Page 244 - madame-bovary

what?
In the midst of the silence that hung over the village a
heart-rending cry rose on the air. Bovary turned white to
fainting. She knit her brows with a nervous gesture, then
went on. And it was for him, for this creature, for this man,
who understood nothing, who felt nothing! For he was
there quite quiet, not even suspecting that the ridicule of
his name would henceforth sully hers as well as his. She had
made efforts to love him, and she had repented with tears
for having yielded to another!
‘But it was perhaps a valgus!’ suddenly exclaimed Bovary,
who was meditating.
At the unexpected shock of this phrase falling on her
thought like a leaden bullet on a silver plate, Emma, shud-
dering, raised her head in order to find out what he meant to
say; and they looked at the other in silence, almost amazed
to see each other, so far sundered were they by their in-
ner thoughts. Charles gazed at her with the dull look of a
drunken man, while he listened motionless to the last cries
of the sufferer, that followed each other in long-drawn mod-
ulations, broken by sharp spasms like the far-off howling of
some beast being slaughtered. Emma bit her wan lips, and
rolling between her fingers a piece of coral that she had bro-
ken, fixed on Charles the burning glance of her eyes like
two arrows of fire about to dart forth. Everything in him ir-
ritated her now; his face, his dress, what he did not say, his
whole person, his existence, in fine. She repented of her past
virtue as of a crime, and what still remained of it rumbled
away beneath the furious blows of her pride. She revelled