Page 345 - madame-bovary

immense brown fumes that were blown away at the top.
One heard the rumbling of the foundries, together with the
clear chimes of the churches that stood out in the mist. The
leafless trees on the boulevards made violet thickets in the
midst of the houses, and the roofs, all shining with the rain,
threw back unequal reflections, according to the height of
the quarters in which they were. Sometimes a gust of wind
drove the clouds towards the Saint Catherine hills, like aer-
ial waves that broke silently against a cliff.
A giddiness seemed to her to detach itself from this mass
of existence, and her heart swelled as if the hundred and
twenty thousand souls that palpitated there had all at once
sent into it the vapour of the passions she fancied theirs.
Her love grew in the presence of this vastness, and expand-
ed with tumult to the vague murmurings that rose towards
her. She poured it out upon the square, on the walks, on
the streets, and the old Norman city outspread before her
eyes as an enormous capital, as a Babylon into which she
was entering. She leant with both hands against the window,
drinking in the breeze; the three horses galloped, the stones
grated in the mud, the diligence rocked, and Hivert, from
afar, hailed the carts on the road, while the bourgeois who
had spent the night at the Guillaume woods came quietly
down the hill in their little family carriages.
They stopped at the barrier; Emma undid her overshoes,
put on other gloves, rearranged her shawl, and some twenty
paces farther she got down from the ‘Hirondelle.’
The town was then awakening. Shop-boys in caps were
cleaning up the shop-fronts, and women with baskets

Madame Bovary