Page 86 - madame-bovary

quences and the scene changed. But nothing happened to
her; God had willed it so! The future was a dark corridor,
with its door at the end shut fast.
She gave up music. What was the good of playing? Who
would hear her? Since she could never, in a velvet gown with
short sleeves, striking with her light fingers the ivory keys
of an Erard at a concert, feel the murmur of ecstasy envel-
op her like a breeze, it was not worth while boring herself
with practicing. Her drawing cardboard and her embroi-
dery she left in the cupboard. What was the good? What
was the good? Sewing irritated her. ‘I have read everything,’
she said to herself. And she sat there making the tongs red-
hot, or looked at the rain falling.
How sad she was on Sundays when vespers sounded! She
listened with dull attention to each stroke of the cracked
bell. A cat slowly walking over some roof put up his back in
the pale rays of the sum. The wind on the highroad blew up
clouds of dust. Afar off a dog sometimes howled; and the
bell, keeping time, continued its monotonous ringing that
died away over the fields.
But the people came out from church. The women in
waxed clogs, the peasants in new blouses, the little bare-
headed children skipping along in front of them, all were
going home. And till nightfall, five or six men, always the
same, stayed playing at corks in front of the large door of
the inn.
The winter was severe. The windows every morning were
covered with rime, and the light shining through them, dim
as through ground-glass, sometimes did not change the