prompt:
Chapter: The crowd was waiting against the wall, symmetrically enclosed between
the balustrades. At the corner of the neighbouring streets huge bills
repeated in quaint letters "Lucie de Lammermoor-Lagardy-Opera-etc." The
weather was fine, the people were hot, perspiration trickled amid the
curls, and handkerchiefs taken from pockets were mopping red foreheads;
and now and then a warm wind that blew from the river gently stirred the
border of the tick awnings hanging from the doors of the public-houses.
A little lower down, however, one was refreshed by a current of icy air
that smelt of tallow, leather, and oil. This was an exhalation from
the Rue des Charrettes, full of large black warehouses where they made
casks.

For fear of seeming ridiculous, Emma before going in wished to have a
little stroll in the harbour, and Bovary prudently kept his tickets in
his hand, in the pocket of his trousers, which he pressed against his
stomach.

Her heart began to beat as soon as she reached the vestibule. She
involuntarily smiled with vanity on seeing the crowd rushing to the
right by the other corridor while she went up the staircase to the
reserved seats. She was as pleased as a child to push with her finger
the large tapestried door. She breathed in with all her might the
dusty smell of the lobbies, and when she was seated in her box she bent
forward with the air of a duchess.

The theatre was beginning to fill; opera-glasses were taken from their
cases, and the subscribers, catching sight of one another, were bowing.
They came to seek relaxation in the fine arts after the anxieties of
business; but "business" was not forgotten; they still talked cottons,
spirits of wine, or indigo. The heads of old men were to be seen,
inexpressive and peaceful, with their hair and complexions looking like
silver medals tarnished by steam of lead. The young beaux were strutting
about in the pit, showing in the opening of their waistcoats their pink
or applegreen cravats, and Madame Bovary from above admired them leaning
on their canes with golden knobs in the open palm of their yellow
gloves.

Now the lights of the orchestra were lit, the lustre, let down from the
ceiling, throwing by the glimmering of its facets a sudden gaiety over
the theatre; then the musicians came in one after the other; and
first there was the protracted hubbub of the basses grumbling, violins
squeaking, cornets trumpeting, flutes and flageolets fifing. But three
knocks were heard on the stage, a rolling of drums began, the brass
instruments played some chords, and the curtain rising, discovered a
country-scene.

It was the cross-roads of a wood, with a fountain shaded by an oak to
the left. Peasants and lords with plaids on their shoulders were singing
a hunting-song together; then a captain suddenly came on, who evoked
the spirit of evil by lifting both his arms to heaven. Another appeared;
they went away, and the hunters started afresh. She felt herself
transported to the reading of her youth, into the midst of Walter Scott.
She seemed to hear through the mist the sound of the Scotch bagpipes
re-echoing over the heather. Then her remembrance of the novel helping
her to understand the libretto, she followed the story phrase by phrase,
while vague thoughts that came back to her dispersed at once again with
the bursts of music. She gave herself up to the lullaby of the melodies,
and felt all her being vibrate as if the violin bows were drawn over her
nerves. She had not eyes enough to look at the costumes, the scenery,
the actors, the painted trees that shook when anyone walked, and the
velvet caps, cloaks, swords--all those imaginary things that floated
amid the harmony as in the atmosphere of another world. But a young
woman stepped forward, throwing a purse to a squire in green. She was
left alone, and the flute was heard like the murmur of a fountain or the
warbling of birds. Lucie attacked her cavatina in G major bravely. She
plained of love; she longed for wings. Emma, too, fleeing from life,
would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly Edgar-Lagardy
appeared.

He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the majesty of
marble to the ardent races of the South. His vigorous form was tightly
clad in a brown-coloured doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against
his left thigh, and he cast round laughing looks showing his white
teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard him sing one night
on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended boats, had fallen in love
with him. She had ruined herself for him. He had deserted her for
other women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his
artistic reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into
his advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his
person and the susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable
coolness, more temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis
than of real singing, made up the charm of this admirable charlatan
nature, in which there was something of the hairdresser and the
toreador.

From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucy in his arms,
he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of
rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes
escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward
to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was
filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn
out to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the
drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognised all the intoxication
and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna
seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that
charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had
loved her with such love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit
night when they said, "To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with
cheers; they recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of
the flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they
uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the
vibrations of the last chords.

"But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute her?"

"No, no!" she answered; "he is her lover!"

"Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on
before said, 'I love Lucie and she loves me!' Besides, he went off with
her father arm in arm. For he certainly is her father, isn't he--the
ugly little man with a cock's feather in his hat?"

Despite Emma's explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began
in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master
Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie,
thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that
he did not understand the story because of the music, which interfered
very much with the words.

"What does it matter?" said Emma. "Do be quiet!"

"Yes, but you know," he went on, leaning against her shoulder, "I like
to understand things."

"Be quiet! be quiet!" she cried impatiently.

Lucie advanced, half supported by her women, a wreath of orange blossoms
in her hair, and paler than the white satin of her gown. Emma dreamed
of her marriage day; she saw herself at home again amid the corn in the
little path as they walked to the church. Oh, why had not she, like
this woman, resisted, implored? She, on the contrary, had been joyous,
without seeing the abyss into which she was throwing herself. Ah! if
in the freshness of her beauty, before the soiling of marriage and the
disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some
great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty
blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness. But that
happiness, no doubt, was a lie invented for the despair of all desire.
She now knew the smallness of the passions that art exaggerated. So,
striving to divert her thoughts, Emma determined now to see in this
reproduction of her sorrows only a plastic fantasy, well enough to
please the eye, and she even smiled internally with disdainful pity when
at the back of the stage under the velvet hangings a man appeared in a
black cloak.

His large Spanish hat fell at a gesture he made, and immediately the
instruments and the singers began the sextet. Edgar, flashing with fury,
dominated all the others with his clearer voice; Ashton hurled homicidal
provocations at him in deep notes; Lucie uttered her shrill plaint,
Arthur at one side, his modulated tones in the middle register, and the
bass of the minister pealed forth like an organ, while the voices of the
women repeating his words took them up in chorus delightfully. They were
all in a row gesticulating, and anger, vengeance, jealousy, terror, and
stupefaction breathed forth at once from their half-opened mouths. The
outraged lover brandished his naked sword; his guipure ruffle rose with
jerks to the movements of his chest, and he walked from right to left
with long strides, clanking against the boards the silver-gilt spurs of
his soft boots, widening out at the ankles. He, she thought must have an
inexhaustible love to lavish it upon the crowd with such effusion.
All her small fault-findings faded before the poetry of the part
that absorbed her; and, drawn towards this man by the illusion of the
character, she tried to imagine to herself his life--that life resonant,
extraordinary, splendid, and that might have been hers if fate had
willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With
him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she would have travelled from
capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the
flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each
evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden trellis-work she would
have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung
for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked
at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at her; it was
certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength,
as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out,
"Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour
and all my dreams!"

The curtain fell.

The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the
fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the
crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with
palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran
to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.

He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were
jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and
he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short
sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered
cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband,
who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with
her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured
taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement.
At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath--

"Ma foi! I thought I should have had to stay there. There is such a
crowd--SUCH a crowd!"

He added--

"Just guess whom I met up there! Monsieur Leon!"

"Leon?"

"Himself! He's coming along to pay his respects." And as he finished
these words the ex-clerk of Yonville entered the box.

