Page 57 - madame-bovary

fruit falls from a tree when shaken by a hand. But as the in-
timacy of their life became deeper, the greater became the
gulf that separated her from him.
Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street
pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped through it in
their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or
thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he
lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from
Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one
day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her
that she had come across in a novel.
A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything,
excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of
passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries? But this one
taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing. He thought
her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene
heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.
Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement
to Charles to stand there bolt upright and watch her bend
over her cardboard, with eyes half-closed the better to see
her work, or rolling, between her fingers, little bread-pellets.
As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers glided over it
the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb,
and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break.
Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed,
could be heard at the other end of the village when the win-
dow was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along
the highroad bare-headed and in list slippers, stopped to
listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.

Madame Bovary