Page 364 - madame-bovary

CHAPTER SIX

uring the journeys he made to see her, Leon had often
Ddined at the chemist’s, and he felt obliged from polite-
ness to invite him in turn.
‘With pleasure!’ Monsieur Homais replied; ‘besides, I
must invigorate my mind, for I am getting rusty here. We’ll
go to the theatre, to the restaurant; we’ll make a night of it.’
‘Oh, my dear!’ tenderly murmured Madame Homais,
alarmed at the vague perils he was preparing to brave.
‘Well, what? Do you think I’m not sufficiently ruining
my health living here amid the continual emanations of the
pharmacy? But there! that is the way with women! They are
jealous of science, and then are opposed to our taking the
most legitimate distractions. No matter! Count upon me.
One of these days I shall turn up at Rouen, and we’ll go the
pace together.’
The druggist would formerly have taken good care not
to use such an expression, but he was cultivating a gay Pa-
risian style, which he thought in the best taste; and, like his
neighbour, Madame Bovary, he questioned the clerk curi-
ously about the customs of the capital; he even talked slang
to dazzle the bourgeois, saying bender, crummy, dandy,
macaroni, the cheese, cut my stick and ‘I’ll hook it,’ for ‘I
am going.’
So one Thursday Emma was surprised to meet Monsieur