Page 169 - madame-bovary

She had attacks in which she could easily have been
driven to commit any folly. She maintained one day, in op-
position to her husband, that she could drink off a large
glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid enough to dare
her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.
In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yon-
ville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay,
and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that im-
mobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and
those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all
over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the
nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering
three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old
age.
She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as
Charles fussed around her showing his anxiety—
‘Bah!’ she answered, ‘what does it matter?’
Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows
on the table, sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the
phrenological head.
Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and
they had many long consultations together on the subject
of Emma.
What should they decide? What was to be done since she
rejected all medical treatment? ‘Do you know what your
wife wants?’ replied Madame Bovary senior.
‘She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some man-
ual work. If she were obliged, like so many others, to earn
her living, she wouldn’t have these vapours, that come to

1 Madame Bovary