He held out his hand with the ease of a gentleman; and Madame Bovary
extended hers, without doubt obeying the attraction of a stronger will.
She had not felt it since that spring evening when the rain fell upon
the green leaves, and they had said good-bye standing at the window.
But soon recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an
effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began stammering a
few hurried words.

"Ah, good-day! What! you here?"

"Silence!" cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was beginning.

"So you are at Rouen?"

"Yes."

"And since when?"

"Turn them out! turn them out!" People were looking at them. They were
silent.

But from that moment she listened no more; and the chorus of the guests,
the scene between Ashton and his servant, the grand duet in D major, all
were for her as far off as if the instruments had grown less sonorous
and the characters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at the
druggist's, and the walk to the nurse's, the reading in the arbour,
the tete-a-tete by the fireside--all that poor love, so calm and so
protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that she had nevertheless
forgotten. And why had he come back? What combination of circumstances
had brought him back into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning
with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt
herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon
her hair.

"Does this amuse you?" said he, bending over her so closely that the end
of his moustache brushed her cheek. She replied carelessly--

"Oh, dear me, no, not much."

Then he proposed that they should leave the theatre and go and take an
ice somewhere.

"Oh, not yet; let us stay," said Bovary. "Her hair's undone; this is
going to be tragic."

But the mad scene did not at all interest Emma, and the acting of the
singer seemed to her exaggerated.

"She screams too loud," said she, turning to Charles, who was listening.

"Yes--a little," he replied, undecided between the frankness of his
pleasure and his respect for his wife's opinion.

Then with a sigh Leon said--

"The heat is--"

"Unbearable! Yes!"

"Do you feel unwell?" asked Bovary.

"Yes, I am stifling; let us go."

Monsieur Leon put her long lace shawl carefully about her shoulders, and
all three went off to sit down in the harbour, in the open air, outside
the windows of a cafe.

First they spoke of her illness, although Emma interrupted Charles
from time to time, for fear, she said, of boring Monsieur Leon; and the
latter told them that he had come to spend two years at Rouen in a large
office, in order to get practice in his profession, which was different
in Normandy and Paris. Then he inquired after Berthe, the Homais, Mere
Lefrancois, and as they had, in the husband's presence, nothing more to
say to one another, the conversation soon came to an end.

People coming out of the theatre passed along the pavement, humming or
shouting at the top of their voices, "O bel ange, ma Lucie!*" Then Leon,
playing the dilettante, began to talk music. He had seen Tambourini,
Rubini, Persiani, Grisi, and, compared with them, Lagardy, despite his
grand outbursts, was nowhere.

     *Oh beautiful angel, my Lucie.

"Yet," interrupted Charles, who was slowly sipping his rum-sherbet,
"they say that he is quite admirable in the last act. I regret leaving
before the end, because it was beginning to amuse me."

"Why," said the clerk, "he will soon give another performance."

But Charles replied that they were going back next day. "Unless," he
added, turning to his wife, "you would like to stay alone, kitten?"

And changing his tactics at this unexpected opportunity that presented
itself to his hopes, the young man sang the praises of Lagardy in the
last number. It was really superb, sublime. Then Charles insisted--

"You would get back on Sunday. Come, make up your mind. You are wrong if
you feel that this is doing you the least good."

The tables round them, however, were emptying; a waiter came and stood
discreetly near them. Charles, who understood, took out his purse; the
clerk held back his arm, and did not forget to leave two more pieces of
silver that he made chink on the marble.

"I am really sorry," said Bovary, "about the money which you are--"

The other made a careless gesture full of cordiality, and taking his hat
said--

"It is settled, isn't it? To-morrow at six o'clock?"

Charles explained once more that he could not absent himself longer, but
that nothing prevented Emma--

"But," she stammered, with a strange smile, "I am not sure--"

"Well, you must think it over. We'll see. Night brings counsel." Then to
Leon, who was walking along with them, "Now that you are in our part of
the world, I hope you'll come and ask us for some dinner now and then."

The clerk declared he would not fail to do so, being obliged, moreover,
to go to Yonville on some business for his office. And they parted
before the Saint-Herbland Passage just as the clock in the cathedral
struck half-past eleven.

Part III

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

completion: While Charles and Emma are at the theater, he is his usual unsophisticated self. Emma is able to ignore him because she is caught up in the plot of the opera, which she sees as portraying her own life. She constantly compares the male lead to Rodolphe and pictures him as her lover. During intermission, Charles sees Leon at the refreshment counter and brings him to their box to greet Emma. Leon stays with them, and Emma pays scant attention to the opera. The three leave the theater and relive old memories. Charles invites Leon to Yonville. He also urges Emma to spend the next evening at the theater with Leon, for it is not possible for him to stay any longer. They separate on very cordial terms.


prompt:
Chapter: Monsieur Leon, while studying law, had gone pretty often to the
dancing-rooms, where he was even a great success amongst the grisettes,
who thought he had a distinguished air. He was the best-mannered of the
students; he wore his hair neither too long nor too short, didn't spend
all his quarter's money on the first day of the month, and kept on good
terms with his professors. As for excesses, he had always abstained from
them, as much from cowardice as from refinement.

Often when he stayed in his room to read, or else when sitting of an
evening under the lime-trees of the Luxembourg, he let his Code fall to
the ground, and the memory of Emma came back to him. But gradually this
feeling grew weaker, and other desires gathered over it, although it
still persisted through them all. For Leon did not lose all hope; there
was for him, as it were, a vague promise floating in the future, like a
golden fruit suspended from some fantastic tree.

Then, seeing her again after three years of absence his passion
reawakened. He must, he thought, at last make up his mind to possess
her. Moreover, his timidity had worn off by contact with his gay
companions, and he returned to the provinces despising everyone who had
not with varnished shoes trodden the asphalt of the boulevards. By
the side of a Parisienne in her laces, in the drawing-room of some
illustrious physician, a person driving his carriage and wearing many
orders, the poor clerk would no doubt have trembled like a child; but
here, at Rouen, on the harbour, with the wife of this small doctor
he felt at his ease, sure beforehand he would shine. Self-possession
depends on its environment. We don't speak on the first floor as on the
fourth; and the wealthy woman seems to have, about her, to guard her
virtue, all her banknotes, like a cuirass in the lining of her corset.

On leaving the Bovarys the night before, Leon had followed them
through the streets at a distance; then having seen them stop at the
"Croix-Rouge," he turned on his heel, and spent the night meditating a
plan.

So the next day about five o'clock he walked into the kitchen of the
inn, with a choking sensation in his throat, pale cheeks, and that
resolution of cowards that stops at nothing.

"The gentleman isn't in," answered a servant.

This seemed to him a good omen. He went upstairs.

She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she apologised
for having neglected to tell him where they were staying.

"Oh, I divined it!" said Leon.

He pretended he had been guided towards her by chance, by, instinct. She
began to smile; and at once, to repair his folly, Leon told her that he
had spent his morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town
one after the other.

"So you have made up your mind to stay?" he added.

"Yes," she said, "and I am wrong. One ought not to accustom oneself to
impossible pleasures when there are a thousand demands upon one."

"Oh, I can imagine!"

"Ah! no; for you, you are a man!"

But men too had had their trials, and the conversation went off into
certain philosophical reflections. Emma expatiated much on the misery of
earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains
entombed.

