Page 257 - madame-bovary
P. 257

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
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