactor."

And he went down to tell the result to five or six inquirers who were
waiting in the yard, and who fancied that Hippolyte would reappear
walking properly. Then Charles, having buckled his patient into the
machine, went home, where Emma, all anxiety, awaited him at the door.
She threw herself on his neck; they sat down to table; he ate much,
and at dessert he even wanted to take a cup of coffee, a luxury he only
permitted himself on Sundays when there was company.

The evening was charming, full of prattle, of dreams together. They
talked about their future fortune, of the improvements to be made in
their house; he saw people's estimation of him growing, his comforts
increasing, his wife always loving him; and she was happy to refresh
herself with a new sentiment, healthier, better, to feel at last some
tenderness for this poor fellow who adored her. The thought of Rodolphe
for one moment passed through her mind, but her eyes turned again to
Charles; she even noticed with surprise that he had not bad teeth.

They were in bed when Monsieur Homais, in spite of the servant, suddenly
entered the room, holding in his hand a sheet of paper just written. It
was the paragraph he intended for the "Fanal de Rouen." He brought it
for them to read.

"Read it yourself," said Bovary.

He read--

"'Despite the prejudices that still invest a part of the face of Europe
like a net, the light nevertheless begins to penetrate our country
places. Thus on Tuesday our little town of Yonville found itself the
scene of a surgical operation which is at the same time an act of
loftiest philanthropy. Monsieur Bovary, one of our most distinguished
practitioners--'"

"Oh, that is too much! too much!" said Charles, choking with emotion.

"No, no! not at all! What next!"

"'--Performed an operation on a club-footed man.' I have not used the
scientific term, because you know in a newspaper everyone would not
perhaps understand. The masses must--'"

"No doubt," said Bovary; "go on!"

"I proceed," said the chemist. "'Monsieur Bovary, one of our most
distinguished practitioners, performed an operation on a club-footed man
called Hippolyte Tautain, stableman for the last twenty-five years at
the hotel of the "Lion d'Or," kept by Widow Lefrancois, at the Place
d'Armes. The novelty of the attempt, and the interest incident to the
subject, had attracted such a concourse of persons that there was
a veritable obstruction on the threshold of the establishment. The
operation, moreover, was performed as if by magic, and barely a
few drops of blood appeared on the skin, as though to say that the
rebellious tendon had at last given way beneath the efforts of art. The
patient, strangely enough--we affirm it as an eye-witness--complained
of no pain. His condition up to the present time leaves nothing to be
desired. Everything tends to show that his convelescence will be brief;
and who knows even if at our next village festivity we shall not see our
good Hippolyte figuring in the bacchic dance in the midst of a chorus
of joyous boon-companions, and thus proving to all eyes by his verve
and his capers his complete cure? Honour, then, to the generous savants!
Honour to those indefatigable spirits who consecrate their vigils to the
amelioration or to the alleviation of their kind! Honour, thrice honour!
Is it not time to cry that the blind shall see, the deaf hear, the lame
walk? But that which fanaticism formerly promised to its elect, science
now accomplishes for all men. We shall keep our readers informed as to
the successive phases of this remarkable cure.'"

This did not prevent Mere Lefrancois, from coming five days after,
scared, and crying out--

"Help! he is dying! I am going crazy!"

Charles rushed to the "Lion d'Or," and the chemist, who caught sight
of him passing along the Place hatless, abandoned his shop. He appeared
himself breathless, red, anxious, and asking everyone who was going up
the stairs--

"Why, what's the matter with our interesting strephopode?"

The strephopode was writhing in hideous convulsions, so that the machine
in which his leg was enclosed was knocked against the wall enough to
break it.

With many precautions, in order not to disturb the position of the limb,
the box was removed, and an awful sight presented itself. The outlines
of the foot disappeared in such a swelling that the entire skin seemed
about to burst, and it was covered with ecchymosis, caused by the famous
machine. Hippolyte had already complained of suffering from it. No
attention had been paid to him; they had to acknowledge that he had not
been altogether wrong, and he was freed for a few hours. But, hardly had
the oedema gone down to some extent, than the two savants thought fit
to put back the limb in the apparatus, strapping it tighter to hasten
matters. At last, three days after, Hippolyte being unable to endure it
any longer, they once more removed the machine, and were much surprised
at the result they saw. The livid tumefaction spread over the leg, with
blisters here and there, whence there oozed a black liquid. Matters
were taking a serious turn. Hippolyte began to worry himself, and Mere
Lefrancois, had him installed in the little room near the kitchen, so
that he might at least have some distraction.

But the tax-collector, who dined there every day, complained bitterly of
such companionship. Then Hippolyte was removed to the billiard-room.
He lay there moaning under his heavy coverings, pale with long beard,
sunken eyes, and from time to time turning his perspiring head on the
dirty pillow, where the flies alighted. Madame Bovary went to see him.
She brought him linen for his poultices; she comforted, and encouraged
him. Besides, he did not want for company, especially on market-days,
when the peasants were knocking about the billiard-balls round him,
fenced with the cues, smoked, drank, sang, and brawled.

"How are you?" they said, clapping him on the shoulder. "Ah! you're not
up to much, it seems, but it's your own fault. You should do this! do
that!" And then they told him stories of people who had all been cured
by other remedies than his. Then by way of consolation they added--

"You give way too much! Get up! You coddle yourself like a king! All the
same, old chap, you don't smell nice!"

Gangrene, in fact, was spreading more and more. Bovary himself turned
sick at it. He came every hour, every moment. Hippolyte looked at him
with eyes full of terror, sobbing--

"When shall I get well? Oh, save me! How unfortunate I am! How
unfortunate I am!"

And the doctor left, always recommending him to diet himself.

"Don't listen to him, my lad," said Mere Lefrancois, "Haven't they
tortured you enough already? You'll grow still weaker. Here! swallow
this."

And she gave him some good beef-tea, a slice of mutton, a piece of
bacon, and sometimes small glasses of brandy, that he had not the
strength to put to his lips.

Abbe Bournisien, hearing that he was growing worse, asked to see him.
He began by pitying his sufferings, declaring at the same time that he
ought to rejoice at them since it was the will of the Lord, and take
advantage of the occasion to reconcile himself to Heaven.

"For," said the ecclesiastic in a paternal tone, "you rather neglected
your duties; you were rarely seen at divine worship. How many years is
it since you approached the holy table? I understand that your work,
that the whirl of the world may have kept you from care for your
salvation. But now is the time to reflect. Yet don't despair. I have
known great sinners, who, about to appear before God (you are not yet
at this point I know), had implored His mercy, and who certainly died in
the best frame of mind. Let us hope that, like them, you will set us a
good example. Thus, as a precaution, what is to prevent you from saying
morning and evening a 'Hail Mary, full of grace,' and 'Our Father which
art in heaven'? Yes, do that, for my sake, to oblige me. That won't cost
you anything. Will you promise me?"

The poor devil promised. The cure came back day after day. He chatted
with the landlady; and even told anecdotes interspersed with jokes and
puns that Hippolyte did not understand. Then, as soon as he could, he
fell back upon matters of religion, putting on an appropriate expression
of face.

His zeal seemed successful, for the club-foot soon manifested a desire
to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if he were cured; to which Monsieur
Bournisien replied that he saw no objection; two precautions were better
than one; it was no risk anyhow.

The druggist was indignant at what he called the manoeuvres of the
priest; they were prejudicial, he said, to Hippolyte's convalescence,
and he kept repeating to Madame Lefrancois, "Leave him alone! leave him
alone! You perturb his morals with your mysticism." But the good woman
would no longer listen to him; he was the cause of it all. From a spirit
of contradiction she hung up near the bedside of the patient a basin
filled with holy-water and a branch of box.

Religion, however, seemed no more able to succour him than surgery, and
the invincible gangrene still spread from the extremities towards
the stomach. It was all very well to vary the potions and change the
poultices; the muscles each day rotted more and more; and at last
Charles replied by an affirmative nod of the head when Mere Lefrancois,
asked him if she could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet
of Neufchatel, who was a celebrity.

A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a good position
and self-possessed, Charles's colleague did not refrain from laughing
disdainfully when he had uncovered the leg, mortified to the knee. Then
having flatly declared that it must be amputated, he went off to the
chemist's to rail at the asses who could have reduced a poor man to such
a state. Shaking Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted
out in the shop--

"These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas of those gentry
of the capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform, lithotrity, a heap of
monstrosities that the Government ought to prohibit. But they want to do
the clever, and they cram you with remedies without, troubling about
the consequences. We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants,
coxcombs, fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and we should
not dream of operating on anyone who is in perfect health. Straighten
club-feet! As if one could straighten club-feet! It is as if one wished,
for example, to make a hunchback straight!"

Homais suffered as he listened to this discourse, and he concealed his
discomfort beneath a courtier's smile; for he needed to humour Monsier
Canivet, whose prescriptions sometimes came as far as Yonville. So he
did not take up the defence of Bovary; he did not even make a single
remark, and, renouncing his principles, he sacrificed his dignity to the
more serious interests of his business.

This amputation of the thigh by Doctor Canivet was a great event in the
village. On that day all the inhabitants got up earlier, and the Grande
Rue, although full of people, had something lugubrious about it, as
if an execution had been expected. At the grocer's they discussed
Hippolyte's illness; the shops did no business, and Madame Tuvache, the
mayor's wife, did not stir from her window, such was her impatience to
see the operator arrive.

