Page 449 - madame-bovary

ness mingled with bitterness, like those ill-made wines that
taste of resin. He mended her toys, made her puppets from
cardboard, or sewed up half-torn dolls. Then, if his eyes fell
upon the workbox, a ribbon lying about, or even a pin left
in a crack of the table, he began to dream, and looked so sad
that she became as sad as he.
No one now came to see them, for Justin had run away to
Rouen, where he was a grocer’s assistant, and the druggist’s
children saw less and less of the child, Monsieur Homais
not caring, seeing the difference of their social position, to
continue the intimacy.
The blind man, whom he had not been able to cure with
the pomade, had gone back to the hill of Bois-Guillaume,
where he told the travellers of the vain attempt of the drug-
gist, to such an extent, that Homais when he went to town
hid himself behind the curtains of the ‘Hirondelle’ to avoid
meeting him. He detested him, and wishing, in the interests
of his own reputation, to get rid of him at all costs, he di-
rected against him a secret battery, that betrayed the depth
of his intellect and the baseness of his vanity. Thus, for six
consecutive months, one could read in the ‘Fanal de Rouen’
editorials such as these—
‘All who bend their steps towards the fertile plains of
Picardy have, no doubt, remarked, by the Bois-Guillaume
hill, a wretch suffering from a horrible facial wound. He
importunes, persecutes one, and levies a regular tax on all
travellers. Are we still living in the monstrous times of the
Middle Ages, when vagabonds were permitted to display in
our public places leprosy and scrofulas they had brought

Madame Bovary