Page 378 - madame-bovary

too heavy, and, gazing upon the stars, longed for some
princely love. She thought of him, of Leon. She would then
have given anything for a single one of those meetings that
surfeited her.
These were her gala days. She wanted them to be sump-
tuous, and when he alone could not pay the expenses, she
made up the deficit liberally, which happened pretty well ev-
ery time. He tried to make her understand that they would
be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel,
but she always found some objection.
One day she drew six small silver-gilt spoons from her
bag (they were old Roualt’s wedding present), begging him
to pawn them at once for her, and Leon obeyed, though the
proceeding annoyed him. He was afraid of compromising
himself.
Then, on, reflection, he began to think his mistress’s ways
were growing odd, and that they were perhaps not wrong in
wishing to separate him from her.
In fact someone had sent his mother a long anonymous
letter to warn her that he was ‘ruining himself with a mar-
ried woman,’ and the good lady at once conjuring up the
eternal bugbear of families the vague pernicious creature,
the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths
of love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who be-
haved perfectly in the affair. He kept him for three quarters
of an hour trying to open his eyes, to warn him of the abyss
into which he was falling. Such an intrigue would damage
him later on, when he set up for himself. He implored him
to break with her, and, if he would not make this sacrifice in