Page 147 - madame-bovary

strap that bucked her in on all sides.
On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various ha-
treds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to
diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was
added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still
more to the separation between them. Her own gentleness
to herself made her rebel against him. Domestic mediocrity
drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulter-
ous desires. She would have like Charles to beat her, that
she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself
upon him. She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious
conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go
on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was
happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.
Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized
with the temptation to flee somewhere with Leon to try a
new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness opened
within her soul.
‘Besides, he no longer loves me,’ she thought. ‘What is to
become of me? What help is to be hoped for, what consola-
tion, what solace?’
She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low
voice, with flowing tears.
‘Why don’t you tell master?’ the servant asked her when
she came in during these crises.
‘It is the nerves,’ said Emma. ‘Do not speak to him of it;
it would worry him.’
‘Ah! yes,’ Felicite went on, ‘you are just like La Guerine,
Pere Guerin’s daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used

1 Madame Bovary