Page 257 - madame-bovary
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riage start, it will be as if we were rising in a balloon, as if
we were setting out for the clouds. Do you know that I count
the hours? And you?’
Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this
period; she had that indefinable beauty that results from joy,
from enthusiasm, from success, and that is only the har-
mony of temperament with circumstances. Her desires, her
sorrows, the experience of pleasure, and her ever-young il-
lusions, that had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun
make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and she at
length blossomed forth in all the plenitude of her nature.
Her eyelids seemed chiselled expressly for her long amo-
rous looks in which the pupil disappeared, while a strong
inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the
fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black
down. One would have thought that an artist apt in concep-
tion had arranged the curls of hair upon her neck; they fell
in a thick mass, negligently, and with the changing chances
of their adultery, that unbound them every day. Her voice
now took more mellow infections, her figure also; some-
thing subtle and penetrating escaped even from the folds
of her gown and from the line of her foot. Charles, as when
they were first married, thought her delicious and quite ir-
resistible.
When he came home in the middle of the night, he did
not dare to wake her. The porcelain night-light threw a
round trembling gleam upon the ceiling, and the drawn
curtains of the little cot formed as it were a white hut stand-
ing out in the shade, and by the bedside Charles looked at
Madame Bovary