To show off, or from a naive imitation of this melancholy which called
forth his, the young man declared that he had been awfully bored during
the whole course of his studies. The law irritated him, other vocations
attracted him, and his mother never ceased worrying him in every one
of her letters. As they talked they explained more and more fully the
motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive
confidence. But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition
of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express
it all the same. She did not confess her passion for another; he did not
say that he had forgotten her.

Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked
balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she
ran across the fields in the morning to her lover's house. The noises
of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if
on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity
dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old arm-chair; the
yellow wall-paper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her,
and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in
the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her
hair.

"But pardon me!" she said. "It is wrong of me. I weary you with my
eternal complaints."

"No, never, never!"

"If you knew," she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes,
in which a tear was trembling, "all that I had dreamed!"

"And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went away. I
dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction amid the din of the
crowd without being able to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me.
In an engraver's shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print of one
of the Muses. She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the
moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair. Something drove me there
continually; I stayed there hours together." Then in a trembling voice,
"She resembled you a little."

Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the
irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.

"Often," he went on, "I wrote you letters that I tore up."

She did not answer. He continued--

"I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you. I thought I
recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages
through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours."

She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption.
Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes
on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin
of them with her toes.

At last she sighed.

"But the most wretched thing, is it not--is to drag out, as I do, a
useless existence. If our pains were only of some use to someone, we
should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice."

He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immolation, having
himself an incredible longing for self-sacrifice that he could not
satisfy.

"I should much like," she said, "to be a nurse at a hospital."

"Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any
calling--unless perhaps that of a doctor."

With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of
her illness, which had almost killed her. What a pity! She should not be
suffering now! Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening
he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug
with velvet stripes he had received from her. For this was how they
would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now
adapting their past life. Besides, speech is a rolling-mill that always
thins out the sentiment.

But at this invention of the rug she asked, "But why?"

"Why?" He hesitated. "Because I loved you so!" And congratulating
himself at having surmounted the difficulty, Leon watched her face out
of the corner of his eyes.

It was like the sky when a gust of wind drives the clouds across. The
mass of sad thoughts that darkened them seemed to be lifted from her
blue eyes; her whole face shone. He waited. At last she replied--

"I always suspected it."

Then they went over all the trifling events of that far-off existence,
whose joys and sorrows they had just summed up in one word. They
recalled the arbour with clematis, the dresses she had worn, the
furniture of her room, the whole of her house.

"And our poor cactuses, where are they?"

"The cold killed them this winter."

"Ah! how I have thought of them, do you know? I often saw them again as
of yore, when on the summer mornings the sun beat down upon your blinds,
and I saw your two bare arms passing out amongst the flowers."

"Poor friend!" she said, holding out her hand to him.

Leon swiftly pressed his lips to it. Then, when he had taken a deep
breath--

"At that time you were to me I know not what incomprehensible force that
took captive my life. Once, for instance, I went to see you; but you, no
doubt, do not remember it."

"I do," she said; "go on."

"You were downstairs in the ante-room, ready to go out, standing on
the last stair; you were wearing a bonnet with small blue flowers; and
without any invitation from you, in spite of myself, I went with you.
Every moment, however, I grew more and more conscious of my folly, and
I went on walking by you, not daring to follow you completely, and
unwilling to leave you. When you went into a shop, I waited in the
street, and I watched you through the window taking off your gloves and
counting the change on the counter. Then you rang at Madame Tuvache's;
you were let in, and I stood like an idiot in front of the great heavy
door that had closed after you."

Madame Bovary, as she listened to him, wondered that she was so old. All
these things reappearing before her seemed to widen out her life; it was
like some sentimental immensity to which she returned; and from time to
time she said in a low voice, her eyes half closed--

"Yes, it is true--true--true!"

They heard eight strike on the different clocks of the Beauvoisine
quarter, which is full of schools, churches, and large empty hotels.
They no longer spoke, but they felt as they looked upon each other a
buzzing in their heads, as if something sonorous had escaped from the
fixed eyes of each of them. They were hand in hand now, and the past,
the future, reminiscences and dreams, all were confounded in the
sweetness of this ecstasy. Night was darkening over the walls, on which
still shone, half hidden in the shade, the coarse colours of four bills
representing four scenes from the "Tour de Nesle," with a motto in
Spanish and French at the bottom. Through the sash-window a patch of
dark sky was seen between the pointed roofs.

She rose to light two wax-candles on the drawers, then she sat down
again.

"Well!" said Leon.

"Well!" she replied.

He was thinking how to resume the interrupted conversation, when she
said to him--

"How is it that no one until now has ever expressed such sentiments to
me?"

The clerk said that ideal natures were difficult to understand. He from
the first moment had loved her, and he despaired when he thought of the
happiness that would have been theirs, if thanks to fortune, meeting her
earlier, they had been indissolubly bound to one another.

"I have sometimes thought of it," she went on.

"What a dream!" murmured Leon. And fingering gently the blue binding of
her long white sash, he added, "And who prevents us from beginning now?"

"No, my friend," she replied; "I am too old; you are too young. Forget
me! Others will love you; you will love them."

"Not as you!" he cried.

"What a child you are! Come, let us be sensible. I wish it."

She showed him the impossibility of their love, and that they must
remain, as formerly, on the simple terms of a fraternal friendship.

Was she speaking thus seriously? No doubt Emma did not herself know,
quite absorbed as she was by the charm of the seduction, and the
necessity of defending herself from it; and contemplating the young
man with a moved look, she gently repulsed the timid caresses that his
trembling hands attempted.

"Ah! forgive me!" he cried, drawing back.

Emma was seized with a vague fear at this shyness, more dangerous to her
than the boldness of Rodolphe when he advanced to her open-armed. No man
had ever seemed to her so beautiful. An exquisite candour emanated from
his being. He lowered his long fine eyelashes, that curled upwards.
His cheek, with the soft skin reddened, she thought, with desire of her
person, and Emma felt an invincible longing to press her lips to it.
Then, leaning towards the clock as if to see the time--

"Ah! how late it is!" she said; "how we do chatter!"

He understood the hint and took up his hat.

"It has even made me forget the theatre. And poor Bovary has left me
here especially for that. Monsieur Lormeaux, of the Rue Grand-Pont, was
to take me and his wife."

And the opportunity was lost, as she was to leave the next day.

"Really!" said Leon.

"Yes."

"But I must see you again," he went on. "I wanted to tell you--"

"What?"

"Something--important--serious. Oh, no! Besides, you will not go; it is
impossible. If you should--listen to me. Then you have not understood
me; you have not guessed--"

"Yet you speak plainly," said Emma.

"Ah! you can jest. Enough! enough! Oh, for pity's sake, let me see you
once--only once!"

"Well--" She stopped; then, as if thinking better of it, "Oh, not here!"

"Where you will."

"Will you--" She seemed to reflect; then abruptly, "To-morrow at eleven
o'clock in the cathedral."

"I shall be there," he cried, seizing her hands, which she disengaged.

And as they were both standing up, he behind her, and Emma with her head
bent, he stooped over her and pressed long kisses on her neck.

"You are mad! Ah! you are mad!" she said, with sounding little laughs,
while the kisses multiplied.

Then bending his head over her shoulder, he seemed to beg the consent of
her eyes. They fell upon him full of an icy dignity.

Leon stepped back to go out. He stopped on the threshold; then he
whispered with a trembling voice, "Tomorrow!"

She answered with a nod, and disappeared like a bird into the next room.

