Page 259 - madame-bovary

a word. Often from the top of a mountain there suddenly
glimpsed some splendid city with domes, and bridges, and
ships, forests of citron trees, and cathedrals of white mar-
ble, on whose pointed steeples were storks’ nests. They went
at a walking-pace because of the great flag-stones, and on
the ground there were bouquets of flowers, offered you by
women dressed in red bodices. They heard the chiming of
bells, the neighing of mules, together with the murmur of
guitars and the noise of fountains, whose rising spray re-
freshed heaps of fruit arranged like a pyramid at the foot of
pale statues that smiled beneath playing waters. And then,
one night they came to a fishing village, where brown nets
were drying in the wind along the cliffs and in front of the
huts. It was there that they would stay; they would live in a
low, flat-roofed house, shaded by a palm-tree, in the heart
of a gulf, by the sea. They would row in gondolas, swing in
hammocks, and their existence would be easy and large as
their silk gowns, warm and star-spangled as the nights they
would contemplate. However, in the immensity of this fu-
ture that she conjured up, nothing special stood forth; the
days, all magnificent, resembled each other like waves; and
it swayed in the horizon, infinite, harmonised, azure, and
bathed in sunshine. But the child began to cough in her cot
or Bovary snored more loudly, and Emma did not fall asleep
till morning, when the dawn whitened the windows, and
when little Justin was already in the square taking down the
shutters of the chemist’s shop.
She had sent for Monsieur Lheureux, and had said to
him—

Madame Bovary