Monsieur Homais at Rouen; The connoisseur in women; An unfulfilled engagement; The summons; Ways and means; Leon's resolution; After the ball; Lheureux shows his hand.

IN the journeys he had made to see Emma, Leon had so often dined at the chemist's that he thought it was only decent to invite him back.

'I should enjoy it immensely,' Monsieur Homais replied. 'Besides, it's about time I had a bit of a fling; I'm getting a regular fossil in this place. We'll go to the theatre and the restaurants, and have a rare old time.'

'But, my dear,' murmured Madame Homais, in a tone of fond expostulation, terrified at the vague perils he was proposing to incur.

'Well, what about it? You seem to imagine that I don't do enough damage to my health by living among the continual emanations of my pharmacy. Well, that's women all over. They are jealous of Science, and then set themselves against the most legitimate recreations. Never mind! Trust me! I shall turn up one of these days at Rouen and we'll make the dibs fly, you and I.'

There was a time when the apothecary would never have thought of using such an expression; but just now he was doing 'the dashing Parisian' sort of thing. He thought it the best of form; and like his neighbour, Madame Bovary, he was very anxious for the clerk to tell him how people went on in the capital and was falling into the habit of using all sorts of slang expressions.

So one Thursday Emma was surprised to encounter Monsieur Homais dressed all ready for a journey, in the kitchen of the 'Lion d'Or'- that is to say, muffled up in an old ulster that no one knew he possessed, with a portmanteau in one hand and the domestic foot-muff in the other. He hadn't told anybody of his intentions, lest his absence should create a feeling of uneasiness in the public mind.

The idea of revisiting the scenes where he had spent his young days doubtless rather excited him, for he didn't stop talking the whole way. And no sooner had they arrived, than he jumped out of the vehicle and set off in search of Leon. It was useless for the latter to try to get out of it. Monsieur Homais dragged him off to the big Cafe de la Normandie, which he entered with pride in his port and his hat on his head, for he held it very 'provincial' to uncover in a public place.

Emma waited for Leon a good three-quarters of an hour. At last she rushed off to his office and, lost in all sorts of conjectures, reproaching him with indifference and herself with weakness, she spent the afternoon with her face glued to the window.

It was two o'clock, and there they were, Leon and Homais, still seated at table facing one another. The big dining-room was getting empty. The pipe of the heating stove, shaped like a palm tree, spread its gilded crest against the white ceiling, and near them, outside the glazed partition, in the full light of the sun a little fountain was playing in a marble basin, where, amid cress and asparagus, three lethargic lobsters stretched their claws across towards some quails that lay piled up in a heap at the side.

Homais was having a rare time. Although luxury inebriated him more than high living, the Pommard imparted a certain stimulus to his faculties, and when the rum omelette made its appearance, he propounded immoral views about women. What appealed to him more than anything was smartness. He simply adored a daintily dressed woman in tasteful surroundings, and as for the physical part of it, well, that was not without its charm.

Leon glanced desperately at the clock. The apothecary went on eating, drinking and talking.

'You ought to be pretty snug here in Rouen. And then your little woman isn't a great way off.'

Seeing the young man turn red, he added,

'Come on, now! Own up! You're not going to tell me that at Yonville...'

Leon stammered something or other.

'At Madame Bovary's, you weren't after...'

'Who?'

'Why, the servant!'

He wasn't joking. But, vanity ousting caution, Leon involuntarily protested. Besides, he said, he only liked dark women.

'I'm with you,' said the chemist: 'they've got more temperament.'

And, leaning over the table, he whispered into Leon's ear the signs by which you could tell where a woman had temperament or not, and forthwith he launched out into an elaborate ethnological disquisition. German women were sentimental, French women licentious, Italian women passionate.

'What about black women?' asked the clerk.

'Ah, they're an acquired taste!' said Homais. 'Waiter- two small blacks!'

'Shall we be off now?' said Leon at last, impatiently.

''Si, signor'.'

But before going, he would insist on seeing the proprietor of the establishment and offering him his congratulations.

Then the clerk, in order to shake him off, said that he had a business appointment.

'Right!' said Homais. 'I'll come with you.'

And all the time they were going along the streets he babbled on about his wife, his children, what he was going to do with them and his business later on; told him how it had been let down when he acquired it, and how wonderfully he had worked it up since.

When they reached the 'Boulogne', Leon said a hurried good-bye, shot upstairs, and found his mistress in a state of great perturbation.

When he mentioned the chemist, she flew into a rage. Leon put the whole case before her; said it wasn't his fault. She knew what Homais was like! Surely she knew he would rather have been with her than with him.

But she turned away. He pulled her back, and, sinking down on his knees, flung both his arms about her, gazing up at her, longingly, beseechingly.

She was standing bolt upright. With big flaming eyes she looked down on him with a severe, almost terrible expression. Then tears came and made a mist in them, her shell-like eyelids drooped, she surrendered her hands, and Leon was just putting them to his lips, when a waiter came up to tell Monsieur he was wanted.

'You'll come back?' she said.

'Yes.'

'When?'

'In a minute or two.'

'Just a bit of bunk,' said the chemist, as soon as he saw Leon. 'I thought I would interrupt this visit, as you seemed so sick about it. Come round to Bridoux's now and have a glass of zoedone.'

Leon swore he was due back at his office, whereupon the apothecary began twitting him about routine and red-tape.

'Let Cujas and Barthole go hang for an hour or two. What the devil does it matter? Who's to prevent you? Be a pal! Come along to Bridoux's. You'll see his dog. It's worth seeing.'

But as the clerk still held out, he said,

'All right, then, I'll come too. I can read the paper while I'm waiting for you, or have a look at one of your law-books.'

Leon, dazed by Emma's outburst and Homais's volubility, and possibly a little incommoded by his generous lunch, stood hesitating and help less, as though the chemist had mesmerized him.

''Come' on! Come round to Bridoux's. It's only a step or two down the Rue Malpalu.'

And so, from sheer weakness, crass stupidity, and that mysterious influence which compels us, willy-nilly, to do the very things we are least inclined to do, he allowed himself to be dragged off to Bridoux's. They found him out in his little yard keeping a watchful eye on three assistants who were turning with all their might at a great wheel belonging to a seltzer-water machine. Homais put them up to a wheeze or two. He embraced Bridoux; they had some zoedone. Leon was all the time itching to be off; but his companion caught hold of his arm, saying,

'Half a minute! I'm coming. We'll go round to the 'Fanal de Rouen' and have a look at those worthies. I'll introduce you to Thomassin.'

However, he shook him off and tore back to the hotel. Emma had gone!

She had just left, in a terrible rage. She hated him now. His failure to keep his appointment seemed to her insulting, and she thought, or tried to think, of other reasons for leaving him. There was not an atom of manliness about him. He was weak, commonplace, softer than a woman. More than that, he was miserly and mean-spirited.

After a while she cooled down, and finally came to the conclusion that she had done him an injustice. But vilifying the people we love tends inevitably to estrange us from them. We should never touch our idols. Some of the gilt always comes off on our fingers.

They reached the stage of talking with growing frequency about things extraneous to their love. In her letters to him, Emma would bring in remarks about flowers, poetry, the moon and the stars, artless shifts of an expiring passion pathetically seeking some external aid to renew its fading vigour. She was always telling herself that, next time, it would all be beautiful again; and when that next time came, she had to confess that she felt nothing very much out of the ordinary. Yet that disappointment, in turn, swiftly disappeared under the influence of new hope, and Emma came to him again more ardent and more famishing than ever. She ripped off her clothes without any beating about the bush, tearing asunder her stay-laces, that hissed like vipers about her hips. She tiptoed bare-footed to the door, to make sure that it was locked; then, with a single movement, she let all her clothes fall to her feet at once; and pale, speechless, with drawn features, she flung herself upon his bosom, shuddering from head to foot.

Nevertheless, on this cold brow, on these stammering lips, in those distracted eyes, in those arms' embrace, there was something desperate, something vaguely mournful, which seemed to Leon subtly to insinuate itself between them, as though to rive them asunder.

He did not dare to question her, but, seeing how deeply versed she was in the things of love, he told himself she must have passed through every phase of suffering and pleasure. Things that used to charm him, scared him a little, now. And then, again, he rebelled against this daily increasing absorption of his personality. He begrudged Emma this unvarying victory. He went the length of trying to cast out his affection for her, and then, at the sound of her step, he would feel himself wilting, like a drunkard at the sight of the bottle.

True, she did not fail to lavish all manner of attentions upon him, from dainty food to alluring dress and seductive glances. She brought roses for him in her bosom from Yonville and tossed them in his face.

She expressed solicitude for his health, admonished him regarding his behaviour and, in order to keep him closer to her, hoping to enlist heaven's aid in her behalf, she hung a medal of the Virgin about his neck. She asked him about his friends, like a virtuous mother, saying,

'Don't see them, don't go out- think only of ourselves, of you and me; oh, love me!'

She would have liked to keep watch over all his doings, and the idea did occur to her to have him followed. There was a man who was for ever hanging about the hotel, a sort of loafer who was always offering to do odd jobs for the travellers, and he would certainly be willing... but her pride revolted at the thought.

'Oh, well, if he deceives me, he does, that's all; what does it matter? What do I care?'

One day when they had said good-bye at an early hour, and she was going back alone along the boulevard, her eye lighted on the walls of her convent, and she sat down on a seat beneath the shade of the elms. How quiet and peaceful those days had been! How she wished she could recapture those visions of ideal love with which the books she read had inspired her! Her early married days, her rides in the forest, the Vicomte at the ball, Lagardy singing- it all came back to her again. And now Leon seemed just as remote as the rest of them.

'And yet,' she told herself, 'I love him.'

Nevertheless, she was not happy, and never had been. How was it, then, that there was this emptiness in life? How was it that whatever she leaned against straightway began to crumble into dust? Oh, but if somewhere there breathed a being brave and handsome, a man of power and resolution, one whose nature was wrought of sweetness and strength, a man with the heart of a poet and the form of an angel, a lyre with brazen strings, sounding his bridal songs of triumph and of pain beneath the echoing vault of heaven, why, peradventure, should she not meet him? What a hopeless dream! Wherefore should she seek the undiscoverable? Everything rang false, everything was a lie, every smile concealed a yawn of boredom; every joy, a curse. Nor was there any pleasure but brought satiety in its train, and every kiss, were it never so sweet, never so passionate, would but leave upon the lips a longing for some bliss that should be greater still.

A metallic rattling sound was borne upon the air, and the convent clock struck four. Four o'clock! It seemed an eternity that she had been there, sitting on that seat. But a universe of passion may be crammed into a moment, even as a crowd may be hemmed into a little space.

Emma lived in the contemplation of her passions, and recked no more of money matters than an archduchess.

One day, however, an obsequious-looking person, red-faced and bald, introduced himself at her house and explained that he had called on behalf of Monsieur Vincart of Rouen. He pulled out the pins that fastened the side pocket of his long green overcoat, stuck them into his sleeve, and politely handed her a paper.

It was a bill for seven hundred francs, bearing her signature, which Lheureux, despite his undertakings to the contrary, had passed on to Vincart.

She sent the servant to fetch him. He was busy and could not come.

Thereupon the stranger, who had remained standing, casting about him right and left inquisitive glances which his light bushy eyebrows hid from view, inquired, with an innocent air, what reply he should convey to Monsieur Vincart.

'Well,' said Emma, 'tell him I haven't got it.... It'll have to be next week.... Ask him to wait.... Yes, next week, tell him.'

The worthy departed without another word.

But next day, at noon, a process was served on her, and the sight of the paper with the Government stamp on it, with the name 'Maitre Hareng, Bailiff at Buchy,' sprawled all over it in big letters, gave her such a fright that she tore off without a moment's delay to the draper's.

She found him in his shop, tying up a big parcel.

'What can Madame's humble servant do for her today?' he blandly inquired. Nevertheless, he went on with what he was doing. He was assisted by a girl of thirteen or thereabouts, rather hump-backed, who united the dual functions of shop-girl and cook.

At length, stumping along the floor of the shop in his wooden sabots, he showed Madame upstairs, and conducted her into a poky little office, where, on a big deal desk behind a padlocked grating, stood some books that looked like registers. Against the wall, underneath some muslin hangings, was discernible an iron safe, which, from its dimensions, was clearly intended to hold other things besides money and bank-notes. Monsieur Lheureux was, if the truth must be told, a pawnbroker, and it was in this same safe that he had placed Madame Bovary's gold chain along with Tellier's earrings. That poor old fellow, having at last been compelled to sell up, had bought a poverty-stricken little grocer's store at Quincampoix, where he was slowly dying of asthma, surrounded by tallow candles that were not so yellow as his face.

'What's up now?' said Lheureux, seating himself in his big wicker arm-chair.

'Look at that.'

And she showed him the paper.

'Well, what can 'I' do?'

This put her in a towering rage. Hadn't he promised on his word of honour not to negotiate her bills? He agreed that he had, but added,

'You see, I had no option. I'd the knife at my throat.'

'What's going to happen now?'

'Oh, I'll tell you what'll happen, right enough. Judgement summons, broker's man! It's all up.'

Though Emma had all she could do to keep from hitting him, she asked him sweetly whether there was anything she could do to keep Vincart quiet.

'Oh, my eye! Keep Vincart quiet! You don't know much about him, that's plain. Why, he's blood-thirstier than an Arab!'

Nevertheless, Monsieur Lheureux really would have to do something in the matter.

'Now, look here, I think I've been pretty decent to you up to now! Look at this,' he went on, opening one of his registers. 'Look,' running his finger up the page. 'Here... and again, here... 3rd August, two hundred francs... 17th June, a hundred and fifty... 23rd March, forty-six. In April...' He stopped, as though he were afraid of what he might be tempted to say.

'I'm not including the bills signed by the Doctor, one for seven hundred and another for three. As for your little payments on account, for interest, it's all such a hopeless tangle, I don't know where we are. Anyhow, I'll have no more of it, and that's flat!'

She wept, she even called him 'kind Monsieur Lheureux,' but he always harked back on 'that hound of a Vincart'. Besides, he hadn't a farthing. No one was paying him now; they were taking the very shirt off his back; a poor shopkeeper like him couldn't go advancing money.

Emma said no more; and Monsieur Lheureux, chewing the feather of his quill, was evidently disconcerted at her silence, for he went on,

'Of course if I 'did' manage to get some money in, one of these days... I could...'

'Besides,' she said, 'as soon as the Barneville money comes...'

'Eh! What's that?'

And hearing that Langlois had not paid up, he betrayed great surprise. Then he went on, silkily,

'And as to terms, we agree...?'

'Oh, any terms you like!'

He shut his eyes to collect his ideas, jotted down a few figures, and, declaring that it would put him in the most terrible straits, that it was the very devil of a business, and that he was being bled white, he said he would give her four notes for two hundred and fifty francs each, falling due at intervals of one month.

'I only hope Vincart won't cut up rough. Anyhow, there you are. No beating about the bush with me. I'm fair, square and aboveboard with everyone!'

After that he casually showed her some new goods he had got in, but none of the stuff, in his opinion, was good enough for Madame.

'Here, now, is some dress material at seven sous a yard, guaranteed fast colours. There's a pretty fairy-tale for you! And yet they lap it up like milk. Of course it's all my eye!'

He thought, by thus avowing his dishonesty towards others, to reinforce her confidence in himself.

Then he called her back to look at three ells of lace he had just picked up at a sale.

'Isn't it lovely?' said Lheureux. 'People are using it a lot just now for antimacassars. It's all the go.'

And with the deftness of a juggler, he rolled up the lace in a bit of blue paper and whipped it into Emma's hands.

'But, really, you must let me know how...'

'Oh, that's all right; any time!' he answered, turning on his heel.

That same evening she urged Bovary to write to his mother, telling her to send on the outstanding balance at the earliest possible moment. She replied that there was nothing more to come at present. Everything had been settled up, and, over and above Barneville, there were six hundred francs interest due to them, which she would punctually hand over as and when she received it.

Then Madame sent out two or three bills; and, this plan proving productive, she employed it on a large scale. She never omitted to add a postscript saying, 'Do not mention this to my husband; you know how tenacious he is.... I'm sure you will forgive me.' Sometimes the bills were disputed. She intercepted the letters.

As a means of getting a little ready cash, she started selling her old gloves, old hats, and any old iron and lumber she could lay hands on. And they didn't get any change out of 'her'. The peasant strain in her taught her how to strike a bargain. And whenever she went into Rouen, she did a deal or two in knick-knacks, things that Monsieur Lheureux would be sure to take off her hands, if no one else did. She bought ostrich feathers, Chinese pottery and wooden chests. She borrowed money of Felicite, Madame Lefrancois, the landlady of the 'Croix Rouge'- of anyone and everyone.

With the money she finally received from Barneville she paid off two of the bills, and the other fifteen hundred francs melted away somehow. Then she involved herself anew; and so it went on.

Sometimes, it is true, she sat down and tried to find out how she stood; but the figures were so colossal, she couldn't believe them. Then she would try again, get in a hopeless muddle, thrust it all aside and dismiss the matter from her mind.

The house was anything but a happy one now. Tradesmen came away from it with indignant looks. Dirty handkerchiefs were left lying about here, there and everywhere, and little Berthe, to Madame Homais's great disgust, went about with great holes in her stockings. If Charles ventured on a timid remonstrance she would blurt out that it wasn't her fault, she couldn't help it.

Why did she have these outbreaks? He put it down to the old nerve trouble, and, reproaching himself for blaming her for things that were really due to her ill-health, he told himself he was a selfish brute, and felt that he must run and kiss her. And then he reflected,

'Oh, no! I should only vex her!'

So he stopped where he was.

After dinner he would go out and stroll about the garden. He would take little Berthe on his knee and, unfolding his medical paper, try to teach her to read. In a very short time the child, who never did any lessons, opened big, tearful eyes, and burst out crying.

Then he would comfort her. He went and filled the watering-pot to make little rivers on the gravel, or broke off branches of privet and pretended to plant trees in the flower-beds. It didn't do the garden any harm, because it was already full of weeds. They owed such a lot to Lestiboudois! After a while the child would feel cold and ask for her mother.

'Ask Nanny to come,' said Charles. 'You know, my sweet, that mummy doesn't like anyone to disturb her.'

Autumn was setting in, and the leaves were beginning to fall already; just like two years ago, when she was taken ill. When 'would' she be herself again? And he went on pacing up and down, his hands clasped behind him.

Madame was upstairs in her bedroom. No one went up to her. All day long she would stay there in a kind of torpor, with hardly any clothes on, burning Oriental scent pastilles that she had bought in Rouen at a shop kept by an Algerian native. So as not to have this husband of hers stretched out beside her sleeping like a log all night long, she had managed, by making all manner of fuss, to persuade him to shift to a room on the floor above; and she lay awake all night reading far-fetched romances full of orgies and bloodshed. Sometimes she would get the horrors and call out in her fright, and Charles would come running.

'Oh,' she would say, 'go away!'

At other times, burning with those secret fires that her adultery fanned into flame, panting, trembling, wild with desire, she would fling wide the window, drink in the cool air, shake out her burden of hair to the winds and, gazing upwards at the stars, long for some princely suitor to come and take her. She thought of him, of Leon; and at these times she would have given everything for one of those encounters of which she was gradually growing so weary. Those were her happy, festive days. And she wanted them to be splendid. And when he hadn't got enough to pay all the expenses himself, as happened always, she made up the deficiency with a free hand. He tried to make her understand that they would be quite as well off somewhere else, in a cheaper hotel; but she always found some objection. One day she produced six little silver-gilt spoons from her bag. They were a wedding present from Farmer Rouault. She wanted him to go and pawn them. Leon obeyed, though it went against the grain. He was afraid he might be seen.

On reflection it did seem as if his mistress were beginning to behave rather strangely, and that, perhaps, people were right in advising him to cut the connexion. As a matter of fact, someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter informing her that he was carrying on at a ruinous rate with a married woman. And straightway, the good lady, who beheld in her mind's eye the eternal bugbear of every mother with a son of her own- the vague pernicious creature, the siren, the monstrous, fantastic being that dwells in the vague underworld of love- wrote off to Maitre Dubocage, his employer, who behaved wonderfully well in the matter. He kept him talking for three-quarters of an hour, trying to open his eyes to the abyss towards which he was hurrying. An intrigue like that was bound to react unfavourably on his business prospects. He implored him to cut out the whole thing, if not for his own sake, at least for his, Dubocage's.

Finally Leon had promised he would never see Emma again; and it weighed on his conscience that he had not kept his word, especially when he thought of the trouble and bother the woman might bring him, not to mention the chaff of his fellow-clerks, who bandied jests about him as they lounged round the office fire of a morning. Moreover, he was going to be promoted chief clerk. It was time he turned over a new leaf. No more love-making! Farewell to the flutes and roses! He had got to come down to earth. Every bourgeois in the heyday of his youth, if only for a moment, an instant, has deemed himself capable of the 'grande passion', of some high emprise. The most humdrum of week-enders has dreamed of toying with seductive sultanas in luxurious seraglios. There was never a lawyer, however pettifogging, but had within him the debris of a poet.

It rather bored him now when Emma began weeping on his breast, and his heart, like people who can only endure a certain dose of music, grew weary and indifferent at the tumult of a passion to the finer shades of which his senses were no longer able to respond. They knew each other too well to experience that sense of wonderment in mutual possession that increases the joys of it a hundredfold. She was as satiated with him as he was weary of her. In adultery Emma rediscovered all the platitudes of marriage.

But how was she to get rid of him? It little mattered that she felt herself humiliated by such degrading pleasures. Habit, or vice, demoralization, compelled her to cling to them; and every day saw her calling 'for madder music and for stronger wine', drying up pleasure at the source by asking too much of it. She blamed Leon for her baffled hopes, as if he had played her false. She even began to wish that some catastrophe would render their separation inevitable, since she herself had not the courage to invite it.

Nevertheless, she continued to write him love-letters, it being her notion of the fitness of things that a woman must always write to her lover.

But all the time she was writing, it was another man she saw in her mind's eye, a phantom composed of her most ardent memories, of the loveliest passages she had read in books, of all she had most passionately coveted, and so real and accessible did he at last become, that her heart beat with amazement. Yet she could not get a clear and definite picture of him, for, like a god, he became lost to view beneath the multiplicity of his attributes. He dwelt in that vague and far-off land where silken ladders sway in the breeze beneath balconies heaped with flowers, in the light of the moon. She felt him near her; he was coming to bear her bodily away in a passionate embrace. And then she would crash down to earth again, broken and weary, for these vague, passionate yearnings were more exhausting to her nature than an actual debauch.

She was now always depressed, everywhere and about everything. It often happened that she received writs and summonses which she hardly took the trouble to look at. She would have liked to stop living or else to go on sleeping for ever.

On the day of the mid-Lent carnival, she did not go back to Yonville all night. In the evening she went to the fancy-dress ball. She wore velvet breeches and red stockings, a club wig and a cocked hat over her ear. She footed it all night long to the blare of the trombones. They made a ring round her. In the morning she found herself on the steps of the theatre in company with five or six revellers, friends of Leon, disguised as dock hands and sailors, who proposed they should all go and have some supper.

The cafes round about were crammed. They trooped off to a dreadful little eating-house down on the quay, the landlord of which opened up a room for them on the fourth floor. The men stood whispering in a corner, no doubt debating about the expense. There were a clerk, two medical students and a shop-assistant- what a choice company for her! As for the women, Emma soon perceived from their twang that they were of the 'unfortunate' class. A sort of fear came over her. She pushed back her chair and lowered her eyes.

The others began to eat, but she could not touch a thing. Her forehead was on fire, her eyelids were twitching. She could feel in her head the floor of the ballroom pulsating beneath innumerable feet dancing in tune. And the smell of the punch and the cigar smoke made her feel as if her head were going round and round. She fainted away, and they carried her over to the window.

Day was beginning to break, and a great splash of crimson was flooding the pale sky away towards Sainte Catherine. The livid waters of the river were crisping in the wind. The bridges were all deserted and the lights were going out one by one.

She roused herself, however, and fell to thinking of little Berthe, who was sleeping away yonder in her nurse's room. But a cart laden with long iron bars went rattling by, and the noise, as it reverberated against the walls of the houses, was deafening.

She slipped out quickly, hurriedly divested herself of her costume, told Leon she must be off home, and finally found herself alone at the Hotel de Boulogne. Everything and everybody, herself included, were intolerable to her. She would have liked, if she had been a bird, to fly away and renew herself in far-off, stainless, skyey spaces.

She went out, crossed the boulevard, the Place Cauchoise and the faubourg, till she came to a sort of causeway looking down on to some gardens. She walked quickly, and found the fresh air soothing; and little by little, the faces in the crowd, the people in fancy dress, the quadrilles, the lustres, the supper and those women all seemed to melt away and disappear as a mist dissolves in the air. Then, going back to the 'Croix Rouge', she flung herself on the bed in the little second-floor bedroom with its pictures of the 'Tour de Nesle'. At four o'clock in the afternoon, Hivert came and woke her.

When she got home Felicite pointed out to her a piece of grey-coloured paper at the back of the clock. She took it and read:

'In accordance with a judgement whereof the present is a true copy...'

Judgement? What judgement? The day before, it is true, they had brought her another paper which she knew nothing about. So she was dumbfounded when she read the words:

'In pursuance of a decision given at the Royal Courts of Justice, Madame Bovary is hereby ordered...'

She skipped a few lines and then read,

'within twenty-four hours...' What is this? 'pay the total amount of eight thousand francs'. Then, lower down, 'In default whereof she will be proceeded against with the utmost rigour of the law and in particular by distraint to be levied on all her household furniture and effects'.

What was to be done? Twenty-four hours! That meant to-morrow. Oh', Lheureux was just trying to frighten her, that's what it was! For she saw now through his little game, and realized why he had been leading her on. What reassured her, however, was the very magnitude of the sum demanded.

Nevertheless, as a result of buying things on credit, borrowing, signing bills, renewing them for ever-increasing amounts, she had at last become indebted to Lheureux for a sum that would supply him with the capital he needed for his speculations.

'Do you know what's happened?' she said in an off-hand tone. 'I suppose it's a joke.'

'It isn't.'

'How do you mean?'

He slowly turned away, and then, folding his arms, said,

'Did you suppose, my dear little lady, that I was going on supplying you with goods and money until the crack of doom, simply for the love of God? Come now, be fair! I must recover my due.'

She protested against the amount.

'Oh, well, the court has ratified it. It's passed them, and you were advised of it. Besides it's not me, it's Vincart.'

'Couldn't you possibly...?'

'I can't do anything.'

'But... all the same... just look at it like this...' And she began beating about the bush; she hadn't known... it had taken her by surprise...

'Whose fault's that?' said Lheureux, with an ironic bow. 'While I'm here working like a black, you're always out gallivanting about.'

'Now, then, no sermons!'

'A sermon never does any harm,' he answered.

She caved in, she begged and prayed, she even put her slender white hand on the tradesman's knee.

'That's enough of that! Anyone 'ud think you were trying to seduce me.'

'You're a brute!'

'Hoity-toity, there's a temper for you!' he said, with a laugh.

'I'll show you up. I'll tell my husband....'

'All right, and I've got something to show your husband too!'

With that, Lheureux extracted from his safe the receipt for eighteen hundred francs she had given him when he discounted Vincart's bill.

'Do you imagine,' he said, 'that he won't tumble to your little theft, poor dear man?'

She went all to pieces, as if someone had felled her with a bludgeon.

'Yes, I'll show him... I'll show him, I will,' he repeated, as he paced up and down, between the desk and the window.

And then he went close up to her, saying in honeyed tones,

'It's no joke, I know; but, after all, it never killed anybody, and seeing that it's the only way left you of paying me back my money...'

'But where am I to get it?' said Emma, wringing her hands.

'Bah! Look at all the friends you've got!'

And he gave her a look so searching and so terrible that her very entrails shuddered at it.

'I promise you,' she said. 'I'll sign...'

'I've had enough of you and your signatures!'

'And I'll sell...'

'Get along with you!' he said, shrugging his shoulders; 'you've nothing left to sell.'

'Annette,' he called down through the trap-door that communicated with the shop, 'don't forget the three coupons No. 14.'

The servant appeared. Emma understood, and asked how much money would be required to stop the proceedings.

'It's too late!'

'But if I brought you several thousand francs, a quarter, a third, nearly all of it?'

'No, it's no good.'

He pushed her gently towards the staircase.

'I implore you, Monsieur Lheureux, give me a few days longer!' and she burst into tears.

'Oh yes, more tears!'

'You are driving me to desperation.'

'I don't care a damn!' and he shut the door.

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