Page 138 - madame-bovary

was there. His cap was drawn down over his eyebrows, and
his two thick lips were trembling, which added a look of
stupidity to his face; his very back, his calm back, was irri-
tating to behold, and she saw written upon his coat all the
platitude of the bearer.
While she was considering him thus, tasting in her
irritation a sort of depraved pleasure, Leon made a step for-
ward. The cold that made him pale seemed to add a more
gentle languor to his face; between his cravat and his neck
the somewhat loose collar of his shirt showed the skin; the
lobe of his ear looked out from beneath a lock of hair, and
his large blue eyes, raised to the clouds, seemed to Emma
more limpid and more beautiful than those mountain-lakes
where the heavens are mirrored.
‘Wretched boy!’ suddenly cried the chemist.
And he ran to his son, who had just precipitated himself
into a heap of lime in order to whiten his boots. At the re-
proaches with which he was being overwhelmed Napoleon
began to roar, while Justin dried his shoes with a wisp of
straw. But a knife was wanted; Charles offered his.
‘Ah!’ she said to herself, ‘he carried a knife in his pocket
like a peasant.’
The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yon-
ville.
In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to her neigh-
bour’s, and when Charles had left and she felt herself alone,
the comparison re-began with the clearness of a sensation
almost actual, and with that lengthening of perspective
which memory gives to things. Looking from her bed at the

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