Page 249 - madame-bovary

her. She was six years older than he, and Theodore, Mon-
sieur Guillaumin’s servant, was beginning to pay court to
her.
‘Let me alone,’ she said, moving her pot of starch. ‘You’d
better be off and pound almonds; you are always dangling
about women. Before you meddle with such things, bad boy,
wait till you’ve got a beard to your chin.’
‘Oh, don’t be cross! I’ll go and clean her boots.’
And he at once took down from the shelf Emma’s boots,
all coated with mud, the mud of the rendezvous, that crum-
bled into powder beneath his fingers, and that he watched
as it gently rose in a ray of sunlight.
‘How afraid you are of spoiling them!’ said the servant,
who wasn’t so particular when she cleaned them herself, be-
cause as soon as the stuff of the boots was no longer fresh
madame handed them over to her.
Emma had a number in her cupboard that she squan-
dered one after the other, without Charles allowing himself
the slightest observation. So also he disbursed three hun-
dred francs for a wooden leg that she thought proper to
make a present of to Hippolyte. Its top was covered with
cork, and it had spring joints, a complicated mechanism,
covered over by black trousers ending in a patent-leather
boot. But Hippolyte, not daring to use such a handsome leg
every day, begged Madame Bovary to get him another more
convenient one. The doctor, of course, had again to defray
the expense of this purchase.
So little by little the stable-man took up his work again.
One saw him running about the village as before, and when

Madame Bovary