Madame Bovary - Penn State University

Madame Bovaryinvented quite a history to find an excuse for going to his ness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow home.room. The chemist’s wife seemed happy to her to sleep under What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to noticeher anguish. His conviction that he was making her happythe same roof, and her thoughts constantly centered uponthis house, like the “Lion d’Or” pigeons, who came there to seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on thisdip their red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtuous? WasEmma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of allthat it might not be evident, that she might make it less. She misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strapwould have liked Leon to guess it, and she imagined chances, that bucked her in on all sides.catastrophes that should facilitate this.On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatredsthat resulted from her boredom, and every effort to di-What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and asense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too minish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was addedmuch, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then, pride, to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more toand joy of being able to say to herself, “I am virtuous,” and to the separation between them. Her own gentleness to herselflook at herself in the glass taking resigned poses, consoled her made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity drove hera little for the sacrifice she believed she was making. to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires. SheThen the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the would have like Charles to beat her, that she might have amelancholy of passion all blended themselves into one suffering,and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she clave to was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that camebetter right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him. Sheit the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking everywhere into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeatedto her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to beoccasion for it. She was irritated by an ill-served dish or by ahalf-open door; bewailed the velvets she had not, the happi-happy, to let it be believed.94