In the evening Emma wrote the clerk an interminable letter, in which she
cancelled the rendezvous; all was over; they must not, for the sake of
their happiness, meet again. But when the letter was finished, as she
did not know Leon's address, she was puzzled.

"I'll give it to him myself," she said; "he will come."

The next morning, at the open window, and humming on his balcony, Leon
himself varnished his pumps with several coatings. He put on white
trousers, fine socks, a green coat, emptied all the scent he had into
his handkerchief, then having had his hair curled, he uncurled it again,
in order to give it a more natural elegance.

"It is still too early," he thought, looking at the hairdresser's
cuckoo-clock, that pointed to the hour of nine. He read an old fashion
journal, went out, smoked a cigar, walked up three streets, thought it
was time, and went slowly towards the porch of Notre Dame.

It was a beautiful summer morning. Silver plate sparkled in the
jeweller's windows, and the light falling obliquely on the cathedral
made mirrors of the corners of the grey stones; a flock of birds
fluttered in the grey sky round the trefoil bell-turrets; the square,
resounding with cries, was fragrant with the flowers that bordered its
pavement, roses, jasmines, pinks, narcissi, and tube-roses, unevenly
spaced out between moist grasses, catmint, and chickweed for the birds;
the fountains gurgled in the centre, and under large umbrellas, amidst
melons, piled up in heaps, flower-women, bare-headed, were twisting
paper round bunches of violets.

The young man took one. It was the first time that he had bought flowers
for a woman, and his breast, as he smelt them, swelled with pride, as if
this homage that he meant for another had recoiled upon himself.

But he was afraid of being seen; he resolutely entered the church. The
beadle, who was just then standing on the threshold in the middle of the
left doorway, under the "Dancing Marianne," with feather cap, and rapier
dangling against his calves, came in, more majestic than a cardinal, and
as shining as a saint on a holy pyx.

He came towards Leon, and, with that smile of wheedling benignity
assumed by ecclesiastics when they question children--

"The gentleman, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? The gentleman
would like to see the curiosities of the church?"

"No!" said the other.

And he first went round the lower aisles. Then he went out to look at
the Place. Emma was not coming yet. He went up again to the choir.

The nave was reflected in the full fonts with the beginning of the
arches and some portions of the glass windows. But the reflections of
the paintings, broken by the marble rim, were continued farther on upon
the flag-stones, like a many-coloured carpet. The broad daylight from
without streamed into the church in three enormous rays from the three
opened portals. From time to time at the upper end a sacristan passed,
making the oblique genuflexion of devout persons in a hurry. The crystal
lustres hung motionless. In the choir a silver lamp was burning, and
from the side chapels and dark places of the church sometimes rose
sounds like sighs, with the clang of a closing grating, its echo
reverberating under the lofty vault.

Leon with solemn steps walked along by the walls. Life had never seemed
so good to him. She would come directly, charming, agitated, looking
back at the glances that followed her, and with her flounced dress, her
gold eyeglass, her thin shoes, with all sorts of elegant trifles that he
had never enjoyed, and with the ineffable seduction of yielding virtue.
The church like a huge boudoir spread around her; the arches bent down
to gather in the shade the confession of her love; the windows shone
resplendent to illumine her face, and the censers would burn that she
might appear like an angel amid the fumes of the sweet-smelling odours.

But she did not come. He sat down on a chair, and his eyes fell upon a
blue stained window representing boatmen carrying baskets. He looked at
it long, attentively, and he counted the scales of the fishes and the
button-holes of the doublets, while his thoughts wandered off towards
Emma.

The beadle, standing aloof, was inwardly angry at this individual who
took the liberty of admiring the cathedral by himself. He seemed to him
to be conducting himself in a monstrous fashion, to be robbing him in a
sort, and almost committing sacrilege.

But a rustle of silk on the flags, the tip of a bonnet, a lined
cloak--it was she! Leon rose and ran to meet her.

Emma was pale. She walked fast.

"Read!" she said, holding out a paper to him. "Oh, no!"

And she abruptly withdrew her hand to enter the chapel of the Virgin,
where, kneeling on a chair, she began to pray.

The young man was irritated at this bigot fancy; then he nevertheless
experienced a certain charm in seeing her, in the middle of a
rendezvous, thus lost in her devotions, like an Andalusian marchioness;
then he grew bored, for she seemed never coming to an end.

Emma prayed, or rather strove to pray, hoping that some sudden
resolution might descend to her from heaven; and to draw down divine
aid she filled full her eyes with the splendours of the tabernacle. She
breathed in the perfumes of the full-blown flowers in the large vases,
and listened to the stillness of the church, that only heightened the
tumult of her heart.

She rose, and they were about to leave, when the beadle came forward,
hurriedly saying--

"Madame, no doubt, does not belong to these parts? Madame would like to
see the curiosities of the church?"

"Oh, no!" cried the clerk.

"Why not?" said she. For she clung with her expiring virtue to the
Virgin, the sculptures, the tombs--anything.

Then, in order to proceed "by rule," the beadle conducted them right to
the entrance near the square, where, pointing out with his cane a large
circle of block-stones without inscription or carving--

"This," he said majestically, "is the circumference of the beautiful
bell of Ambroise. It weighed forty thousand pounds. There was not its
equal in all Europe. The workman who cast it died of the joy--"

"Let us go on," said Leon.

The old fellow started off again; then, having got back to the chapel of
the Virgin, he stretched forth his arm with an all-embracing gesture
of demonstration, and, prouder than a country squire showing you his
espaliers, went on--

"This simple stone covers Pierre de Breze, lord of Varenne and of
Brissac, grand marshal of Poitou, and governor of Normandy, who died at
the battle of Montlhery on the 16th of July, 1465."

Leon bit his lips, fuming.

"And on the right, this gentleman all encased in iron, on the
prancing horse, is his grandson, Louis de Breze, lord of Breval and of
Montchauvet, Count de Maulevrier, Baron de Mauny, chamberlain to the
king, Knight of the Order, and also governor of Normandy; died on the
23rd of July, 1531--a Sunday, as the inscription specifies; and below,
this figure, about to descend into the tomb, portrays the same person.
It is not possible, is it, to see a more perfect representation of
annihilation?"

Madame Bovary put up her eyeglasses. Leon, motionless, looked at her,
no longer even attempting to speak a single word, to make a gesture,
so discouraged was he at this two-fold obstinacy of gossip and
indifference.

The everlasting guide went on--

"Near him, this kneeling woman who weeps is his spouse, Diane de
Poitiers, Countess de Breze, Duchess de Valentinois, born in 1499, died
in 1566, and to the left, the one with the child is the Holy Virgin. Now
turn to this side; here are the tombs of the Ambroise. They were both
cardinals and archbishops of Rouen. That one was minister under Louis
thousand gold crowns for the poor."

And without stopping, still talking, he pushed them into a chapel
full of balustrades, some put away, and disclosed a kind of block that
certainly might once have been an ill-made statue.

"Truly," he said with a groan, "it adorned the tomb of Richard Coeur de
Lion, King of England and Duke of Normandy. It was the Calvinists, sir,
    who reduced it to this condition. They had buried it for spite in the
    earth, under the episcopal seat of Monsignor. See! this is the door by
    which Monsignor passes to his house. Let us pass on quickly to see the
    gargoyle windows."

    But Leon hastily took some silver from his pocket and seized Emma's
    arm. The beadle stood dumfounded, not able to understand this untimely
    munificence when there were still so many things for the stranger to
    see. So calling him back, he cried--

    "Sir! sir! The steeple! the steeple!"

