Page 109 - madame-bovary

a serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great
deal of scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic
conditions of our peasant dwellings. Ah! you will find many
prejudices to combat, Monsieur Bovary, much obstinacy of
routine, with which all the efforts of your science will daily
come into collision; for people still have recourse to nove-
nas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the
doctor of the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth
to tell, bad, and we even have a few nonagenarians in our
parish. The thermometer (I have made some observations)
falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which
gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or other-
wise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And,
as a matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by
the forest of Argueil on the one side, from the west winds
by the St. Jean range on the other; and this heat, more-
over, which, on account of the aqueous vapours given off
by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the
fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is
to say, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hy-
drogen alone), and which sucking up into itself the humus
from the ground, mixing together all those different ema-
nations, unites them into a stack, so to say, and combining
with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when
there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries,
engender insalubrious miasmata—this heat, I say, finds
itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or
rather whence it should come—that is to say, the southern
side— by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled

10 Madame Bovary