Madame Bovary - Penn State University

Madame Bovary“But pardon me!” she said. “It is wrong of me. I weary you the carriages through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering,a veil like yours.”with my eternal complaints.”“No, never, never!”She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without“If you knew,” she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautifuleyes, in which a tear was trembling, “all that I had she looked at the rosettes on her slippers, and at intervals madeinterruption. Crossing her arms and bending down her face,dreamed!”little movements inside the satin of them with her toes.“And I! Oh, I too have suffered! Often I went out; I went At last she sighed.away. I dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction “But the most wretched thing, is it not—is to drag out, asamid the din of the crowd without being able to banish the I do, a useless existence. If our pains were only of some use toheaviness that weighed upon me. In an engraver’s shop on the someone, we should find consolation in the thought of theboulevard there is an Italian print of one of the Muses. She is sacrifice.”draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the moon, with forget-me-notsin her flowing hair. Something drove me there tion, having himself an incredible longing for self-sacrificeHe started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immola-continually; I stayed there hours together.” Then in a tremblingvoice, “She resembled you a little.”“I should much like,” she said, “to be a nurse at a hospital.”that he could not satisfy.Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not “Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhereany calling—unless perhaps that of a doctor.”see the irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.“Often,” he went on, “I wrote you letters that I tore up.” With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interruptedShe did not answer. He continued—him to speak of her illness, which had almost killed her. What“I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you. I a pity! She should not be suffering now! Leon at once enviedthought I recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his200