Page 386 - madame-bovary
P. 386

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-
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