He came in his gig, which he drove himself. But the springs of the right
side having at length given way beneath the weight of his corpulence, it
happened that the carriage as it rolled along leaned over a little, and
on the other cushion near him could be seen a large box covered in red
sheep-leather, whose three brass clasps shone grandly.

After he had entered like a whirlwind the porch of the "Lion d'Or," the
doctor, shouting very loud, ordered them to unharness his horse. Then he
went into the stable to see that she was eating her oats all right; for
on arriving at a patient's he first of all looked after his mare and his
gig. People even said about this--

"Ah! Monsieur Canivet's a character!"

And he was the more esteemed for this imperturbable coolness. The
universe to the last man might have died, and he would not have missed
the smallest of his habits.

Homais presented himself.

"I count on you," said the doctor. "Are we ready? Come along!"

But the druggist, turning red, confessed that he was too sensitive to
assist at such an operation.

"When one is a simple spectator," he said, "the imagination, you know,
is impressed. And then I have such a nervous system!"

"Pshaw!" interrupted Canivet; "on the contrary, you seem to me inclined
to apoplexy. Besides, that doesn't astonish me, for you chemist fellows
are always poking about your kitchens, which must end by spoiling your
constitutions. Now just look at me. I get up every day at four o'clock;
I shave with cold water (and am never cold). I don't wear flannels, and
I never catch cold; my carcass is good enough! I live now in one way,
now in another, like a philosopher, taking pot-luck; that is why I
am not squeamish like you, and it is as indifferent to me to carve a
Christian as the first fowl that turns up. Then, perhaps, you will say,
habit! habit!"

Then, without any consideration for Hippolyte, who was sweating with
agony between his sheets, these gentlemen entered into a conversation,
in which the druggist compared the coolness of a surgeon to that of a
general; and this comparison was pleasing to Canivet, who launched out
on the exigencies of his art. He looked upon, it as a sacred office,
although the ordinary practitioners dishonoured it. At last, coming back
to the patient, he examined the bandages brought by Homais, the same
that had appeared for the club-foot, and asked for someone to hold the
limb for him. Lestiboudois was sent for, and Monsieur Canivet having
turned up his sleeves, passed into the billiard-room, while the druggist
stayed with Artemise and the landlady, both whiter than their aprons,
and with ears strained towards the door.

Bovary during this time did not dare to stir from his house.

He kept downstairs in the sitting-room by the side of the fireless
chimney, his chin on his breast, his hands clasped, his eyes staring.
"What a mishap!" he thought, "what a mishap!" Perhaps, after all, he had
made some slip. He thought it over, but could hit upon nothing. But the
most famous surgeons also made mistakes; and that is what no one would
ever believe! People, on the contrary, would laugh, jeer! It would
spread as far as Forges, as Neufchatel, as Rouen, everywhere! Who could
say if his colleagues would not write against him. Polemics would ensue;
he would have to answer in the papers. Hippolyte might even prosecute
him. He saw himself dishonoured, ruined, lost; and his imagination,
assailed by a world of hypotheses, tossed amongst them like an empty
cask borne by the sea and floating upon the waves.

Emma, opposite, watched him; she did not share his humiliation; she felt
another--that of having supposed such a man was worth anything. As if
twenty times already she had not sufficiently perceived his mediocrity.

Charles was walking up and down the room; his boots creaked on the
floor.

"Sit down," she said; "you fidget me."

He sat down again.

How was it that she--she, who was so intelligent--could have allowed
herself to be deceived again? and through what deplorable madness had
she thus ruined her life by continual sacrifices? She recalled all her
instincts of luxury, all the privations of her soul, the sordidness of
marriage, of the household, her dream sinking into the mire like wounded
swallows; all that she had longed for, all that she had denied herself,
all that she might have had! And for what? for what?

In the midst of the silence that hung over the village a heart-rending
cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to fainting. She knit her
brows with a nervous gesture, then went on. And it was for him, for this
creature, for this man, who understood nothing, who felt nothing! For he
was there quite quiet, not even suspecting that the ridicule of his name
would henceforth sully hers as well as his. She had made efforts to love
him, and she had repented with tears for having yielded to another!

"But it was perhaps a valgus!" suddenly exclaimed Bovary, who was
meditating.

At the unexpected shock of this phrase falling on her thought like a
leaden bullet on a silver plate, Emma, shuddering, raised her head in
order to find out what he meant to say; and they looked at the other in
silence, almost amazed to see each other, so far sundered were they
by their inner thoughts. Charles gazed at her with the dull look of
a drunken man, while he listened motionless to the last cries of the
sufferer, that followed each other in long-drawn modulations, broken by
sharp spasms like the far-off howling of some beast being slaughtered.
Emma bit her wan lips, and rolling between her fingers a piece of coral
that she had broken, fixed on Charles the burning glance of her eyes
like two arrows of fire about to dart forth. Everything in him irritated
her now; his face, his dress, what he did not say, his whole person, his
existence, in fine. She repented of her past virtue as of a crime, and
what still remained of it rumbled away beneath the furious blows of her
pride. She revelled in all the evil ironies of triumphant adultery.
The memory of her lover came back to her with dazzling attractions; she
threw her whole soul into it, borne away towards this image with a fresh
enthusiasm; and Charles seemed to her as much removed from her life, as
absent forever, as impossible and annihilated, as if he had been about
to die and were passing under her eyes.

There was a sound of steps on the pavement. Charles looked up, and
through the lowered blinds he saw at the corner of the market in
the broad sunshine Dr. Canivet, who was wiping his brow with his
handkerchief. Homais, behind him, was carrying a large red box in his
hand, and both were going towards the chemist's.

Then with a feeling of sudden tenderness and discouragement Charles
turned to his wife saying to her--

"Oh, kiss me, my own!"

"Leave me!" she said, red with anger.

"What is the matter?" he asked, stupefied. "Be calm; compose yourself.
You know well enough that I love you. Come!"

"Enough!" she cried with a terrible look.

And escaping from the room, Emma closed the door so violently that the
barometer fell from the wall and smashed on the floor.

Charles sank back into his arm-chair overwhelmed, trying to discover
what could be wrong with her, fancying some nervous illness, weeping,
and vaguely feeling something fatal and incomprehensible whirling round
him.

When Rodolphe came to the garden that evening, he found his mistress
waiting for him at the foot of the steps on the lowest stair. They threw
their arms round one another, and all their rancour melted like snow
beneath the warmth of that kiss.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Homais reads an article about a new treatment for clubfeet and, "being an apostle of progress and a local patriot," he wants Charles to try out this treatment on Hippolyte, a servant at Madame Lefrancois' inn. Emma and Homais both encourage Charles to experiment on Hippolyte, and he agrees to allow Charles to operate on his left foot. Flaubert compares the state of Charles' nerves to that of other surgeons attempting a new operation for the first time. After the operation, Charles returns home to a fawning Emma. They chatter pleasantly and dream of a prosperous future. Homais writes about the 'event' in his article for the Beacon. Five days later, Hippolyte's health takes a bad turn, and the foot appears gangrenous. Three days later, a "livid tumor" begins to spread up the leg, and Hippolyte loses hope of recovery. Charles does nothing to treat the infection. The Abbe Bournisien visits Hippolyte and attempts to effect a cure through religion. Madame Lefrancois asks for Charles' consent to send for the well-known Doctor Canivet of Neufchatel, who and declares that he will have to amputate the gangrenous leg at the thigh. Homais does not reveal to Canivet that he has been part of the 'clubfoot operation' and tactfully humors Canivet while assisting in the amputation. During this time, Charles does not leave home. He bemoans his fate and fears the possible controversy that will probably erupt as a result of his actions. Emma is clearly devastated and wonders how she could have pinned her hopes on Charles. When her husband expects Emma to comfort him, she flies into a rage; the naive Charles interprets Emma's strange mood as excessive concern for his personal grief. Emma, feeling "irrevocably estranged" from Charles, is drawn to Rodolphe with a "new enthusiasm. " That night, Rodolphe and Emma are together again.


prompt:
Chapter: They began to love one another again. Often, even in the middle of the
day, Emma suddenly wrote to him, then from the window made a sign to
Justin, who, taking his apron off, quickly ran to La Huchette. Rodolphe
would come; she had sent for him to tell him that she was bored, that
her husband was odious, her life frightful.

"But what can I do?" he cried one day impatiently.

"Ah! if you would--"

She was sitting on the floor between his knees, her hair loose, her look
lost.

"Why, what?" said Rodolphe.

She sighed.

"We would go and live elsewhere--somewhere!"

"You are really mad!" he said laughing. "How could that be possible?"

She returned to the subject; he pretended not to understand, and turned
the conversation.

What he did not understand was all this worry about so simple an affair
as love. She had a motive, a reason, and, as it were, a pendant to her
affection.

Her tenderness, in fact, grew each day with her repulsion to her
husband. The more she gave up herself to the one, the more she loathed
the other. Never had Charles seemed to her so disagreeable, to have
such stodgy fingers, such vulgar ways, to be so dull as when they found
themselves together after her meeting with Rodolphe. Then, while playing
the spouse and virtue, she was burning at the thought of that head whose
black hair fell in a curl over the sunburnt brow, of that form at once
so strong and elegant, of that man, in a word, who had such experience
in his reasoning, such passion in his desires. It was for him that she
filed her nails with the care of a chaser, and that there was never
enough cold-cream for her skin, nor of patchouli for her handkerchiefs.
She loaded herself with bracelets, rings, and necklaces. When he
was coming she filled the two large blue glass vases with roses, and
prepared her room and her person like a courtesan expecting a prince.
The servant had to be constantly washing linen, and all day Felicite
did not stir from the kitchen, where little Justin, who often kept her
company, watched her at work.

