Madame Bovary - Penn State University

Madame Bovarythe most distant reminiscences, like the most immediate occasions,what she experienced as well as what she imagined, allow herself certain whims. She bought a Gothic prie-dieu,A woman who had laid on herself such sacrifices could wellher voluptuous desires that were unsatisfied, her projects of and in a month spent fourteen francs on lemons for polishinghappiness that crackled in the wind like dead boughs, her her nails; she wrote to Rouen for a blue cashmere gown; shesterile virtue, her lost hopes, the domestic tete-a-tete—she chose one of Lheureux’s finest scarves, and wore it knottedgathered it all up, took everything, and made it all serve as around her waist over her dressing-gown; and, with closedfuel for her melancholy.blinds and a book in her hand, she lay stretched out on aThe flames, however, subsided, either because the supply couch in this garb.had exhausted itself, or because it had been piled up too much. She often changed her coiffure; she did her hair a la Chinoise,Love, little by little, was quelled by absence; regret stifled beneathhabit; and this incendiary light that had empurpled her rolled it under like a man’s.in flowing curls, in plaited coils; she parted in on one side andpale sky was overspread and faded by degrees. In the supinenessof her conscience she even took her repugnance towards mar, and a supply of white paper. She tried serious reading,She wanted to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a gram-her husband for aspirations towards her lover, the burning of history, and philosophy. Sometimes in the night Charles wokehate for the warmth of tenderness; but as the tempest still up with a start, thinking he was being called to a patient. “I’mraged, and as passion burnt itself down to the very cinders, coming,”and no help came, no sun rose, there was night on all sides, he stammered; and it was the noise of a match Emma hadand she was lost in the terrible cold that pierced her. struck to relight the lamp. But her reading fared like her pieceThen the evil days of Tostes began again. She thought herselfnow far more unhappy; for she had the experience of board; she took it up, left it, passed on to other books.of embroidery, all of which, only just begun, filled her cup-grief, with the certainty that it would not end.She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven108