Page 102 - madame-bovary

eyes were small and the nose hooked. Clever at all games
of cards, a good hunter, and writing a fine hand, he had at
home a lathe, and amused himself by turning napkin rings,
with which he filled up his house, with the jealousy of an
artist and the egotism of a bourgeois.
He went to the small parlour, but the three millers had
to be got out first, and during the whole time necessary for
laying the cloth, Binet remained silent in his place near the
stove. Then he shut the door and took off his cap in his usual
way.
‘It isn’t with saying civil things that he’ll wear out his
tongue,’ said the chemist, as soon as he was along with the
landlady.
‘He never talks more,’ she replied. ‘Last week two travel-
ers in the cloth line were here—such clever chaps who told
such jokes in the evening, that I fairly cried with laughing;
and he stood there like a dab fish and never said a word.’
‘Yes,’ observed the chemist; ‘no imagination, no sallies,
nothing that makes the society-man.’
‘Yet they say he has parts,’ objected the landlady.
‘Parts!’ replied Monsieur Homais; ‘he, parts! In his own
line it is possible,’ he added in a calmer tone. And he went
on—
‘Ah! That a merchant, who has large connections, a juris-
consult, a doctor, a chemist, should be thus absent-minded,
that the should become whimsical or even peevish, I can
understand; such cases are cited in history. But at least it is
because they are thinking of something. Myself, for exam-
ple, how often has it happened to me to look on the bureau

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