    "No, thank you!" said Leon.

    "You are wrong, sir! It is four hundred and forty feet high, nine less
    than the great pyramid of Egypt. It is all cast; it--"

    Leon was fleeing, for it seemed to him that his love, that for nearly
    two hours now had become petrified in the church like the stones, would
    vanish like a vapour through that sort of truncated funnel, of oblong
    cage, of open chimney that rises so grotesquely from the cathedral like
    the extravagant attempt of some fantastic brazier.

    "But where are we going?" she said.

    Making no answer, he walked on with a rapid step; and Madame Bovary
    was already, dipping her finger in the holy water when behind them they
    heard a panting breath interrupted by the regular sound of a cane. Leon
    turned back.

    "Sir!"

    "What is it?"

    And he recognised the beadle, holding under his arms and balancing
    against his stomach some twenty large sewn volumes. They were works
    "which treated of the cathedral."

    "Idiot!" growled Leon, rushing out of the church.

    A lad was playing about the close.

    "Go and get me a cab!"

    The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quatre-Vents; then they
    were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed.

    "Ah! Leon! Really--I don't know--if I ought," she whispered. Then with a
    more serious air, "Do you know, it is very improper--"

    "How so?" replied the clerk. "It is done at Paris."

    And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her.

    Still the cab did not come. Leon was afraid she might go back into the
    church. At last the cab appeared.

    "At all events, go out by the north porch," cried the beadle, who was
    left alone on the threshold, "so as to see the Resurrection, the Last
    Judgment, Paradise, King David, and the Condemned in Hell-flames."

    "Where to, sir?" asked the coachman.

    "Where you like," said Leon, forcing Emma into the cab.

    And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont,
    crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and
    stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille.

    "Go on," cried a voice that came from within.

    The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour
    Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop.

    "No, straight on!" cried the same voice.

    The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours, trotted
    quietly beneath the elm-trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put his
    leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the side
    alley by the meadow to the margin of the waters.

    It went along by the river, along the towing-path paved with sharp
    pebbles, and for a long while in the direction of Oyssel, beyond the
    isles.

    But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatremares, Sotteville, La
    Grande-Chaussee, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of
    the Jardin des Plantes.

    "Get on, will you?" cried the voice more furiously.

    And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the
    Quai'des Curandiers, the Quai aux Meules, once more over the bridge, by
    the Place du Champ de Mars, and behind the hospital gardens, where old
    men in black coats were walking in the sun along the terrace all green
    with ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard
    Cauchoise, then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills.

    It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered
    about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont
    Gargan, at La Rougue-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue
    Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien,
    Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise--in front of the Customs, at the "Vieille
    Tour," the "Trois Pipes," and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to time
    the coachman, on his box cast despairing eyes at the public-houses.
    He could not understand what furious desire for locomotion urged these
    individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to now and then, and at
    once exclamations of anger burst forth behind him. Then he lashed his
    perspiring jades afresh, but indifferent to their jolting, running up
    against things here and there, not caring if he did, demoralised, and
    almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and depression.

    And on the harbour, in the midst of the drays and casks, and in the
    streets, at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken
    eyes at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds
    drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb,
    and tossing about like a vessel.

    Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun
    beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed
    beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps
    of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white
    butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom.

    At about six o'clock the carriage stopped in a back street of the
    Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down,
    and without turning her head.

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

completion: During his days at law school in Paris, Leon had allowed his memories of Emma to dim; upon seeing her again, his passion is immediately rekindled, even though it has been almost three years. When he addresses Emma, Leon, no longer shy, reveals a new confidence. He is even bold enough to pay a visit to the Bovarys at their hotel. Charles is not in, and Leon and Emma converse "on the subject of their sorrows, each growing somewhat excited as they went further in confidence." Finally Leon blurts, "I loved you!" Emma becomes radiant on hearing his words. They talk until very late and arrange to meet in the Cathedral at eleven the next morning. Before leaving, Leon kisses her on the nape of her neck; Emma tries hard not to respond. The next day, Emma arrives late at the Cathedral. Leon has been waiting for a while and is eager to spend some time alone with her. She is, however, aware of her "tottering virtue" and accepts a guided tour of the cathedral. Leon is clearly uncomfortable and whisks her away as soon as the opportunity presents itself. They enter a carriage, and Leon orders the driver to wander about randomly. The night before, Emma had written Leon a letter explaining that they could not have a relationship. This note is torn into bits, which are tossed out the window of the carriage. At about six o'clock, the cab drops Emma off near her hotel. She walks away "with her veil lowered, and without a backward glance."


prompt:
Chapter: On reaching the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the
diligence. Hivert, who had waited for her fifty-three minutes, had at
last started.

Yet nothing forced her to go; but she had given her word that she would
return that same evening. Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her
heart she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at
once the chastisement and atonement of adultery.

She packed her box quickly, paid her bill, took a cab in the yard,
hurrying on the driver, urging him on, every moment inquiring about
the time and the miles traversed. He succeeded in catching up the
"Hirondelle" as it neared the first houses of Quincampoix.

Hardly was she seated in her corner than she closed her eyes, and opened
them at the foot of the hill, when from afar she recognised Felicite,
who was on the lookout in front of the farrier's shop. Hivert pulled
in his horses and, the servant, climbing up to the window, said
mysteriously--

"Madame, you must go at once to Monsieur Homais. It's for something
important."

The village was silent as usual. At the corner of the streets were small
pink heaps that smoked in the air, for this was the time for jam-making,
and everyone at Yonville prepared his supply on the same day. But in
front of the chemist's shop one might admire a far larger heap, and that
surpassed the others with the superiority that a laboratory must have
over ordinary stores, a general need over individual fancy.

She went in. The large arm-chair was upset, and even the "Fanal de
Rouen" lay on the ground, outspread between two pestles. She pushed open
the lobby door, and in the middle of the kitchen, amid brown jars full
of picked currants, of powdered sugar and lump sugar, of the scales on
the table, and of the pans on the fire, she saw all the Homais, small
and large, with aprons reaching to their chins, and with forks in their
hands. Justin was standing up with bowed head, and the chemist was
screaming--

"Who told you to go and fetch it in the Capharnaum."

"What is it? What is the matter?"

"What is it?" replied the druggist. "We are making preserves; they are
simmering; but they were about to boil over, because there is too
much juice, and I ordered another pan. Then he, from indolence, from
laziness, went and took, hanging on its nail in my laboratory, the key
of the Capharnaum."

It was thus the druggist called a small room under the leads, full of
the utensils and the goods of his trade. He often spent long hours there
alone, labelling, decanting, and doing up again; and he looked upon
it not as a simple store, but as a veritable sanctuary, whence there
afterwards issued, elaborated by his hands, all sorts of pills, boluses,
infusions, lotions, and potions, that would bear far and wide his
celebrity. No one in the world set foot there, and he respected it so,
that he swept it himself. Finally, if the pharmacy, open to all comers,
was the spot where he displayed his pride, the Capharnaum was the refuge
where, egoistically concentrating himself, Homais delighted in the
exercise of his predilections, so that Justin's thoughtlessness seemed
to him a monstrous piece of irreverence, and, redder than the currants,
he repeated--

"Yes, from the Capharnaum! The key that locks up the acids and caustic
alkalies! To go and get a spare pan! a pan with a lid! and that I
shall perhaps never use! Everything is of importance in the delicate
operations of our art! But, devil take it! one must make distinctions,
and not employ for almost domestic purposes that which is meant for
pharmaceutical! It is as if one were to carve a fowl with a scalpel; as
if a magistrate--"

"Now be calm," said Madame Homais.

