Page 146 - madame-bovary

his face; she invented quite a history to find an excuse for
going to his room. The chemist’s wife seemed happy to her
to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly
centered upon this house, like the ‘Lion d’Or’ pigeons, who
came there to dip their red feet and white wings in its gut-
ters. But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she
crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might
make it less. She would have liked Leon to guess it, and she
imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this.
What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and
a sense of shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too
much, that the time was past, that all was lost. Then, pride,
and joy of being able to say to herself, ‘I am virtuous,’ and to
look at herself in the glass taking resigned poses, consoled
her a little for the sacrifice she believed she was making.
Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and
the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one
suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she
clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking ev-
erywhere occasion for it. She was irritated by an ill-served
dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had
not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams,
her narrow home.
What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to
notice her anguish. His conviction that he was making her
happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on
this point ingratitude. For whose sake, then was she virtu-
ous? Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause
of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex

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