Page 299 - madame-bovary

recalling herself to the necessities of the situation, with an
effort she shook off the torpor of her memories, and began
stammering a few hurried words.
‘Ah, good-day! What! you here?’
‘Silence!’ cried a voice from the pit, for the third act was
beginning.
‘So you are at Rouen?’
‘Yes.’
‘And since when?’
‘Turn them out! turn them out!’ People were looking at
them. They were silent.
But from that moment she listened no more; and the
chorus of the guests, the scene between Ashton and his ser-
vant, the grand duet in D major, all were for her as far off as
if the instruments had grown less sonorous and the char-
acters more remote. She remembered the games at cards at
the druggist’s, and the walk to the nurse’s, the reading in
the arbour, the tete-a-tete by the fireside—all that poor love,
so calm and so protracted, so discreet, so tender, and that
she had nevertheless forgotten. And why had he come back?
What combination of circumstances had brought him back
into her life? He was standing behind her, leaning with his
shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt
herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils
falling upon her hair.
‘Does this amuse you?’ said he, bending over her so close-
ly that the end of his moustache brushed her cheek. She
replied carelessly—
‘Oh, dear me, no, not much.’

Madame Bovary