Page 295 - madame-bovary

recognised all the intoxication and the anguish that had
almost killed her. The voice of a prima donna seemed to
her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion
that charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But
no one on earth had loved her with such love. He had not
wept like Edgar that last moonlit night when they said, ‘To-
morrow! to-morrow!’ The theatre rang with cheers; they
recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of the
flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when
they uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that
mingled with the vibrations of the last chords.
‘But why,’ asked Bovary, ‘does that gentleman persecute
her?’
‘No, no!’ she answered; ‘he is her lover!’
‘Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other
one who came on before said, ‘I love Lucie and she loves
me!’ Besides, he went off with her father arm in arm. For he
certainly is her father, isn’t he—the ugly little man with a
cock’s feather in his hat?’
Despite Emma’s explanations, as soon as the recita-
tive duet began in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable
machinations to his master Ashton, Charles, seeing the false
troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie, thought it was a love-gift
sent by Edgar. He confessed, moreover, that he did not un-
derstand the story because of the music, which interfered
very much with the words.
‘What does it matter?’ said Emma. ‘Do be quiet!’
‘Yes, but you know,’ he went on, leaning against her
shoulder, ‘I like to understand things.’

Madame Bovary