With his elbows on the long board on which she was ironing, he
greedily watched all these women's clothes spread about him, the dimity
petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with running
strings, wide at the hips and growing narrower below.

"What is that for?" asked the young fellow, passing his hand over the
crinoline or the hooks and eyes.

"Why, haven't you ever seen anything?" Felicite answered laughing. "As
if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the same."

"Oh, I daresay! Madame Homais!" And he added with a meditative air, "As
if she were a lady like madame!"

But Felicite grew impatient of seeing him hanging round her. She was six
years older than he, and Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin's servant, was
beginning to pay court to her.

"Let me alone," she said, moving her pot of starch. "You'd better be
off and pound almonds; you are always dangling about women. Before you
meddle with such things, bad boy, wait till you've got a beard to your
chin."

"Oh, don't be cross! I'll go and clean her boots."

And he at once took down from the shelf Emma's boots, all coated with
mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crumbled into powder beneath his
fingers, and that he watched as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight.

"How afraid you are of spoiling them!" said the servant, who wasn't so
particular when she cleaned them herself, because as soon as the stuff
of the boots was no longer fresh madame handed them over to her.

Emma had a number in her cupboard that she squandered one after the
other, without Charles allowing himself the slightest observation. So
also he disbursed three hundred francs for a wooden leg that she thought
proper to make a present of to Hippolyte. Its top was covered with cork,
and it had spring joints, a complicated mechanism, covered over by black
trousers ending in a patent-leather boot. But Hippolyte, not daring
to use such a handsome leg every day, begged Madame Bovary to get him
another more convenient one. The doctor, of course, had again to defray
the expense of this purchase.

So little by little the stable-man took up his work again. One saw him
running about the village as before, and when Charles heard from afar
the sharp noise of the wooden leg, he at once went in another direction.

It was Monsieur Lheureux, the shopkeeper, who had undertaken the order;
this provided him with an excuse for visiting Emma. He chatted with her
about the new goods from Paris, about a thousand feminine trifles, made
himself very obliging, and never asked for his money. Emma yielded to
this lazy mode of satisfying all her caprices. Thus she wanted to have
a very handsome ridding-whip that was at an umbrella-maker's at Rouen
to give to Rodolphe. The week after Monsieur Lheureux placed it on her
table.

But the next day he called on her with a bill for two hundred and
seventy francs, not counting the centimes. Emma was much embarrassed;
all the drawers of the writing-table were empty; they owed over a
fortnight's wages to Lestiboudois, two quarters to the servant, for any
quantity of other things, and Bovary was impatiently expecting Monsieur
Derozeray's account, which he was in the habit of paying every year
about Midsummer.

She succeeded at first in putting off Lheureux. At last he lost
patience; he was being sued; his capital was out, and unless he got some
in he should be forced to take back all the goods she had received.

"Oh, very well, take them!" said Emma.

"I was only joking," he replied; "the only thing I regret is the whip.
My word! I'll ask monsieur to return it to me."

"No, no!" she said.

"Ah! I've got you!" thought Lheureux.

And, certain of his discovery, he went out repeating to himself in an
undertone, and with his usual low whistle--

"Good! we shall see! we shall see!"

She was thinking how to get out of this when the servant coming in
put on the mantelpiece a small roll of blue paper "from Monsieur
Derozeray's." Emma pounced upon and opened it. It contained fifteen
napoleons; it was the account. She heard Charles on the stairs; threw
the gold to the back of her drawer, and took out the key.

Three days after Lheureux reappeared.

"I have an arrangement to suggest to you," he said. "If, instead of the
sum agreed on, you would take--"

"Here it is," she said placing fourteen napoleons in his hand.

The tradesman was dumfounded. Then, to conceal his disappointment, he
was profuse in apologies and proffers of service, all of which Emma
declined; then she remained a few moments fingering in the pocket of
her apron the two five-franc pieces that he had given her in change.
She promised herself she would economise in order to pay back later on.
"Pshaw!" she thought, "he won't think about it again."

Besides the riding-whip with its silver-gilt handle, Rodolphe had
received a seal with the motto Amor nel cor* furthermore, a scarf for
a muffler, and, finally, a cigar-case exactly like the Viscount's, that
Charles had formerly picked up in the road, and that Emma had kept.
These presents, however, humiliated him; he refused several; she
insisted, and he ended by obeying, thinking her tyrannical and
overexacting.

     *A loving heart.

Then she had strange ideas.

"When midnight strikes," she said, "you must think of me."

And if he confessed that he had not thought of her, there were floods of
reproaches that always ended with the eternal question--

"Do you love me?"

"Why, of course I love you," he answered.

"A great deal?"

"Certainly!"

"You haven't loved any others?"

"Did you think you'd got a virgin?" he exclaimed laughing.

Emma cried, and he tried to console her, adorning his protestations with
puns.

"Oh," she went on, "I love you! I love you so that I could not live
without you, do you see? There are times when I long to see you again,
when I am torn by all the anger of love. I ask myself, Where is
he? Perhaps he is talking to other women. They smile upon him; he
approaches. Oh no; no one else pleases you. There are some more
beautiful, but I love you best. I know how to love best. I am your
servant, your concubine! You are my king, my idol! You are good, you are
beautiful, you are clever, you are strong!"

He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as
original. Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty,
gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony
of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language. He
did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of
sentiment beneath the sameness of expression. Because lips libertine
and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the
candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be
discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in
the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of
his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human
speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to
make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to him who, in no
matter what circumstance, holds back, Rodolphe saw other delights to be
got out of this love. He thought all modesty in the way. He treated her
quite sans facon.* He made of her something supple and corrupt. Hers
was an idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration for him, of
voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank
into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in
his butt of Malmsey.

     *Off-handedly.

By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary's manners changed.
Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the
impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her
mouth, "as if to defy the people." At last, those who still doubted
doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out of the
"Hirondelle," her waist squeezed into a waistcoat like a man; and Madame
Bovary senior, who, after a fearful scene with her husband, had taken
refuge at her son's, was not the least scandalised of the women-folk.
Many other things displeased her. First, Charles had not attended to
her advice about the forbidding of novels; then the "ways of the house"
annoyed her; she allowed herself to make some remarks, and there were
quarrels, especially one on account of Felicite.

Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing along the passage,
had surprised her in company of a man--a man with a brown collar, about
forty years old, who, at the sound of her step, had quickly escaped
through the kitchen. Then Emma began to laugh, but the good lady grew
angry, declaring that unless morals were to be laughed at one ought to
look after those of one's servants.

"Where were you brought up?" asked the daughter-in-law, with so
impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not perhaps
defending her own case.

"Leave the room!" said the young woman, springing up with a bound.

"Emma! Mamma!" cried Charles, trying to reconcile them.

But both had fled in their exasperation. Emma was stamping her feet as
she repeated--

"Oh! what manners! What a peasant!"

He ran to his mother; she was beside herself. She stammered

"She is an insolent, giddy-headed thing, or perhaps worse!"

And she was for leaving at once if the other did not apologise. So
Charles went back again to his wife and implored her to give way; he
knelt to her; she ended by saying--

"Very well! I'll go to her."

And in fact she held out her hand to her mother-in-law with the dignity
of a marchioness as she said--

"Excuse me, madame."

Then, having gone up again to her room, she threw herself flat on her
bed and cried there like a child, her face buried in the pillow.

She and Rodolphe had agreed that in the event of anything extraordinary
occurring, she should fasten a small piece of white paper to the blind,
so that if by chance he happened to be in Yonville, he could hurry to
the lane behind the house. Emma made the signal; she had been waiting
three-quarters of an hour when she suddenly caught sight of Rodolphe at
the corner of the market. She felt tempted to open the window and call
him, but he had already disappeared. She fell back in despair.

Soon, however, it seemed to her that someone was walking on the
pavement. It was he, no doubt. She went downstairs, crossed the yard. He
was there outside. She threw herself into his arms.

"Do take care!" he said.

"Ah! if you knew!" she replied.

And she began telling him everything, hurriedly, disjointedly,
exaggerating the facts, inventing many, and so prodigal of parentheses
that he understood nothing of it.

"Come, my poor angel, courage! Be comforted! be patient!"

"But I have been patient; I have suffered for four years. A love like
ours ought to show itself in the face of heaven. They torture me! I can
bear it no longer! Save me!"

She clung to Rodolphe. Her eyes, full of tears, flashed like flames
beneath a wave; her breast heaved; he had never loved her so much, so
that he lost his head and said "What is, it? What do you wish?"

"Take me away," she cried, "carry me off! Oh, I pray you!"

And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the
unexpected consent if breathed forth in a kiss.

"But--" Rodolphe resumed.

"What?"

"Your little girl!"

She reflected a few moments, then replied--

"We will take her! It can't be helped!"

"What a woman!" he said to himself, watching her as she went. For she
had run into the garden. Someone was calling her.

On the following days Madame Bovary senior was much surprised at the
change in her daughter-in-law. Emma, in fact, was showing herself more
docile, and even carried her deference so far as to ask for a recipe for
pickling gherkins.

