Page 353 - madame-bovary

time, assuming a higher ground through this pretended
fascination exercised over a man who must have been of
warlike nature and accustomed to receive homage?
The clerk then felt the lowliness of his position; he longed
for epaulettes, crosses, titles. All that would please her—he
gathered that from her spendthrift habits.
Emma nevertheless concealed many of these extravagant
fancies, such as her wish to have a blue tilbury to drive into
Rouen, drawn by an English horse and driven by a groom
in top-boots. It was Justin who had inspired her with this
whim, by begging her to take him into her service as valet-
de-chambre*, and if the privation of it did not lessen the
pleasure of her arrival at each rendezvous, it certainly aug-
mented the bitterness of the return.
* Manservant.
Often, when they talked together of Paris, she ended by
murmuring, ‘Ah! how happy we should be there!’
‘Are we not happy?’ gently answered the young man pass-
ing his hands over her hair.
‘Yes, that is true,’ she said. ‘I am mad. Kiss me!’
To her husband she was more charming than ever. She
made him pistachio-creams, and played him waltzes after
dinner. So he thought himself the most fortunate of men
and Emma was without uneasiness, when, one evening
suddenly he said—
‘It is Mademoiselle Lempereur, isn’t it, who gives you les-
sons?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, I saw her just now,’ Charles went on, ‘at Madame

Madame Bovary