Page 50 - madame-bovary

tending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with their
azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the
sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus
sinking beneath the cross he carries. She tried, by way of
mortification, to eat nothing a whole day. She puzzled her
head to find some vow to fulfil.
When she went to confession, she invented little sins in
order that she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shad-
ow, her hands joined, her face against the grating beneath
the whispering of the priest. The comparisons of betrothed,
husband, celestial lover, and eternal marriage, that recur
in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of unexpected
sweetness.
In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious
reading in the study. On week-nights it was some abstract of
sacred history or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and
on Sundays passages from the ‘Genie du Christianisme,’ as
a recreation. How she listened at first to the sonorous lam-
entations of its romantic melancholies reechoing through
the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in
the shop-parlour of some business quarter, she might per-
haps have opened her heart to those lyrical invasions of
Nature, which usually come to us only through translation
in books. But she knew the country too well; she knew the
lowing of cattle, the milking, the ploughs.
Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the
contrary, to those of excitement. She loved the sea only for
the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when bro-
ken up by ruins.