Page 61 - madame-bovary

Amidst the vegetation of the ditch there are long reeds with
leaves that cut you.
She began by looking round her to see if nothing had
changed since last she had been there. She found again in
the same places the foxgloves and wallflowers, the beds of
nettles growing round the big stones, and the patches of li-
chen along the three windows, whose shutters, always closed,
were rotting away on their rusty iron bars. Her thoughts,
aimless at first, wandered at random, like her greyhound,
who ran round and round in the fields, yelping after the
yellow butterflies, chasing the shrew-mice, or nibbling the
poppies on the edge of a cornfield.
Then gradually her ideas took definite shape, and, sitting
on the grass that she dug up with little prods of her sun-
shade, Emma repeated to herself, ‘Good heavens! Why did
I marry?’
She asked herself if by some other chance combination
it would have not been possible to meet another man; and
she tried to imagine what would have been these unrealised
events, this different life, this unknown husband. All, sure-
ly, could not be like this one. He might have been handsome,
witty, distinguished, attractive, such as, no doubt, her old
companions of the convent had married. What were they
doing now? In town, with the noise of the streets, the buzz
of the theatres and the lights of the ballroom, they were liv-
ing lives where the heart expands, the senses bourgeon out.
But she—her life was cold as a garret whose dormer window
looks on the north, and ennui, the silent spider, was weav-
ing its web in the darkness in every corner of her heart.

0 Madame Bovary