Page 240 - madame-bovary

position and self-possessed, Charles’s colleague did not re-
frain from laughing disdainfully when he had uncovered
the leg, mortified to the knee. Then having flatly declared
that it must be amputated, he went off to the chemist’s to
rail at the asses who could have reduced a poor man to such
a state. Shaking Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat,
he shouted out in the shop—
‘These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas of
those gentry of the capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform,
lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the Government
ought to prohibit. But they want to do the clever, and they
cram you with remedies without, troubling about the con-
sequences. We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants,
coxcombs, fops! We are practitioners; we cure people, and
we should not dream of operating on anyone who is in per-
fect health. Straighten club- feet! As if one could straighten
club-feet! It is as if one wished, for example, to make a
hunchback straight!’
Homais suffered as he listened to this discourse, and he
concealed his discomfort beneath a courtier’s smile; for he
needed to humour Monsier Canivet, whose prescriptions
sometimes came as far as Yonville. So he did not take up the
defence of Bovary; he did not even make a single remark,
and, renouncing his principles, he sacrificed his dignity to
the more serious interests of his business.
This amputation of the thigh by Doctor Canivet was a
great event in the village. On that day all the inhabitants
got up earlier, and the Grande Rue, although full of people,
had something lugubrious about it, as if an execution had