Page 447 - madame-bovary

accounts for professional attendance. He was shown the let-
ters his wife had written. Then he had to apologise.
Felicite now wore Madame Bovary’s gowns; not all, for
he had kept some of them, and he went to look at them in
her dressing-room, locking himself up there; she was about
her height, and often Charles, seeing her from behind, was
seized with an illusion, and cried out—
‘Oh, stay, stay!’
But at Whitsuntide she ran away from Yonville, carried
off by Theodore, stealing all that was left of the wardrobe.
It was about this time that the widow Dupuis had the
honour to inform him of the ‘marriage of Monsieur Leon
Dupuis her son, notary at Yvetot, to Mademoiselle Leo-
cadie Leboeuf of Bondeville.’ Charles, among the other
congratulations he sent him, wrote this sentence—
‘How glad my poor wife would have been!’
One day when, wandering aimlessly about the house, he
had gone up to the attic, he felt a pellet of fine paper under
his slipper. He opened it and read: ‘Courage, Emma, courage.
I would not bring misery into your life.’ It was Rodolphe’s
letter, fallen to the ground between the boxes, where it had
remained, and that the wind from the dormer window had
just blown towards the door. And Charles stood, motion-
less and staring, in the very same place where, long ago,
Emma, in despair, and paler even than he, had thought of
dying. At last he discovered a small R at the bottom of the
second page. What did this mean? He remembered Rodol-
phe’s attentions, his sudden, disappearance, his constrained
air when they had met two or three times since. But the re-

Madame Bovary