Page 185 - madame-bovary

than his.’
*Upon my word!
And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move
about more easily, showed the gendarme his blue card, and
even stopped now and then in front of some fine beast,
which Madame Bovary did not at all admire. He noticed
this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dress-
es; then he apologised for the negligence of his own. He had
that incongruity of common and elegant in which the ha-
bitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric
existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies
of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions,
that seduces or exasperates them. Thus his cambric shirt
with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the open-
ing of his waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped
trousers disclosed at the ankle nankeen boots with patent
leather gaiters.
These were so polished that they reflected the grass. He
trampled on horses’s dung with them, one hand in the
pocket of his jacket and his straw hat on one side.
‘Besides,’ added he, ‘when one lives in the country—‘
‘It’s waste of time,’ said Emma.
‘That is true,’ replied Rodolphe. ‘To think that not one
of these people is capable of understanding even the cut of
a coat!’
Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives
it crushed, the illusions lost there.
‘And I too,’ said Rodolphe, ‘am drifting into depression.’
‘You!’ she said in astonishment; ‘I thought you very light-

1 Madame Bovary