Page 417 - madame-bovary

less agitated; and at every insignificant word, at every res-
piration a little more easy, he regained hope. At last, when
Canivet came in, he threw himself into his arms.
‘Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See!
look at her.’
His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he
said of himself, ‘never beating about the bush,’ he prescribed,
an emetic in order to empty the stomach completely.
She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn.
Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body covered with
brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath the fingers like
a stretched thread, like a harp-string nearly breaking.
After this she began to scream horribly. She cursed the
poison, railed at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust
away with her stiffened arms everything that Charles, in
more agony than herself, tried to make her drink. He stood
up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling sound in his
throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his whole
body. Felicite was running hither and thither in the room.
Homais, motionless, uttered great sighs; and Monsieur Ca-
nivet, always retaining his self-command, nevertheless
began to feel uneasy.
‘The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the mo-
ment that the cause ceases—‘
‘The effect must cease,’ said Homais, ‘that is evident.’
‘Oh, save her!’ cried Bovary.
And, without listening to the chemist, who was still ven-
turing the hypothesis, ‘It is perhaps a salutary paroxysm,’
Canivet was about to administer some theriac, when they

1 Madame Bovary