Madame Bovary - Penn State University

Flaubertlooking. Nevertheless, she persevered; and when the volume Then she gave herself up to excessive charity. She sewed clothesslipped from her hands, she fancied herself seized with the finestCatholic melancholy that an ethereal soul could conceive. one day, on coming home, found three good-for-nothings infor the poor, she sent wood to women in childbed; and CharlesAs for the memory of Rodolphe, she had thrust it back to the kitchen seated at the table eating soup. She had her littlethe bottom of her heart, and it remained there more solemn girl, whom during her illness her husband had sent back to theand more motionless than a king’s mummy in a catacomb. An nurse, brought home. She wanted to teach her to read; evenexhalation escaped from this embalmed love, that, penetrating when Berthe cried, she was not vexed. She had made up herthrough everything, perfumed with tenderness the immaculate mind to resignation, to universal indulgence. Her language aboutatmosphere in which she longed to live. When she knelt on her everything was full of ideal expressions. She said to her child,Gothic prie-Dieu, she addressed to the Lord the same suave “Is your stomach-ache better, my angel?”words that she had murmured formerly to her lover in the Madame Bovary senior found nothing to censure exceptoutpourings of adultery. It was to make faith come; but no perhaps this mania of knitting jackets for orphans instead ofdelights descended from the heavens, and she arose with tired mending her own house-linen; but, harassed with domesticlimbs and with a vague feeling of a gigantic dupery.quarrels, the good woman took pleasure in this quiet house,This searching after faith, she thought, was only one merit and she even stayed there till after Easter, to escape the sarcasmsof old Bovary, who never failed on Good Friday tothe more, and in the pride of her devoutness Emma comparedherself to those grand ladies of long ago whose glory order chitterlings.she, had dreamed of over a portrait of La Valliere, and who, Besides the companionship of her mother-in-law, whotrailing with so much majesty the lace-trimmed trains of their strengthened her a little by the rectitude of her judgment andlong gowns, retired into solitudes to shed at the feet of Christ her grave ways, Emma almost every day had other visitors.all the tears of hearts that life had wounded.These were Madame Langlois, Madame Caron, Madame185