Page 354 - madame-bovary

Liegeard’s. I spoke to her about you, and she doesn’t know
you.’
This was like a thunderclap. However, she replied quite
naturally—
‘Ah! no doubt she forgot my name.’
‘But perhaps,’ said the doctor, ‘there are several Demoi-
selles Lempereur at Rouen who are music-mistresses.’
‘Possibly!’ Then quickly—‘But I have my receipts here.
See!’
And she went to the writing-table, ransacked all the
drawers, rummaged the papers, and at last lost her head so
completely that Charles earnestly begged her not to take so
much trouble about those wretched receipts.
‘Oh, I will find them,’ she said.
And, in fact, on the following Friday, as Charles was put-
ting on one of his boots in the dark cabinet where his clothes
were kept, he felt a piece of paper between the leather and
his sock. He took it out and read—
‘Received, for three months’ lessons and several pieces
of music, the sum of sixty-three francs.—Felicie Lempereur,
professor of music.’
‘How the devil did it get into my boots?’
‘It must,’ she replied, ‘have fallen from the old box of bills
that is on the edge of the shelf.’
From that moment her existence was but one long tissue
of lies, in which she enveloped her love as in veils to hide it.
It was a want, a mania, a pleasure carried to such an extent
that if she said she had the day before walked on the right
side of a road, one might know she had taken the left.