And Athalie, pulling at his coat, cried "Papa! papa!"

"No, let me alone," went on the druggist "let me alone, hang it! My
word! One might as well set up for a grocer. That's it! go it! respect
nothing! break, smash, let loose the leeches, burn the mallow-paste,
pickle the gherkins in the window jars, tear up the bandages!"

"I thought you had--" said Emma.

"Presently! Do you know to what you exposed yourself? Didn't you see
anything in the corner, on the left, on the third shelf? Speak, answer,
articulate something."

"I--don't--know," stammered the young fellow.

"Ah! you don't know! Well, then, I do know! You saw a bottle of blue
glass, sealed with yellow wax, that contains a white powder, on which I
have even written 'Dangerous!' And do you know what is in it? Arsenic!
And you go and touch it! You take a pan that was next to it!"

"Next to it!" cried Madame Homais, clasping her hands. "Arsenic! You
might have poisoned us all."

And the children began howling as if they already had frightful pains in
their entrails.

"Or poison a patient!" continued the druggist. "Do you want to see me
in the prisoner's dock with criminals, in a court of justice? To see
me dragged to the scaffold? Don't you know what care I take in managing
things, although I am so thoroughly used to it? Often I am horrified
myself when I think of my responsibility; for the Government persecutes
us, and the absurd legislation that rules us is a veritable Damocles'
sword over our heads."

Emma no longer dreamed of asking what they wanted her for, and the
druggist went on in breathless phrases--

"That is your return for all the kindness we have shown you! That is how
you recompense me for the really paternal care that I lavish on you! For
without me where would you be? What would you be doing? Who provides
you with food, education, clothes, and all the means of figuring one day
with honour in the ranks of society? But you must pull hard at the oar
if you're to do that, and get, as, people say, callosities upon your
hands. Fabricando fit faber, age quod agis.*"

     * The worker lives by working, do what he will.

He was so exasperated he quoted Latin. He would have quoted Chinese
or Greenlandish had he known those two languages, for he was in one
of those crises in which the whole soul shows indistinctly what it
contains, like the ocean, which, in the storm, opens itself from the
seaweeds on its shores down to the sands of its abysses.

And he went on--

"I am beginning to repent terribly of having taken you up! I should
certainly have done better to have left you to rot in your poverty and
the dirt in which you were born. Oh, you'll never be fit for anything
but to herd animals with horns! You have no aptitude for science! You
hardly know how to stick on a label! And there you are, dwelling with me
snug as a parson, living in clover, taking your ease!"

But Emma, turning to Madame Homais, "I was told to come here--"

"Oh, dear me!" interrupted the good woman, with a sad air, "how am I to
tell you? It is a misfortune!"

She could not finish, the druggist was thundering--"Empty it! Clean it!
Take it back! Be quick!"

And seizing Justin by the collar of his blouse, he shook a book out of
his pocket. The lad stooped, but Homais was the quicker, and, having
picked up the volume, contemplated it with staring eyes and open mouth.

"CONJUGAL--LOVE!" he said, slowly separating the two words. "Ah! very
good! very good! very pretty! And illustrations! Oh, this is too much!"

Madame Homais came forward.

"No, do not touch it!"

The children wanted to look at the pictures.

"Leave the room," he said imperiously; and they went out.

First he walked up and down with the open volume in his hand, rolling
his eyes, choking, tumid, apoplectic. Then he came straight to his
pupil, and, planting himself in front of him with crossed arms--

"Have you every vice, then, little wretch? Take care! you are on a
downward path. Did not you reflect that this infamous book might fall
in the hands of my children, kindle a spark in their minds, tarnish the
purity of Athalie, corrupt Napoleon. He is already formed like a man.
Are you quite sure, anyhow, that they have not read it? Can you certify
to me--"

"But really, sir," said Emma, "you wished to tell me--"

"Ah, yes! madame. Your father-in-law is dead."

In fact, Monsieur Bovary senior had expired the evening before suddenly
from an attack of apoplexy as he got up from table, and by way of
greater precaution, on account of Emma's sensibility, Charles had begged
Homais to break the horrible news to her gradually. Homais had thought
over his speech; he had rounded, polished it, made it rhythmical; it was
a masterpiece of prudence and transitions, of subtle turns and delicacy;
but anger had got the better of rhetoric.

Emma, giving up all chance of hearing any details, left the pharmacy;
for Monsieur Homais had taken up the thread of his vituperations.
However, he was growing calmer, and was now grumbling in a paternal tone
whilst he fanned himself with his skull-cap.

"It is not that I entirely disapprove of the work. Its author was a
doctor! There are certain scientific points in it that it is not ill a
man should know, and I would even venture to say that a man must know.
But later--later! At any rate, not till you are man yourself and your
temperament is formed."

When Emma knocked at the door. Charles, who was waiting for her, came
forward with open arms and said to her with tears in his voice--

"Ah! my dear!"

And he bent over her gently to kiss her. But at the contact of his lips
the memory of the other seized her, and she passed her hand over her
face shuddering.

But she made answer, "Yes, I know, I know!"

He showed her the letter in which his mother told the event without any
sentimental hypocrisy. She only regretted her husband had not received
the consolations of religion, as he had died at Daudeville, in the
street, at the door of a cafe after a patriotic dinner with some
ex-officers.

Emma gave him back the letter; then at dinner, for appearance's sake,
she affected a certain repugnance. But as he urged her to try, she
resolutely began eating, while Charles opposite her sat motionless in a
dejected attitude.

Now and then he raised his head and gave her a long look full of
distress. Once he sighed, "I should have liked to see him again!"

She was silent. At last, understanding that she must say something, "How
old was your father?" she asked.

"Fifty-eight."

"Ah!"

And that was all.

A quarter of an hour after he added, "My poor mother! what will become
of her now?"

She made a gesture that signified she did not know. Seeing her so
taciturn, Charles imagined her much affected, and forced himself to say
nothing, not to reawaken this sorrow which moved him. And, shaking off
his own--

"Did you enjoy yourself yesterday?" he asked.

"Yes."

When the cloth was removed, Bovary did not rise, nor did Emma; and as
she looked at him, the monotony of the spectacle drove little by little
all pity from her heart. He seemed to her paltry, weak, a cipher--in
a word, a poor thing in every way. How to get rid of him? What an
interminable evening! Something stupefying like the fumes of opium
seized her.

They heard in the passage the sharp noise of a wooden leg on the boards.
It was Hippolyte bringing back Emma's luggage. In order to put it down
he described painfully a quarter of a circle with his stump.

"He doesn't even remember any more about it," she thought, looking at
the poor devil, whose coarse red hair was wet with perspiration.

Bovary was searching at the bottom of his purse for a centime, and
without appearing to understand all there was of humiliation for him
in the mere presence of this man, who stood there like a personified
reproach to his incurable incapacity.

"Hallo! you've a pretty bouquet," he said, noticing Leon's violets on
the chimney.

"Yes," she replied indifferently; "it's a bouquet I bought just now from
a beggar."

Charles picked up the flowers, and freshening his eyes, red with tears,
against them, smelt them delicately.

She took them quickly from his hand and put them in a glass of water.

