Page 418 - madame-bovary

heard the cracking of a whip; all the windows rattled, and a
post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to their ears
in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of the market. It
was Doctor Lariviere.
The apparition of a god would not have caused more
commotion. Bovary raised his hands; Canivet stopped
short; and Homais pulled off his skull-cap long before the
doctor had come in.
He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten
of Bichat, to that generation, now extinct, of philosophi-
cal practitioners, who, loving their art with a fanatical love,
exercised it with enthusiasm and wisdom. Everyone in his
hospital trembled when he was angry; and his students so
revered him that they tried, as soon as they were themselves
in practice, to imitate him as much as possible. So that in
all the towns about they were found wearing his long wad-
ded merino overcoat and black frock-coat, whose buttoned
cuffs slightly covered his brawny hands—very beautiful
hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be more
ready to plunge into suffering. Disdainful of honours, of
titles, and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospi-
tallers, generous, fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue
without believing in it, he would almost have passed for a
saint if the keenness of his intellect had not caused him to
be feared as a demon. His glance, more penetrating than his
bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected ev-
ery lie athwart all assertions and all reticences. And thus he
went along, full of that debonair majesty that is given by the
consciousness of great talent, of fortune, and of forty years

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