Page 379 - madame-bovary

his own interest, to do it at least for his, Dubocage’s sake.
At last Leon swore he would not see Emma again, and
he reproached himself with not having kept his word, con-
sidering all the worry and lectures this woman might still
draw down upon him, without reckoning the jokes made
by his companions as they sat round the stove in the morn-
ing. Besides, he was soon to be head clerk; it was time to
settle down. So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and
poetry; for every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were
it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of
immense passions, of lofty enterprises. The most mediocre
libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears with-
in him the debris of a poet.
He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob
on his breast, and his heart, like the people who can only
stand a certain amount of music, dozed to the sound of a
love whose delicacies he no longer noted.
They knew one another too well for any of those surprises
of possession that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was
as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in
adultery all the platitudes of marriage.
But how to get rid of him? Then, though she might feel
humiliated at the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to
it from habit or from corruption, and each day she hun-
gered after them the more, exhausting all felicity in wishing
for too much of it. She accused Leon of her baffled hopes, as
if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some catas-
trophe that would bring about their separation, since she
had not the courage to make up her mind to it herself.

Madame Bovary