Page 408 - madame-bovary

doesn’t have silver on the butt of one’s gun. One doesn’t buy
a clock inlaid with tortoise shell,’ she went on, pointing to
a buhl timepiece, ‘nor silver-gilt whistles for one’s whips,’
and she touched them, ‘nor charms for one’s watch. Oh, he
wants for nothing! even to a liqueur-stand in his room! For
you love yourself; you live well. You have a chateau, farms,
woods; you go hunting; you travel to Paris. Why, if it were
but that,’ she cried, taking up two studs from the mantel-
piece, ‘but the least of these trifles, one can get money for
them. Oh, I do not want them, keep them!’
And she threw the two links away from her, their gold
chain breaking as it struck against the wall.
‘But I! I would have given you everything. I would have
sold all, worked for you with my hands, I would have
begged on the highroads for a smile, for a look, to hear you
say ‘Thanks!’ And you sit there quietly in your arm-chair, as
if you had not made me suffer enough already! But for you,
and you know it, I might have lived happily. What made
you do it? Was it a bet? Yet you loved me—you said so. And
but a moment since—Ah! it would have been better to have
driven me away. My hands are hot with your kisses, and
there is the spot on the carpet where at my knees you swore
an eternity of love! You made me believe you; for two years
you held me in the most magnificent, the sweetest dream!
Eh! Our plans for the journey, do you remember? Oh, your
letter! your letter! it tore my heart! And then when I come
back to him—to him, rich, happy, free—to implore the help
the first stranger would give, a suppliant, and bringing back
to him all my tenderness, he repulses me because it would

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