Page 266 - madame-bovary

Rodolphe disturbed all the others, and mechanically began
rummaging amidst this mass of papers and things, finding
pell-mell bouquets, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair—
hair! dark and fair, some even, catching in the hinges of the
box, broke when it was opened.
Thus dallying with his souvenirs, he examined the writ-
ing and the style of the letters, as varied as their orthography.
They were tender or jovial, facetious, melancholy; there
were some that asked for love, others that asked for money.
A word recalled faces to him, certain gestures, the sound
of a voice; sometimes, however, he remembered nothing at
all.
In fact, these women, rushing at once into his thoughts,
cramped each other and lessened, as reduced to a uniform
level of love that equalised them all. So taking handfuls of
the mixed-up letters, he amused himself for some moments
with letting them fall in cascades from his right into his
left hand. At last, bored and weary, Rodolphe took back the
box to the cupboard, saying to himself, ‘What a lot of rub-
bish!’ Which summed up his opinion; for pleasures, like
schoolboys in a school courtyard, had so trampled upon his
heart that no green thing grew there, and that which passed
through it, more heedless than children, did not even, like
them, leave a name carved upon the wall.
‘Come,’ said he, ‘let’s begin.’
He wrote—
‘Courage, Emma! courage! I would not bring misery into
your life.’
‘After all, that’s true,’ thought Rodolphe. ‘I am acting in