Page 386 - madame-bovary

CHAPTER SEVEN

he was stoical the next day when Maitre Hareng, the bai-
Sliff, with two assistants, presented himself at her house
to draw up the inventory for the distraint.
They began with Bovary’s consulting-room, and did not
write down the phrenological head, which was considered
an ‘instrument of his profession”; but in the kitchen they
counted the plates; the saucepans, the chairs, the candle-
sticks, and in the bedroom all the nick-nacks on the whatnot.
They examined her dresses, the linen, the dressing-room;
and her whole existence to its most intimate details, was,
like a corpse on whom a post-mortem is made, outspread
before the eyes of these three men.
Maitre Hareng, buttoned up in his thin black coat, wear-
ing a white choker and very tight foot-straps, repeated from
time to time—‘Allow me, madame. You allow me?’ Often he
uttered exclamations. ‘Charming! very pretty.’ Then he be-
gan writing again, dipping his pen into the horn inkstand
in his left hand.
When they had done with the rooms they went up to the
attic. She kept a desk there in which Rodolphe’s letters were
locked. It had to be opened.
‘Ah! a correspondence,’ said Maitre Hareng, with a dis-
creet smile. ‘But allow me, for I must make sure the box
contains nothing else.’ And he tipped up the papers light-