The next day Madame Bovary senior arrived. She and her son wept much.
Emma, on the pretext of giving orders, disappeared. The following day
they had a talk over the mourning. They went and sat down with their
workboxes by the waterside under the arbour.

Charles was thinking of his father, and was surprised to feel so much
affection for this man, whom till then he had thought he cared little
about. Madame Bovary senior was thinking of her husband. The worst
days of the past seemed enviable to her. All was forgotten beneath the
instinctive regret of such a long habit, and from time to time whilst
she sewed, a big tear rolled along her nose and hung suspended there a
moment. Emma was thinking that it was scarcely forty-eight hours since
they had been together, far from the world, all in a frenzy of joy, and
not having eyes enough to gaze upon each other. She tried to recall the
slightest details of that past day. But the presence of her husband and
mother-in-law worried her. She would have liked to hear nothing, to see
nothing, so as not to disturb the meditation on her love, that, do what
she would, became lost in external sensations.

She was unpicking the lining of a dress, and the strips were scattered
around her. Madame Bovary senior was plying her scissor without looking
up, and Charles, in his list slippers and his old brown surtout that he
used as a dressing-gown, sat with both hands in his pockets, and did not
speak either; near them Berthe, in a little white pinafore, was raking
sand in the walks with her spade. Suddenly she saw Monsieur Lheureux,
the linendraper, come in through the gate.

He came to offer his services "under the sad circumstances." Emma
answered that she thought she could do without. The shopkeeper was not
to be beaten.

"I beg your pardon," he said, "but I should like to have a private talk
with you." Then in a low voice, "It's about that affair--you know."

Charles crimsoned to his ears. "Oh, yes! certainly." And in his
confusion, turning to his wife, "Couldn't you, my darling?"

She seemed to understand him, for she rose; and Charles said to his
mother, "It is nothing particular. No doubt, some household trifle." He
did not want her to know the story of the bill, fearing her reproaches.

As soon as they were alone, Monsieur Lheureux in sufficiently clear
terms began to congratulate Emma on the inheritance, then to talk of
indifferent matters, of the espaliers, of the harvest, and of his own
health, which was always so-so, always having ups and downs. In fact, he
had to work devilish hard, although he didn't make enough, in spite of
all people said, to find butter for his bread.

Emma let him talk on. She had bored herself so prodigiously the last two
days.

"And so you're quite well again?" he went on. "Ma foi! I saw your
husband in a sad state. He's a good fellow, though we did have a little
misunderstanding."

She asked what misunderstanding, for Charles had said nothing of the
dispute about the goods supplied to her.

"Why, you know well enough," cried Lheureux. "It was about your little
fancies--the travelling trunks."

He had drawn his hat over his eyes, and, with his hands behind his
back, smiling and whistling, he looked straight at her in an unbearable
manner. Did he suspect anything?

She was lost in all kinds of apprehensions. At last, however, he went
on--

"We made it up, all the same, and I've come again to propose another
arrangement."

This was to renew the bill Bovary had signed. The doctor, of course,
would do as he pleased; he was not to trouble himself, especially just
now, when he would have a lot of worry. "And he would do better to give
it over to someone else--to you, for example. With a power of attorney
it could be easily managed, and then we (you and I) would have our
little business transactions together."

She did not understand. He was silent. Then, passing to his trade,
Lheureux declared that madame must require something. He would send her
a black barege, twelve yards, just enough to make a gown.

"The one you've on is good enough for the house, but you want another
for calls. I saw that the very moment that I came in. I've the eye of an
American!"

He did not send the stuff; he brought it. Then he came again to measure
it; he came again on other pretexts, always trying to make himself
agreeable, useful, "enfeoffing himself," as Homais would have said, and
always dropping some hint to Emma about the power of attorney. He never
mentioned the bill; she did not think of it. Charles, at the beginning
of her convalescence, had certainly said something about it to her,
but so many emotions had passed through her head that she no longer
remembered it. Besides, she took care not to talk of any money
questions. Madame Bovary seemed surprised at this, and attributed the
change in her ways to the religious sentiments she had contracted during
her illness.

But as soon as she was gone, Emma greatly astounded Bovary by her
practical good sense. It would be necessary to make inquiries, to look
into mortgages, and see if there were any occasion for a sale by auction
or a liquidation. She quoted technical terms casually, pronounced the
grand words of order, the future, foresight, and constantly exaggerated
the difficulties of settling his father's affairs so much, that at last
one day she showed him the rough draft of a power of attorney to manage
and administer his business, arrange all loans, sign and endorse all
bills, pay all sums, etc. She had profited by Lheureux's lessons.
Charles naively asked her where this paper came from.

"Monsieur Guillaumin"; and with the utmost coolness she added, "I don't
trust him overmuch. Notaries have such a bad reputation. Perhaps we
ought to consult--we only know--no one."

"Unless Leon--" replied Charles, who was reflecting. But it was
difficult to explain matters by letter. Then she offered to make the
journey, but he thanked her. She insisted. It was quite a contest of
mutual consideration. At last she cried with affected waywardness--

"No, I will go!"

"How good you are!" he said, kissing her forehead.

The next morning she set out in the "Hirondelle" to go to Rouen to
consult Monsieur Leon, and she stayed there three days.

They were three full, exquisite days--a true honeymoon. They were at
the Hotel-de-Boulogne, on the harbour; and they lived there, with drawn
blinds and closed doors, with flowers on the floor, and iced syrups were
brought them early in the morning.

Towards evening they took a covered boat and went to dine on one of the
islands. It was the time when one hears by the side of the dockyard the
caulking-mallets sounding against the hull of vessels. The smoke of
the tar rose up between the trees; there were large fatty drops on the
water, undulating in the purple colour of the sun, like floating plaques
of Florentine bronze.

They rowed down in the midst of moored boats, whose long oblique cables
grazed lightly against the bottom of the boat. The din of the town
gradually grew distant; the rolling of carriages, the tumult of voices,
the yelping of dogs on the decks of vessels. She took off her bonnet,
and they landed on their island.

They sat down in the low-ceilinged room of a tavern, at whose door hung
black nets. They ate fried smelts, cream and cherries. They lay down
upon the grass; they kissed behind the poplars; and they would fain,
like two Robinsons, have lived for ever in this little place, which
seemed to them in their beatitude the most magnificent on earth. It was
not the first time that they had seen trees, a blue sky, meadows; that
they had heard the water flowing and the wind blowing in the leaves;
but, no doubt, they had never admired all this, as if Nature had
not existed before, or had only begun to be beautiful since the
gratification of their desires.

At night they returned. The boat glided along the shores of the islands.
They sat at the bottom, both hidden by the shade, in silence. The square
oars rang in the iron thwarts, and, in the stillness, seemed to mark
time, like the beating of a metronome, while at the stern the rudder
that trailed behind never ceased its gentle splash against the water.

Once the moon rose; they did not fail to make fine phrases, finding the
orb melancholy and full of poetry. She even began to sing--

"One night, do you remember, we were sailing," etc.

Her musical but weak voice died away along the waves, and the winds
carried off the trills that Leon heard pass like the flapping of wings
about him.

She was opposite him, leaning against the partition of the shallop,
through one of whose raised blinds the moon streamed in. Her black
dress, whose drapery spread out like a fan, made her seem more slender,
taller. Her head was raised, her hands clasped, her eyes turned towards
heaven. At times the shadow of the willows hid her completely; then she
reappeared suddenly, like a vision in the moonlight.