Was it the better to deceive them both? Or did she wish by a sort of
voluptuous stoicism to feel the more profoundly the bitterness of the
things she was about to leave?

But she paid no heed to them; on the contrary, she lived as lost in the
anticipated delight of her coming happiness.

It was an eternal subject for conversation with Rodolphe. She leant on
his shoulder murmuring--

"Ah! when we are in the mail-coach! Do you think about it? Can it be? It
seems to me that the moment I feel the carriage start, it will be as if
we were rising in a balloon, as if we were setting out for the clouds.
Do you know that I count the hours? And you?"

Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had
that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from
success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with circumstances.
Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young
illusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun make flowers
grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed forth in all
the plenitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for
her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong
inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the fleshy corner
of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black down. One would have
thought that an artist apt in conception had arranged the curls of hair
upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass, negligently, and with the
changing chances of their adultery, that unbound them every day. Her
voice now took more mellow infections, her figure also; something subtle
and penetrating escaped even from the folds of her gown and from the
line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first married, thought her
delicious and quite irresistible.

When he came home in the middle of the night, he did not dare to wake
her. The porcelain night-light threw a round trembling gleam upon the
ceiling, and the drawn curtains of the little cot formed as it were a
white hut standing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles looked
at them. He seemed to hear the light breathing of his child. She would
grow big now; every season would bring rapid progress. He already saw
her coming from school as the day drew in, laughing, with ink-stains on
her jacket, and carrying her basket on her arm. Then she would have to
be sent to the boarding-school; that would cost much; how was it to
be done? Then he reflected. He thought of hiring a small farm in the
neighbourhood, that he would superintend every morning on his way to his
patients. He would save up what he brought in; he would put it in the
savings-bank. Then he would buy shares somewhere, no matter where;
besides, his practice would increase; he counted upon that, for he
wanted Berthe to be well-educated, to be accomplished, to learn to play
the piano. Ah! how pretty she would be later on when she was fifteen,
when, resembling her mother, she would, like her, wear large straw hats
in the summer-time; from a distance they would be taken for two sisters.
He pictured her to himself working in the evening by their side beneath
the light of the lamp; she would embroider him slippers; she would look
after the house; she would fill all the home with her charm and her
gaiety. At last, they would think of her marriage; they would find her
some good young fellow with a steady business; he would make her happy;
this would last for ever.

Emma was not asleep; she pretended to be; and while he dozed off by her
side she awakened to other dreams.

To the gallop of four horses she was carried away for a week towards a
new land, whence they would return no more. They went on and on, their
arms entwined, without a word. Often from the top of a mountain there
suddenly glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and
ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white marble, on whose
pointed steeples were storks' nests. They went at a walking-pace because
of the great flag-stones, and on the ground there were bouquets of
flowers, offered you by women dressed in red bodices. They heard the
chiming of bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of
guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray refreshed heaps
of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of pale statues that smiled
beneath playing waters. And then, one night they came to a fishing
village, where brown nets were drying in the wind along the cliffs and
in front of the huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live
in a low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart of a
gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in hammocks, and
their existence would be easy and large as their silk gowns, warm and
star-spangled as the nights they would contemplate. However, in the
immensity of this future that she conjured up, nothing special stood
forth; the days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and
it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and bathed in
sunshine. But the child began to cough in her cot or Bovary snored
more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep till morning, when the dawn
whitened the windows, and when little Justin was already in the square
taking down the shutters of the chemist's shop.

She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to him--

"I want a cloak--a large lined cloak with a deep collar."

"You are going on a journey?" he asked.

"No; but--never mind. I may count on you, may I not, and quickly?"

He bowed.

"Besides, I shall want," she went on, "a trunk--not too heavy--handy."

"Yes, yes, I understand. About three feet by a foot and a half, as they
are being made just now."

"And a travelling bag."

"Decidedly," thought Lheureux, "there's a row on here."

"And," said Madame Bovary, taking her watch from her belt, "take this;
you can pay yourself out of it."

But the tradesman cried out that she was wrong; they knew one another;
did he doubt her? What childishness!

She insisted, however, on his taking at least the chain, and Lheureux
had already put it in his pocket and was going, when she called him
back.

"You will leave everything at your place. As to the cloak"--she seemed
to be reflecting--"do not bring it either; you can give me the maker's
address, and tell him to have it ready for me."

It was the next month that they were to run away. She was to leave
Yonville as if she was going on some business to Rouen. Rodolphe would
have booked the seats, procured the passports, and even have written to
Paris in order to have the whole mail-coach reserved for them as far as
Marseilles, where they would buy a carriage, and go on thence without
stopping to Genoa. She would take care to send her luggage to Lheureux
whence it would be taken direct to the "Hirondelle," so that no one
would have any suspicion. And in all this there never was any allusion
to the child. Rodolphe avoided speaking of her; perhaps he no longer
thought about it.

He wished to have two more weeks before him to arrange some affairs;
then at the end of a week he wanted two more; then he said he was ill;
next he went on a journey. The month of August passed, and, after all
these delays, they decided that it was to be irrevocably fixed for the
4th September--a Monday.

At length the Saturday before arrived.

Rodolphe came in the evening earlier than usual.

"Everything is ready?" she asked him.

"Yes."

Then they walked round a garden-bed, and went to sit down near the
terrace on the kerb-stone of the wall.

"You are sad," said Emma.

"No; why?"

And yet he looked at her strangely in a tender fashion.

"It is because you are going away?" she went on; "because you are
leaving what is dear to you--your life? Ah! I understand. I have nothing
in the world! you are all to me; so shall I be to you. I will be your
people, your country; I will tend, I will love you!"

"How sweet you are!" he said, seizing her in his arms.

"Really!" she said with a voluptuous laugh. "Do you love me? Swear it
then!"

"Do I love you--love you? I adore you, my love."

The moon, full and purple-coloured, was rising right out of the earth
at the end of the meadow. She rose quickly between the branches of the
poplars, that hid her here and there like a black curtain pierced with
holes. Then she appeared dazzling with whiteness in the empty heavens
that she lit up, and now sailing more slowly along, let fall upon the
river a great stain that broke up into an infinity of stars; and the
silver sheen seemed to writhe through the very depths like a heedless
serpent covered with luminous scales; it also resembled some monster
candelabra all along which sparkled drops of diamonds running together.
The soft night was about them; masses of shadow filled the branches.
Emma, her eyes half closed, breathed in with deep sighs the fresh wind
that was blowing. They did not speak, lost as they were in the rush of
their reverie. The tenderness of the old days came back to their hearts,
full and silent as the flowing river, with the softness of the perfume
of the syringas, and threw across their memories shadows more immense
and more sombre than those of the still willows that lengthened out over
the grass. Often some night-animal, hedgehog or weasel, setting out on
the hunt, disturbed the lovers, or sometimes they heard a ripe peach
falling all alone from the espalier.

"Ah! what a lovely night!" said Rodolphe.

"We shall have others," replied Emma; and, as if speaking to herself:
"Yet, it will be good to travel. And yet, why should my heart be
so heavy? Is it dread of the unknown? The effect of habits left? Or
rather--? No; it is the excess of happiness. How weak I am, am I not?
Forgive me!"

"There is still time!" he cried. "Reflect! perhaps you may repent!"

"Never!" she cried impetuously. And coming closer to him: "What ill
could come to me? There is no desert, no precipice, no ocean I would not
traverse with you. The longer we live together the more it will be like
an embrace, every day closer, more heart to heart. There will be
nothing to trouble us, no cares, no obstacle. We shall be alone, all to
ourselves eternally. Oh, speak! Answer me!"

At regular intervals he answered, "Yes--Yes--" She had passed her hands
through his hair, and she repeated in a childlike voice, despite the big
tears which were falling, "Rodolphe! Rodolphe! Ah! Rodolphe! dear little
Rodolphe!"

Midnight struck.

"Midnight!" said she. "Come, it is to-morrow. One day more!"

He rose to go; and as if the movement he made had been the signal for
their flight, Emma said, suddenly assuming a gay air--

"You have the passports?"

"Yes."

"You are forgetting nothing?"

"No."

"Are you sure?"

"Certainly."

"It is at the Hotel de Provence, is it not, that you will wait for me at
midday?"

He nodded.

"Till to-morrow then!" said Emma in a last caress; and she watched him
go.

He did not turn round. She ran after him, and, leaning over the water's
edge between the bulrushes--

"To-morrow!" she cried.

He was already on the other side of the river and walking fast across
the meadow.

After a few moments Rodolphe stopped; and when he saw her with her white
gown gradually fade away in the shade like a ghost, he was seized with
such a beating of the heart that he leant against a tree lest he should
fall.

"What an imbecile I am!" he said with a fearful oath. "No matter! She
was a pretty mistress!"

And immediately Emma's beauty, with all the pleasures of their love,
came back to him. For a moment he softened; then he rebelled against
her.

"For, after all," he exclaimed, gesticulating, "I can't exile
myself--have a child on my hands."

He was saying these things to give himself firmness.

