Page 306 - madame-bovary

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and I am wrong. One ought not to ac-
custom oneself to impossible pleasures when there are a
thousand demands upon one.’
‘Oh, I can imagine!’
‘Ah! no; for you, you are a man!’
But men too had had their trials, and the conversation
went off into certain philosophical reflections. Emma ex-
patiated much on the misery of earthly affections, and the
eternal isolation in which the heart remains entombed.
To show off, or from a naive imitation of this melancholy
which called forth his, the young man declared that he had
been awfully bored during the whole course of his studies.
The law irritated him, other vocations attracted him, and
his mother never ceased worrying him in every one of her
letters. As they talked they explained more and more ful-
ly the motives of their sadness, working themselves up in
their progressive confidence. But they sometimes stopped
short of the complete exposition of their thought, and then
sought to invent a phrase that might express it all the same.
She did not confess her passion for another; he did not say
that he had forgotten her.
Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls
after masked balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the
rendezvous of old when she ran across the fields in the
morning to her lover’s house. The noises of the town hardly
reached them, and the room seemed small, as if on purpose
to hem in their solitude more closely. Emma, in a dimity
dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old
arm-chair; the yellow wall-paper formed, as it were, a gold-

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