Page 60 - madame-bovary

mother, and he loved his wife infinitely; he considered the
judgment of the one infallible, and yet he thought the con-
duct of the other irreproachable. When Madam Bovary had
gone, he tried timidly and in the same terms to hazard one
or two of the more anodyne observations he had heard from
his mamma. Emma proved to him with a word that he was
mistaken, and sent him off to his patients.
And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she
wanted to make herself in love with him. By moonlight in
the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by
heart, and, sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios;
but she found herself as calm after as before, and Charles
seemed no more amorous and no more moved.
When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her
heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of un-
derstanding what she did not experience as of believing
anything that did not present itself in conventional forms,
she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles’s pas-
sion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became
regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one
habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked for-
ward to after the monotony of dinner.
A gamekeeper, cured by the doctor of inflammation of
the lungs, had given madame a little Italian greyhound;
she took her out walking, for she went out sometimes in
order to be alone for a moment, and not to see before her
eyes the eternal garden and the dusty road. She went as far
as the beeches of Banneville, near the deserted pavilion
which forms an angle of the wall on the side of the country.