"And besides, the worry, the expense! Ah! no, no, no, no! a thousand
times no! That would be too stupid."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Emma continues her affair with Rodolphe, but she often complains to him of her boredom and her husband's behavior. In an impatient outburst, Rodolphe states his inability to solve her marital problems. Emma suggests that they run away together, but he dismisses her notion as madness and changes the subject. Instead, he continues to call on Emma at home. Whenever he is expected, she beautifies herself and her room "like a courtesan awaiting a prince" and makes her maid Felicite wash all the linen. Justin, Homais' helper, often helps Emma. He delivers letters for her to Rodolphe and cleans Emma's shoes, encrusted with mud acquired from the journey to and from her meetings with Rodolphe. Felicite wonders at the lad's devotion. Charles, who is financially in trouble, is constantly having to buy new shoes for his wife, who wears them out quickly, but he never complains. "In the same docile spirit," he pays for a wooden leg for Hippolyte at Emma's urging. Lheureux is the one who supplies the leg and also several other things of "feminine interest" to Emma. He presents her with a bill of over ten francs. Emma, already in debt, cannot pay Lheureux. Sensing this, Lheureux asks that the riding-whip, which she supposedly purchased for Charles, be returned to him, but she hesitates. Seeing that she is cornered, he leaves. Luckily, one of the patients pays his pending account, and Emma is able to repay Lheureux. Emma has given Rodolphe several expensive things, including the riding whip. Though hesitant, he accepts every gift. In spite of her generosity, Rodolphe does not declare his love for Emma. In response, Emma cries and declares her love for him. Rodolphe, however, has become quite indifferent to her passionate speeches. He shamelessly treats her as he pleases, aware that he has the upper hand in the relationship. Emma grows apathetic, a fact that is noticed by all of Yonville. Her mother-in-law makes life particularly miserable for her. Emma begs Rodolphe to take her away. He tries to get out of the suggestion by reminding Emma about Berthe; she simply declares that the little girl can accompany them. In the days following this incident, she dreams about leaving Yonville with Rodolphe. The thoughts of escape make her more agreeable. Charles finds her "as delicious, as utterly irresistible, as when they were first married." Even her mother-in-law wonders at the change in Emma. One day Emma sends for Lheureux and orders a cloak, a case, and a traveling-bag. She does not reply when he asks if she is going on a journey. She also requests that nothing be delivered to her at home, saying she will collect the items from the workman herself. The plan is to run away with Rodolphe the following month. The details are fairly elaborate, but Rodolphe does not mention Berthe. After a few delays on Rodolphe's side, they plan Monday, the fourth of September, as the day of their departure. Their final night together before they are to run away is a tender, blissful one for Emma and Rodolphe. He looks at Emma "strangely, with tenderness," but his feelings do not match those she is feeling. As Emma looks forward to their future together, Rodolphe merely replies in monosyllables. On his way home, Rodolphe makes the decision to harden his heart against Emma. He concludes that to run away with her "would have been too stupid!"


prompt:
Chapter: No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat down quickly at his bureau
under the stag's head that hung as a trophy on the wall. But when he had
the pen between his fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting
on his elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to him to have receded
into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly
placed a distance between them.

To get back something of her, he fetched from the cupboard at the
bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he usually kept his letters
from women, and from it came an odour of dry dust and withered
roses. First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a
handkerchief of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled; he
had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature
given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him pretentious, and her
languishing look in the worst possible taste. Then, from looking at this
image and recalling the memory of its original, Emma's features little
by little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living and the
painted face, rubbing one against the other, had effaced each other.
Finally, he read some of her letters; they were full of explanations
relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent, like business
notes. He wanted to see the long ones again, those of old times. In
order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the
others, and mechanically began rummaging amidst this mass of papers and
things, finding pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and
hair--hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the box,
broke when it was opened.

Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writing and the style
of the letters, as varied as their orthography. They were tender or
jovial, facetious, melancholy; there were some that asked for love,
others that asked for money. A word recalled faces to him, certain
gestures, the sound of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered
nothing at all.

In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts, cramped each
other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform level of love that equalised
them all. So taking handfuls of the mixed-up letters, he amused himself
for some moments with letting them fall in cascades from his right into
his left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the box to
the cupboard, saying to himself, "What a lot of rubbish!" Which summed
up his opinion; for pleasures, like schoolboys in a school courtyard,
had so trampled upon his heart that no green thing grew there, and that
which passed through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like
them, leave a name carved upon the wall.

"Come," said he, "let's begin."

He wrote--

"Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring misery into your life."

"After all, that's true," thought Rodolphe. "I am acting in her
interest; I am honest."

"Have you carefully weighed your resolution? Do you know to what an
abyss I was dragging you, poor angel? No, you do not, do you? You were
coming confident and fearless, believing in happiness in the future. Ah!
unhappy that we are--insensate!"

Rodolphe stopped here to think of some good excuse.

"If I told her all my fortune is lost? No! Besides, that would stop
nothing. It would all have to be begun over again later on. As if one
could make women like that listen to reason!" He reflected, then went
on--

"I shall not forget you, oh believe it; and I shall ever have a profound
devotion for you; but some day, sooner or later, this ardour (such is
the fate of human things) would have grown less, no doubt. Lassitude
would have come to us, and who knows if I should not even have had the
atrocious pain of witnessing your remorse, of sharing it myself, since
I should have been its cause? The mere idea of the grief that would come
to you tortures me, Emma. Forget me! Why did I ever know you? Why were
you so beautiful? Is it my fault? O my God! No, no! Accuse only fate."

"That's a word that always tells," he said to himself.

"Ah, if you had been one of those frivolous women that one sees,
certainly I might, through egotism, have tried an experiment, in that
case without danger for you. But that delicious exaltation, at once your
charm and your torment, has prevented you from understanding, adorable
woman that you are, the falseness of our future position. Nor had I
reflected upon this at first, and I rested in the shade of that ideal
happiness as beneath that of the manchineel tree, without foreseeing the
consequences."

"Perhaps she'll think I'm giving it up from avarice. Ah, well! so much
the worse; it must be stopped!"

"The world is cruel, Emma. Wherever we might have gone, it would have
persecuted us. You would have had to put up with indiscreet questions,
calumny, contempt, insult perhaps. Insult to you! Oh! And I, who would
place you on a throne! I who bear with me your memory as a talisman! For
I am going to punish myself by exile for all the ill I have done you.
I am going away. Whither I know not. I am mad. Adieu! Be good always.
Preserve the memory of the unfortunate who has lost you. Teach my name
to your child; let her repeat it in her prayers."

The wicks of the candles flickered. Rodolphe got up to, shut the window,
and when he had sat down again--

"I think it's all right. Ah! and this for fear she should come and hunt
me up."

"I shall be far away when you read these sad lines, for I have wished to
flee as quickly as possible to shun the temptation of seeing you again.
No weakness! I shall return, and perhaps later on we shall talk together
very coldly of our old love. Adieu!"

And there was a last "adieu" divided into two words! "A Dieu!" which he
thought in very excellent taste.

"Now how am I to sign?" he said to himself. "'Yours devotedly?' No!
'Your friend?' Yes, that's it."

"Your friend."

He re-read his letter. He considered it very good.

"Poor little woman!" he thought with emotion. "She'll think me harder
than a rock. There ought to have been some tears on this; but I can't
cry; it isn't my fault." Then, having emptied some water into a glass,
Rodolphe dipped his finger into it, and let a big drop fall on the
paper, that made a pale stain on the ink. Then looking for a seal, he
came upon the one "Amor nel cor."

"That doesn't at all fit in with the circumstances. Pshaw! never mind!"

After which he smoked three pipes and went to bed.

The next day when he was up (at about two o'clock--he had slept late),
Rodolphe had a basket of apricots picked. He put his letter at
the bottom under some vine leaves, and at once ordered Girard, his
ploughman, to take it with care to Madame Bovary. He made use of this
means for corresponding with her, sending according to the season fruits
or game.

"If she asks after me," he said, "you will tell her that I have gone on
a journey. You must give the basket to her herself, into her own hands.
Get along and take care!"

Girard put on his new blouse, knotted his handkerchief round the
apricots, and walking with great heavy steps in his thick iron-bound
galoshes, made his way to Yonville.

Madame Bovary, when he got to her house, was arranging a bundle of linen
on the kitchen-table with Felicite.

"Here," said the ploughboy, "is something for you--from the master."

She was seized with apprehension, and as she sought in her pocket for
some coppers, she looked at the peasant with haggard eyes, while he
himself looked at her with amazement, not understanding how such a
present could so move anyone. At last he went out. Felicite remained.
She could bear it no longer; she ran into the sitting room as if to take
the apricots there, overturned the basket, tore away the leaves, found
the letter, opened it, and, as if some fearful fire were behind her,
Emma flew to her room terrified.

Charles was there; she saw him; he spoke to her; she heard nothing, and
she went on quickly up the stairs, breathless, distraught, dumb, and
ever holding this horrible piece of paper, that crackled between her
fingers like a plate of sheet-iron. On the second floor she stopped
before the attic door, which was closed.

Then she tried to calm herself; she recalled the letter; she must finish
it; she did not dare to. And where? How? She would be seen! "Ah, no!
here," she thought, "I shall be all right."

Emma pushed open the door and went in.

The slates threw straight down a heavy heat that gripped her temples,
stifled her; she dragged herself to the closed garret-window. She drew
back the bolt, and the dazzling light burst in with a leap.

Opposite, beyond the roofs, stretched the open country till it was lost
to sight. Down below, underneath her, the village square was empty; the
stones of the pavement glittered, the weathercocks on the houses were
motionless. At the corner of the street, from a lower storey, rose a
kind of humming with strident modulations. It was Binet turning.