Leon, on the floor by her side, found under his hand a ribbon of scarlet
silk. The boatman looked at it, and at last said--

"Perhaps it belongs to the party I took out the other day. A lot
of jolly folk, gentlemen and ladies, with cakes, champagne,
cornets--everything in style! There was one especially, a tall handsome
man with small moustaches, who was that funny! And they all kept saying,
'Now tell us something, Adolphe--Dolpe,' I think."

She shivered.

"You are in pain?" asked Leon, coming closer to her.

"Oh, it's nothing! No doubt, it is only the night air."

"And who doesn't want for women, either," softly added the sailor,
thinking he was paying the stranger a compliment.

Then, spitting on his hands, he took the oars again.

Yet they had to part. The adieux were sad. He was to send his letters to
Mere Rollet, and she gave him such precise instructions about a double
envelope that he admired greatly her amorous astuteness.

"So you can assure me it is all right?" she said with her last kiss.

"Yes, certainly."

"But why," he thought afterwards as he came back through the streets
alone, "is she so very anxious to get this power of attorney?"

Leon soon put on an air of superiority before his comrades, avoided
their company, and completely neglected his work.

He waited for her letters; he re-read them; he wrote to her. He called
her to mind with all the strength of his desires and of his memories.
Instead of lessening with absence, this longing to see her again grew,
so that at last on Saturday morning he escaped from his office.

When, from the summit of the hill, he saw in the valley below the
church-spire with its tin flag swinging in the wind, he felt that
delight mingled with triumphant vanity and egoistic tenderness that
millionaires must experience when they come back to their native
village.

He went rambling round her house. A light was burning in the kitchen. He
watched for her shadow behind the curtains, but nothing appeared.

Mere Lefrancois, when she saw him, uttered many exclamations. She
thought he "had grown and was thinner," while Artemise, on the contrary,
thought him stouter and darker.

He dined in the little room as of yore, but alone, without the
tax-gatherer; for Binet, tired of waiting for the "Hirondelle," had
definitely put forward his meal one hour, and now he dined punctually at
five, and yet he declared usually the rickety old concern "was late."

Leon, however, made up his mind, and knocked at the doctor's door.
Madame was in her room, and did not come down for a quarter of an hour.
The doctor seemed delighted to see him, but he never stirred out that
evening, nor all the next day.

He saw her alone in the evening, very late, behind the garden in the
lane; in the lane, as she had the other one! It was a stormy night, and
they talked under an umbrella by lightning flashes.

Their separation was becoming intolerable. "I would rather die!" said
Emma. She was writhing in his arms, weeping. "Adieu! adieu! When shall I
see you again?"

They came back again to embrace once more, and it was then that
she promised him to find soon, by no matter what means, a regular
opportunity for seeing one another in freedom at least once a week. Emma
never doubted she should be able to do this. Besides, she was full of
hope. Some money was coming to her.

On the strength of it she bought a pair of yellow curtains with large
stripes for her room, whose cheapness Monsieur Lheureux had commended;
she dreamed of getting a carpet, and Lheureux, declaring that it wasn't
"drinking the sea," politely undertook to supply her with one. She could
no longer do without his services. Twenty times a day she sent for him,
and he at once put by his business without a murmur. People could not
understand either why Mere Rollet breakfasted with her every day, and
even paid her private visits.

It was about this time, that is to say, the beginning of winter, that
she seemed seized with great musical fervour.

One evening when Charles was listening to her, she began the same piece
four times over, each time with much vexation, while he, not noticing
any difference, cried--

"Bravo! very goodl You are wrong to stop. Go on!"

"Oh, no; it is execrable! My fingers are quite rusty."

The next day he begged her to play him something again.

"Very well; to please you!"

And Charles confessed she had gone off a little. She played wrong notes
and blundered; then, stopping short--

"Ah! it is no use. I ought to take some lessons; but--" She bit her lips
and added, "Twenty francs a lesson, that's too dear!"

"Yes, so it is--rather," said Charles, giggling stupidly. "But it seems
to me that one might be able to do it for less; for there are artists of
no reputation, and who are often better than the celebrities."

"Find them!" said Emma.

The next day when he came home he looked at her shyly, and at last could
no longer keep back the words.

"How obstinate you are sometimes! I went to Barfucheres to-day. Well,
Madame Liegard assured me that her three young ladies who are at
La Misericorde have lessons at fifty sous apiece, and that from an
excellent mistress!"

She shrugged her shoulders and did not open her piano again. But when
she passed by it (if Bovary were there), she sighed--

"Ah! my poor piano!"

And when anyone came to see her, she did not fail to inform them she
had given up music, and could not begin again now for important reasons.
Then people commiserated her--

"What a pity! she had so much talent!"

They even spoke to Bovary about it. They put him to shame, and
especially the chemist.

"You are wrong. One should never let any of the faculties of nature lie
fallow. Besides, just think, my good friend, that by inducing madame to
study; you are economising on the subsequent musical education of
your child. For my own part, I think that mothers ought themselves to
instruct their children. That is an idea of Rousseau's, still rather
new perhaps, but that will end by triumphing, I am certain of it, like
mothers nursing their own children and vaccination."

So Charles returned once more to this question of the piano. Emma
replied bitterly that it would be better to sell it. This poor piano,
that had given her vanity so much satisfaction--to see it go was to
Bovary like the indefinable suicide of a part of herself.

"If you liked," he said, "a lesson from time to time, that wouldn't
after all be very ruinous."

"But lessons," she replied, "are only of use when followed up."

And thus it was she set about obtaining her husband's permission to go
to town once a week to see her lover. At the end of a month she was even
considered to have made considerable progress.

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

completion: Emma reaches the inn late after her rendezvous and misses the Hirondelle that had been specially sent for her. She hires a trap and overtakes the Hirondelle in a neighboring town en route to Yonville. Back home, Felicite urges her to see Homais, at whose place Emma witnesses a curious spectacle. Homais scolds Justin for using a pan that was stored next to the bottle of arsenic in his professional supplies cupboard. In the heat of anger, Homais forgets all about a condolence speech he had prepared for Emma. He blurts out the news that her father-in-law died two days ago. At home, Emma is indifferent to Charles' bereavement. She looks upon him as a spineless individual and yearns to get rid of him. Charles' mother arrives the next day, and mother and son grieve together. Lheureux visits Emma during this period and urges her to attain a power of attorney from Charles in order to expedite payments. After her mother-in-law leaves, Emma makes inquiries about the legal implications of the deed, and Charles urges her to go to Rouen to consult with Leon before having Monsieur Guillaumin attend to the documents. As a result, Emma is able to spend three exquisite days with Leon. They stay at the Hotel de Boulogne. During one of their boat rides, the boatman mentions the name of a person who had been part of a group that he had ferried some time back, saying, "Adolphe. . .Dodolphe, I think it was." Emma thinks about Rodolphe and shivers. At the end of her stay, Emma and Leon part with the agreement that Leon will send her letters through Madame Rollet, the nurse. He wonders at Emma's shrewdness as she instructs him to use a double envelope for his letters. He is also curious about her need for the power of attorney. After Emma' visit, Leon totally immerses himself in the relationship. He ignores his official duties and his friends. He writes to Emma and waits for her letters. They meet one night, and Emma promises to devise a way that they might meet more often. She cleverly gets Charles' permission for weekly music lessons at Rouen. Meanwhile, Lheureux becomes indispensable to Emma, as does Madame Rollet.