Page 409 - madame-bovary

cost him three thousand francs!’
‘I haven’t got them,’ replied Rodolphe, with that perfect
calm with which resigned rage covers itself as with a shield.
She went out. The walls trembled, the ceiling was
crushing her, and she passed back through the long alley,
stumbling against the heaps of dead leaves scattered by the
wind. At last she reached the ha-ha hedge in front of the gate;
she broke her nails against the lock in her haste to open it.
Then a hundred steps farther on, breathless, almost falling,
she stopped. And now turning round, she once more saw
the impassive chateau, with the park, the gardens, the three
courts, and all the windows of the facade.
She remained lost in stupor, and having no more con-
sciousness of herself than through the beating of her arteries,
that she seemed to hear bursting forth like a deafening mu-
sic filling all the fields. The earth beneath her feet was more
yielding than the sea, and the furrows seemed to her im-
mense brown waves breaking into foam. Everything in her
head, of memories, ideas, went off at once like a thousand
pieces of fireworks. She saw her father, Lheureux’s clos-
et, their room at home, another landscape. Madness was
coming upon her; she grew afraid, and managed to recover
herself, in a confused way, it is true, for she did not in the,
least remember the cause of the terrible condition she was
in, that is to say, the question of money. She suffered only in
her love, and felt her soul passing from her in this memory;
as wounded men, dying, feel their life ebb from their bleed-
ing wounds.
Night was falling, crows were flying about.

0 Madame Bovary