She leant against the embrasure of the window, and reread the letter
with angry sneers. But the more she fixed her attention upon it, the
more confused were her ideas. She saw him again, heard him, encircled
him with her arms, and throbs of her heart, that beat against her breast
like blows of a sledge-hammer, grew faster and faster, with uneven
intervals. She looked about her with the wish that the earth might
crumble into pieces. Why not end it all? What restrained her? She was
free. She advanced, looking at the paving-stones, saying to herself,
"Come! come!"

The luminous ray that came straight up from below drew the weight of
her body towards the abyss. It seemed to her that the ground of the
oscillating square went up the walls and that the floor dipped on
end like a tossing boat. She was right at the edge, almost hanging,
surrounded by vast space. The blue of the heavens suffused her, the air
was whirling in her hollow head; she had but to yield, to let herself
be taken; and the humming of the lathe never ceased, like an angry voice
calling her.

"Emma! Emma!" cried Charles.

She stopped.

"Wherever are you? Come!"

The thought that she had just escaped from death almost made her faint
with terror. She closed her eyes; then she shivered at the touch of a
hand on her sleeve; it was Felicite.

"Master is waiting for you, madame; the soup is on the table."

And she had to go down to sit at table.

She tried to eat. The food choked her. Then she unfolded her napkin as
if to examine the darns, and she really thought of applying herself to
this work, counting the threads in the linen. Suddenly the remembrance
of the letter returned to her. How had she lost it? Where could she find
it? But she felt such weariness of spirit that she could not even invent
a pretext for leaving the table. Then she became a coward; she was
afraid of Charles; he knew all, that was certain! Indeed he pronounced
these words in a strange manner:

"We are not likely to see Monsieur Rodolphe soon again, it seems."

"Who told you?" she said, shuddering.

"Who told me!" he replied, rather astonished at her abrupt tone. "Why,
Girard, whom I met just now at the door of the Cafe Francais. He has
gone on a journey, or is to go."

She gave a sob.

"What surprises you in that? He absents himself like that from time
to time for a change, and, ma foi, I think he's right, when one has a
fortune and is a bachelor. Besides, he has jolly times, has our friend.
He's a bit of a rake. Monsieur Langlois told me--"

He stopped for propriety's sake because the servant came in. She put
back into the basket the apricots scattered on the sideboard. Charles,
without noticing his wife's colour, had them brought to him, took one,
and bit into it.

"Ah! perfect!" said he; "just taste!"

And he handed her the basket, which she put away from her gently.

"Do just smell! What an odour!" he remarked, passing it under her nose
several times.

"I am choking," she cried, leaping up. But by an effort of will the
spasm passed; then--

"It is nothing," she said, "it is nothing! It is nervousness. Sit down
and go on eating." For she dreaded lest he should begin questioning her,
attending to her, that she should not be left alone.

Charles, to obey her, sat down again, and he spat the stones of the
apricots into his hands, afterwards putting them on his plate.

Suddenly a blue tilbury passed across the square at a rapid trot. Emma
uttered a cry and fell back rigid to the ground.

In fact, Rodolphe, after many reflections, had decided to set out for
Rouen. Now, as from La Huchette to Buchy there is no other way than by
Yonville, he had to go through the village, and Emma had recognised him
by the rays of the lanterns, which like lightning flashed through the
twilight.

The chemist, at the tumult which broke out in the house ran thither. The
table with all the plates was upset; sauce, meat, knives, the salt, and
cruet-stand were strewn over the room; Charles was calling for help;
Berthe, scared, was crying; and Felicite, whose hands trembled, was
unlacing her mistress, whose whole body shivered convulsively.

"I'll run to my laboratory for some aromatic vinegar," said the
druggist.

Then as she opened her eyes on smelling the bottle--

"I was sure of it," he remarked; "that would wake any dead person for
you!"

"Speak to us," said Charles; "collect yourself; it is your Charles, who
loves you. Do you know me? See! here is your little girl! Oh, kiss her!"

The child stretched out her arms to her mother to cling to her neck. But
turning away her head, Emma said in a broken voice "No, no! no one!"

She fainted again. They carried her to her bed. She lay there stretched
at full length, her lips apart, her eyelids closed, her hands open,
motionless, and white as a waxen image. Two streams of tears flowed from
her eyes and fell slowly upon the pillow.

Charles, standing up, was at the back of the alcove, and the chemist,
near him, maintained that meditative silence that is becoming on the
serious occasions of life.

"Do not be uneasy," he said, touching his elbow; "I think the paroxysm
is past."

"Yes, she is resting a little now," answered Charles, watching her
sleep. "Poor girl! poor girl! She had gone off now!"

Then Homais asked how the accident had come about. Charles answered that
she had been taken ill suddenly while she was eating some apricots.

"Extraordinary!" continued the chemist. "But it might be that the
apricots had brought on the syncope. Some natures are so sensitive to
certain smells; and it would even be a very fine question to study both
in its pathological and physiological relation. The priests know the
importance of it, they who have introduced aromatics into all their
ceremonies. It is to stupefy the senses and to bring on ecstasies--a
thing, moreover, very easy in persons of the weaker sex, who are more
delicate than the other. Some are cited who faint at the smell of burnt
hartshorn, of new bread--"

"Take care; you'll wake her!" said Bovary in a low voice.

"And not only," the druggist went on, "are human beings subject to such
anomalies, but animals also. Thus you are not ignorant of the singularly
aphrodisiac effect produced by the Nepeta cataria, vulgarly called
catmint, on the feline race; and, on the other hand, to quote an example
whose authenticity I can answer for. Bridaux (one of my old comrades, at
present established in the Rue Malpalu) possesses a dog that falls into
convulsions as soon as you hold out a snuff-box to him. He often even
makes the experiment before his friends at his summer-house at Guillaume
Wood. Would anyone believe that a simple sternutation could produce such
ravages on a quadrupedal organism? It is extremely curious, is it not?"

"Yes," said Charles, who was not listening to him.

"This shows us," went on the other, smiling with benign
self-sufficiency, "the innumerable irregularities of the nervous system.
With regard to madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very
susceptible. And so I should by no means recommend to you, my dear
friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretence
of attacking the symptoms, attack the constitution. No; no useless
physicking! Diet, that is all; sedatives, emollients, dulcification.
Then, don't you think that perhaps her imagination should be worked
upon?"

"In what way? How?" said Bovary.

"Ah! that is it. Such is indeed the question. 'That is the question,' as
I lately read in a newspaper."

But Emma, awaking, cried out--

"The letter! the letter!"

They thought she was delirious; and she was by midnight. Brain-fever had
set in.

For forty-three days Charles did not leave her. He gave up all his
patients; he no longer went to bed; he was constantly feeling her pulse,
putting on sinapisms and cold-water compresses. He sent Justin as far as
Neufchatel for ice; the ice melted on the way; he sent him back again.
He called Monsieur Canivet into consultation; he sent for Dr. Lariviere,
his old master, from Rouen; he was in despair. What alarmed him most was
Emma's prostration, for she did not speak, did not listen, did not even
seem to suffer, as if her body and soul were both resting together after
all their troubles.

About the middle of October she could sit up in bed supported by
pillows. Charles wept when he saw her eat her first bread-and-jelly. Her
strength returned to her; she got up for a few hours of an afternoon,
and one day, when she felt better, he tried to take her, leaning on his
arm, for a walk round the garden. The sand of the paths was disappearing
beneath the dead leaves; she walked slowly, dragging along her slippers,
and leaning against Charles's shoulder. She smiled all the time.

They went thus to the bottom of the garden near the terrace. She drew
herself up slowly, shading her eyes with her hand to look. She looked
far off, as far as she could, but on the horizon were only great
bonfires of grass smoking on the hills.

"You will tire yourself, my darling!" said Bovary. And, pushing her
gently to make her go into the arbour, "Sit down on this seat; you'll be
comfortable."

"Oh! no; not there!" she said in a faltering voice.

She was seized with giddiness, and from that evening her illness
recommenced, with a more uncertain character, it is true, and more
complex symptoms. Now she suffered in her heart, then in the chest, the
head, the limbs; she had vomitings, in which Charles thought he saw the
first signs of cancer.

And besides this, the poor fellow was worried about money matters.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: At home, Rodolphe tries to compose a farewell note to Emma. He finally writes that they have no future together, tells her he plans to leave La Huchette the very next day by himself, and asks her to be brave. He lays the blame for his decision on society. He ends the note with a flourish, giving "a final adieu -- separated into two words, A Dieu! -- which he thought in excellent taste." To pretend that he had cried during the composition of the letter, he lets a big drop of water smudge the ink. Having finished the letter, he seals it, smokes three pipes, and goes to bed. The next day he has a basket of apricots delivered to Emma with the letter at the bottom. The basket of apricots from Rodolphe makes Emma sense that all is not well. She finds the letter and, in a state of panic, rushes to the attic to read it without being seen. Sitting by the window, she reads Rodolphe's words and becomes "hysterical with rage. " She thinks about hurling herself out of the window. When she hears Charles and Felicite call her to lunch, she is shocked into facing reality. In a confused state, she forgets where she has placed the letter. As she sits at the table, she tries to behave as if nothing is the matter, but, when Charles mentions Rodolphe and then passes the basket of apricots, she becomes very tense. When she sees Rodolphe's carriage, she shrieks and faints. Homais rushes in as she writhes convulsively. Emma is carried up to her bed where she lies motionless with her mouth hanging open and her eyes closed. Charles and Homais discuss the possibility of an apricot allergy but are interrupted by a delirious Emma shouting, "The letter! The letter!" By midnight, brain fever sets in and she grows much worse. For the next forty- three days, Charles is constantly by her side. By mid-October Emma is on her way to recovery, but a visit to the arbor in the terrace brings on another attack of dizziness. Meanwhile, Charles grows greatly disturbed over financial worries.


