Madame Bovary - Penn State University

Madame BovaryHis zeal seemed successful, for the club-foot soon manifesteda desire to go on a pilgrimage to Bon-Secours if he position and self-possessed, Charles’s colleague did not refrainA doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a goodwere cured; to which Monsieur Bournisien replied that he from laughing disdainfully when he had uncovered the leg,saw no objection; two precautions were better than one; it mortified to the knee. Then having flatly declared that it mustwas no risk anyhow.be amputated, he went off to the chemist’s to rail at the assesThe druggist was indignant at what he called the manoeuvres who could have reduced a poor man to such a state. Shakingof the priest; they were prejudicial, he said, to Hippolyte’s Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted outconvalescence, and he kept repeating to Madame Lefrancois, in the shop—“Leave him alone! leave him alone! You perturb his morals “These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas ofwith your mysticism.” But the good woman would no longer those gentry of the capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform,listen to him; he was the cause of it all. From a spirit of contradictionshe hung up near the bedside of the patient a basin to prohibit. But they want to do the clever, and they cramlithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the Government oughtfilled with holy-water and a branch of box.you with remedies without, troubling about the consequences.Religion, however, seemed no more able to succour him We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants, coxcombs,than surgery, and the invincible gangrene still spread from the fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and we should notextremities towards the stomach. It was all very well to vary dream of operating on anyone who is in perfect health.the potions and change the poultices; the muscles each day Straighten club-feet! As if one could straighten club-feet! It isrotted more and more; and at last Charles replied by an affirmativenod of the head when Mere Lefrancois, asked him if Homais suffered as he listened to this discourse, and heas if one wished, for example, to make a hunchback straight!”she could not, as a forlorn hope, send for Monsieur Canivet concealed his discomfort beneath a courtier’s smile; for heof Neufchatel, who was a celebrity.needed to humour Monsier Canivet, whose prescriptions156