Page 144 - madame-bovary

servant with more severity.
She took Berthe from nurse. When visitors called, Fe-
licite brought her in, and Madame Bovary undressed her
to show off her limbs. She declared she adored children;
this was her consolation, her joy, her passion, and she ac-
companied her caresses with lyrical outburst which would
have reminded anyone but the Yonville people of Sachette
in ‘Notre Dame de Paris.’
When Charles came home he found his slippers put to
warm near the fire. His waistcoat now never wanted lining,
nor his shirt buttons, and it was quite a pleasure to see in
the cupboard the night-caps arranged in piles of the same
height. She no longer grumbled as formerly at taking a turn
in the garden; what he proposed was always done, although
she did not understand the wishes to which she submitted
without a murmur; and when Leon saw him by his fireside
after dinner, his two hands on his stomach, his two feet on
the fender, his two cheeks red with feeding, his eyes moist
with happiness, the child crawling along the carpet, and
this woman with the slender waist who came behind his
arm-chair to kiss his forehead: ‘What madness!’ he said to
himself. ‘And how to reach her!’
And thus she seemed so virtuous and inaccessible to him
that he lost all hope, even the faintest. But by this renun-
ciation he placed her on an extraordinary pinnacle. To him
she stood outside those fleshly attributes from which he
had nothing to obtain, and in his heart she rose ever, and
became farther removed from him after the magnificent
manner of an apotheosis that is taking wing. It was one of

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