prompt:
Chapter: To begin with, he did not know how he could pay Monsieur Homais for all
the physic supplied by him, and though, as a medical man, he was not
obliged to pay for it, he nevertheless blushed a little at such an
obligation. Then the expenses of the household, now that the servant was
mistress, became terrible. Bills rained in upon the house; the tradesmen
grumbled; Monsieur Lheureux especially harassed him. In fact, at
the height of Emma's illness, the latter, taking advantage of the
circumstances to make his bill larger, had hurriedly brought the cloak,
the travelling-bag, two trunks instead of one, and a number of other
things. It was very well for Charles to say he did not want them. The
tradesman answered arrogantly that these articles had been ordered, and
that he would not take them back; besides, it would vex madame in her
convalescence; the doctor had better think it over; in short, he was
resolved to sue him rather than give up his rights and take back his
goods. Charles subsequently ordered them to be sent back to the shop.
Felicite forgot; he had other things to attend to; then thought no more
about them. Monsieur Lheureux returned to the charge, and, by turns
threatening and whining, so managed that Bovary ended by signing a
bill at six months. But hardly had he signed this bill than a bold idea
occurred to him: it was to borrow a thousand francs from Lheureux.
So, with an embarrassed air, he asked if it were possible to get them,
adding that it would be for a year, at any interest he wished. Lheureux
ran off to his shop, brought back the money, and dictated another bill,
by which Bovary undertook to pay to his order on the 1st of September
next the sum of one thousand and seventy francs, which, with the hundred
and eighty already agreed to, made just twelve hundred and fifty, thus
lending at six per cent in addition to one-fourth for commission: and
the things bringing him in a good third at the least, this ought in
twelve months to give him a profit of a hundred and thirty francs. He
hoped that the business would not stop there; that the bills would not
be paid; that they would be renewed; and that his poor little money,
having thriven at the doctor's as at a hospital, would come back to him
one day considerably more plump, and fat enough to burst his bag.

Everything, moreover, succeeded with him. He was adjudicator for a
supply of cider to the hospital at Neufchatel; Monsieur Guillaumin
promised him some shares in the turf-pits of Gaumesnil, and he dreamt of
establishing a new diligence service between Arcueil and Rouen, which
no doubt would not be long in ruining the ramshackle van of the "Lion
d'Or," and that, travelling faster, at a cheaper rate, and carrying more
luggage, would thus put into his hands the whole commerce of Yonville.

Charles several times asked himself by what means he should next year be
able to pay back so much money. He reflected, imagined expedients, such
as applying to his father or selling something. But his father would be
deaf, and he--he had nothing to sell. Then he foresaw such worries that
he quickly dismissed so disagreeable a subject of meditation from
his mind. He reproached himself with forgetting Emma, as if, all his
thoughts belonging to this woman, it was robbing her of something not to
be constantly thinking of her.

The winter was severe, Madame Bovary's convalescence slow. When it
was fine they wheeled her arm-chair to the window that overlooked the
square, for she now had an antipathy to the garden, and the blinds on
that side were always down. She wished the horse to be sold; what she
formerly liked now displeased her. All her ideas seemed to be limited to
the care of herself. She stayed in bed taking little meals, rang for the
servant to inquire about her gruel or to chat with her. The snow on
the market-roof threw a white, still light into the room; then the rain
began to fall; and Emma waited daily with a mind full of eagerness for
the inevitable return of some trifling events which nevertheless had no
relation to her. The most important was the arrival of the "Hirondelle"
in the evening. Then the landlady shouted out, and other voices
answered, while Hippolyte's lantern, as he fetched the boxes from the
boot, was like a star in the darkness. At mid-day Charles came in;
then he went out again; next she took some beef-tea, and towards five
o'clock, as the day drew in, the children coming back from school,
dragging their wooden shoes along the pavement, knocked the clapper of
the shutters with their rulers one after the other.

It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien came to see her. He
inquired after her health, gave her news, exhorted her to religion, in a
coaxing little prattle that was not without its charm. The mere thought
of his cassock comforted her.

One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself
dying, and had asked for the communion; and, while they were making the
preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the
night table covered with syrups into an altar, and while Felicite was
strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing
over her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from
all feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was
beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would
be annihilated in that love like a burning incense that melts into
vapour. The bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water, the priest drew
from the holy pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting with a celestial
joy that she put out her lips to accept the body of the Saviour
presented to her. The curtains of the alcove floated gently round her
like clouds, and the rays of the two tapers burning on the night-table
seemed to shine like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back,
fancying she heard in space the music of seraphic harps, and perceived
in an azure sky, on a golden throne in the midst of saints holding green
palms, God the Father, resplendent with majesty, who with a sign sent to
earth angels with wings of fire to carry her away in their arms.

This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing
that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her
sensation. That still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion
and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by pride, at length
found rest in Christian humility, and, tasting the joy of weakness, she
saw within herself the destruction of her will, that must have left a
wide entrance for the inroads of heavenly grace. There existed, then,
in the place of happiness, still greater joys--another love beyond all
loves, without pause and without end, one that would grow eternally! She
saw amid the illusions of her hope a state of purity floating above the
earth mingling with heaven, to which she aspired. She wanted to become
a saint. She bought chaplets and wore amulets; she wished to have in her
room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might
kiss it every evening.

The cure marvelled at this humour, although Emma's religion, he thought,
might, from its fervour, end by touching on heresy, extravagance. But
not being much versed in these matters, as soon as they went beyond a
certain limit he wrote to Monsieur Boulard, bookseller to Monsignor,
to send him "something good for a lady who was very clever." The
bookseller, with as much indifference as if he had been sending off
hardware to niggers, packed up, pellmell, everything that was then the
fashion in the pious book trade. There were little manuals in questions
and answers, pamphlets of aggressive tone after the manner of Monsieur
de Maistre, and certain novels in rose-coloured bindings and with
a honied style, manufactured by troubadour seminarists or penitent
blue-stockings. There were the "Think of it; the Man of the World at
Mary's Feet, by Monsieur de ***, decorated with many Orders"; "The
Errors of Voltaire, for the Use of the Young," etc.

Madame Bovary's mind was not yet sufficiently clear to apply herself
seriously to anything; moreover, she began this reading in too much
hurry. She grew provoked at the doctrines of religion; the arrogance
of the polemic writings displeased her by their inveteracy in attacking
people she did not know; and the secular stories, relieved with
religion, seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world, that
they insensibly estranged her from the truths for whose proof she was
looking. Nevertheless, she persevered; and when the volume slipped
from her hands, she fancied herself seized with the finest Catholic
melancholy that an ethereal soul could conceive.

As for the memory of Rodolphe, she had thrust it back to the bottom of
her heart, and it remained there more solemn and more motionless than
a king's mummy in a catacomb. An exhalation escaped from this embalmed
love, that, penetrating through everything, perfumed with tenderness the
immaculate atmosphere in which she longed to live. When she knelt on her
Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same suave words that
she had murmured formerly to her lover in the outpourings of adultery.
It was to make faith come; but no delights descended from the heavens,
and she arose with tired limbs and with a vague feeling of a gigantic
dupery.

This searching after faith, she thought, was only one merit the more,
and in the pride of her devoutness Emma compared herself to those grand
ladies of long ago whose glory she had dreamed of over a portrait of La
Valliere, and who, trailing with so much majesty the lace-trimmed trains
of their long gowns, retired into solitudes to shed at the feet of
Christ all the tears of hearts that life had wounded.

Then she gave herself up to excessive charity. She sewed clothes for the
poor, she sent wood to women in childbed; and Charles one day, on coming
home, found three good-for-nothings in the kitchen seated at the table
eating soup. She had her little girl, whom during her illness her
husband had sent back to the nurse, brought home. She wanted to teach
her to read; even when Berthe cried, she was not vexed. She had made
up her mind to resignation, to universal indulgence. Her language about
everything was full of ideal expressions. She said to her child, "Is
your stomach-ache better, my angel?"

Madame Bovary senior found nothing to censure except perhaps this mania
of knitting jackets for orphans instead of mending her own house-linen;
but, harassed with domestic quarrels, the good woman took pleasure in
this quiet house, and she even stayed there till after Easter, to escape
the sarcasms of old Bovary, who never failed on Good Friday to order
chitterlings.

Besides the companionship of her mother-in-law, who strengthened her a
little by the rectitude of her judgment and her grave ways, Emma almost
every day had other visitors. These were Madame Langlois, Madame Caron,
Madame Dubreuil, Madame Tuvache, and regularly from two to five o'clock
the excellent Madame Homais, who, for her part, had never believed any
of the tittle-tattle about her neighbour. The little Homais also came to
see her; Justin accompanied them. He went up with them to her bedroom,
and remained standing near the door, motionless and mute. Often even
Madame Bovary; taking no heed of him, began her toilette. She began by
taking out her comb, shaking her head with a quick movement, and when
he for the first time saw all this mass of hair that fell to her knees
unrolling in black ringlets, it was to him, poor child! like a sudden
entrance into something new and strange, whose splendour terrified him.

