Page 167 - madame-bovary

meadow set trembling the leaves of the book and the nastur-
tiums of the arbour. Ah! he was gone, the only charm of her
life, the only possible hope of joy. Why had she not seized
this happiness when it came to her? Why not have kept hold
of it with both hands, with both knees, when it was about to
flee from her? And she cursed herself for not having loved
Leon. She thirsted for his lips. The wish took possession of
her to run after and rejoin him, throw herself into his arms
and say to him, ‘It is I; I am yours.’ But Emma recoiled be-
forehand at the difficulties of the enterprise, and her desires,
increased by regret, became only the more acute.
Henceforth the memory of Leon was the centre of her
boredom; it burnt there more brightly than the fire travel-
lers have left on the snow of a Russian steppe. She sprang
towards him, she pressed against him, she stirred careful-
ly the dying embers, sought all around her anything that
could revive it; and the most distant reminiscences, like the
most immediate occasions, what she experienced as well as
what she imagined, her voluptuous desires that were unsat-
isfied, her projects of happiness that crackled in the wind
like dead boughs, her sterile virtue, her lost hopes, the do-
mestic tete-a-tete—she gathered it all up, took everything,
and made it all serve as fuel for her melancholy.
The flames, however, subsided, either because the sup-
ply had exhausted itself, or because it had been piled up too
much. Love, little by little, was quelled by absence; regret
stifled beneath habit; and this incendiary light that had em-
purpled her pale sky was overspread and faded by degrees.
In the supineness of her conscience she even took her re-

1 Madame Bovary