Emma, no doubt, did not notice his silent attentions or his timidity.
She had no suspicion that the love vanished from her life was there,
palpitating by her side, beneath that coarse holland shirt, in that
youthful heart open to the emanations of her beauty. Besides, she
now enveloped all things with such indifference, she had words so
affectionate with looks so haughty, such contradictory ways, that one
could no longer distinguish egotism from charity, or corruption from
virtue. One evening, for example, she was angry with the servant, who
had asked to go out, and stammered as she tried to find some pretext.
Then suddenly--

"So you love him?" she said.

And without waiting for any answer from Felicite, who was blushing, she
added, "There! run along; enjoy yourself!"

In the beginning of spring she had the garden turned up from end to end,
despite Bovary's remonstrances. However, he was glad to see her at last
manifest a wish of any kind. As she grew stronger she displayed more
wilfulness. First, she found occasion to expel Mere Rollet, the nurse,
who during her convalescence had contracted the habit of coming too
often to the kitchen with her two nurslings and her boarder, better
off for teeth than a cannibal. Then she got rid of the Homais family,
successively dismissed all the other visitors, and even frequented
church less assiduously, to the great approval of the druggist, who said
to her in a friendly way--

"You were going in a bit for the cassock!"

As formerly, Monsieur Bournisien dropped in every day when he came out
after catechism class. He preferred staying out of doors to taking the
air "in the grove," as he called the arbour. This was the time when
Charles came home. They were hot; some sweet cider was brought out, and
they drank together to madame's complete restoration.

Binet was there; that is to say, a little lower down against the terrace
wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary invited him to have a drink, and he
thoroughly understood the uncorking of the stone bottles.

"You must," he said, throwing a satisfied glance all round him, even to
the very extremity of the landscape, "hold the bottle perpendicularly on
the table, and after the strings are cut, press up the cork with
little thrusts, gently, gently, as indeed they do seltzer-water at
restaurants."

But during his demonstration the cider often spurted right into their
faces, and then the ecclesiastic, with a thick laugh, never missed this
joke--

"Its goodness strikes the eye!"

He was, in fact, a good fellow and one day he was not even scandalised
at the chemist, who advised Charles to give madame some distraction
by taking her to the theatre at Rouen to hear the illustrious tenor,
Lagardy. Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion,
and the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous for
morals than literature.

But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The theatre, he
contended, served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath a mask of
pleasure, taught virtue.

"'Castigat ridendo mores,'* Monsieur Bournisien! Thus consider the
greater part of Voltaire's tragedies; they are cleverly strewn with
philosophical reflections, that made them a vast school of morals and
diplomacy for the people."

     *It corrects customs through laughter.

"I," said Binet, "once saw a piece called the 'Gamin de Paris,' in which
there was the character of an old general that is really hit off to a
T. He sets down a young swell who had seduced a working girl, who at the
ending--"

"Certainly," continued Homais, "there is bad literature as there is bad
pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most important of the fine arts
seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic idea, worthy of the abominable times
that imprisoned Galileo."

"I know very well," objected the cure, "that there are good works,
good authors. However, if it were only those persons of different sexes
united in a bewitching apartment, decorated rouge, those lights, those
effeminate voices, all this must, in the long-run, engender a
certain mental libertinage, give rise to immodest thoughts and impure
temptations. Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all the Fathers.
Finally," he added, suddenly assuming a mystic tone of voice while
he rolled a pinch of snuff between his fingers, "if the Church has
condemned the theatre, she must be right; we must submit to her
decrees."

"Why," asked the druggist, "should she excommunicate actors? For
formerly they openly took part in religious ceremonies. Yes, in the
middle of the chancel they acted; they performed a kind of farce called
'Mysteries,' which often offended against the laws of decency."

The ecclesiastic contented himself with uttering a groan, and the
chemist went on--

"It's like it is in the Bible; there there are, you know, more than one
piquant detail, matters really libidinous!"

And on a gesture of irritation from Monsieur Bournisien--

"Ah! you'll admit that it is not a book to place in the hands of a young
girl, and I should be sorry if Athalie--"

"But it is the Protestants, and not we," cried the other impatiently,
"who recommend the Bible."

"No matter," said Homais. "I am surprised that in our days, in this
century of enlightenment, anyone should still persist in proscribing an
intellectual relaxation that is inoffensive, moralising, and sometimes
even hygienic; is it not, doctor?"

"No doubt," replied the doctor carelessly, either because, sharing the
same ideas, he wished to offend no one, or else because he had not any
ideas.

The conversation seemed at an end when the chemist thought fit to shoot
a Parthian arrow.

"I've known priests who put on ordinary clothes to go and see dancers
kicking about."

"Come, come!" said the cure.

"Ah! I've known some!" And separating the words of his sentence, Homais
repeated, "I--have--known--some!"

"Well, they were wrong," said Bournisien, resigned to anything.

"By Jove! they go in for more than that," exclaimed the druggist.

"Sir!" replied the ecclesiastic, with such angry eyes that the druggist
was intimidated by them.

"I only mean to say," he replied in less brutal a tone, "that toleration
is the surest way to draw people to religion."

"That is true! that is true!" agreed the good fellow, sitting down again
on his chair. But he stayed only a few moments.

Then, as soon as he had gone, Monsieur Homais said to the doctor--

"That's what I call a cock-fight. I beat him, did you see, in a
way!--Now take my advice. Take madame to the theatre, if it were only
for once in your life, to enrage one of these ravens, hang it! If anyone
could take my place, I would accompany you myself. Be quick about it.
Lagardy is only going to give one performance; he's engaged to go to
England at a high salary. From what I hear, he's a regular dog; he's
rolling in money; he's taking three mistresses and a cook along with
him. All these great artists burn the candle at both ends; they require
a dissolute life, that suits the imagination to some extent. But they
die at the hospital, because they haven't the sense when young to lay
by. Well, a pleasant dinner! Goodbye till to-morrow."

The idea of the theatre quickly germinated in Bovary's head, for he at
once communicated it to his wife, who at first refused, alleging the
fatigue, the worry, the expense; but, for a wonder, Charles did not give
in, so sure was he that this recreation would be good for her. He saw
nothing to prevent it: his mother had sent them three hundred francs
which he had no longer expected; the current debts were not very large,
and the falling in of Lheureux's bills was still so far off that
there was no need to think about them. Besides, imagining that she
was refusing from delicacy, he insisted the more; so that by dint of
worrying her she at last made up her mind, and the next day at eight
o'clock they set out in the "Hirondelle."

The druggist, whom nothing whatever kept at Yonville, but who thought
himself bound not to budge from it, sighed as he saw them go.

"Well, a pleasant journey!" he said to them; "happy mortals that you
are!"

Then addressing himself to Emma, who was wearing a blue silk gown with
four flounces--

"You are as lovely as a Venus. You'll cut a figure at Rouen."

The diligence stopped at the "Croix-Rouge" in the Place Beauvoisine. It
was the inn that is in every provincial faubourg, with large stables
and small bedrooms, where one sees in the middle of the court chickens
pilfering the oats under the muddy gigs of the commercial travellers--a
good old house, with worm-eaten balconies that creak in the wind on
winter nights, always full of people, noise, and feeding, whose black
tables are sticky with coffee and brandy, the thick windows made yellow
by the flies, the damp napkins stained with cheap wine, and that always
smells of the village, like ploughboys dressed in Sundayclothes, has
a cafe on the street, and towards the countryside a kitchen-garden.
Charles at once set out. He muddled up the stage-boxes with the gallery,
the pit with the boxes; asked for explanations, did not understand them;
was sent from the box-office to the acting-manager; came back to the
inn, returned to the theatre, and thus several times traversed the whole
length of the town from the theatre to the boulevard.

Madame Bovary bought a bonnet, gloves, and a bouquet. The doctor was
much afraid of missing the beginning, and, without having had time to
swallow a plate of soup, they presented themselves at the doors of the
theatre, which were still closed.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Charles is troubled about the medical bills incurred during Emma's illness. In addition, Lheureux has delivered the bill for the goods Emma ordered for her planned departure with Rodolphe. Since Charles obviously cannot pay such a large amount, Lheureux maneuvers him into borrowing more money at a high interest rate. Charles borrows forty francs from the moneylender and signs another bill due on the first of September of the following year. In all, he will have to pay fifty francs. The scheming Lheureux hopes that Charles will renew the bill so that the interest will continue to grow. Emma's recovery is slow. During her illness, when she had felt sure of death overcoming her, she had asked for the sacrament of extreme unction, known as the last rites in the Catholic religion. Afterwards, she had seen a heavenly vision and had felt immense peace. As a result, Emma buried her memories of Rodolphe and transfers her affections to the Lord. She begins to indulge in charity and is gentle and patient with her daughter Berthe. She welcomes the visits of the priest, Bournisien, and aspires to be a saint. Bournisien marvels at Emma's transformation, but he is skeptical about her new religious fervor lasting for long. Emma finds herself surrounded with company. Her mother-in-law visits often, finding Emma to be pleasant. Almost all the busybodies of the neighborhood are her daily companions. Justin escorts the Homais children to Emma's room and stands "stiffly silent by the door." On several occasions, Emma, unaware of his presence, combs her hair before him. Her attractiveness is not lost on Justin, and he begins to love her. Emma does not notice his attraction to her, for she is beyond earthly love for now. With the advent of spring, Emma is recovered. Homais suggests that Charles take Emma to the theater because the excursion will do her good. Charles manages to coax a reluctant Emma, and they set off for Rouen.