Page 87 - madame-bovary

whole day long. At four o’clock the lamp had to be lighted.
On fine days she went down into the garden. The dew
had left on the cabbages a silver lace with long transparent
threads spreading from one to the other. No birds were to be
heard; everything seemed asleep, the espalier covered with
straw, and the vine, like a great sick serpent under the cop-
ing of the wall, along which, on drawing hear, one saw the
many-footed woodlice crawling. Under the spruce by the
hedgerow, the curie in the three-cornered hat reading his
breviary had lost his right foot, and the very plaster, scaling
off with the frost, had left white scabs on his face.
Then she went up again, shut her door, put on coals, and
fainting with the heat of the hearth, felt her boredom weigh
more heavily than ever. She would have like to go down and
talk to the servant, but a sense of shame restrained her.
Every day at the same time the schoolmaster in a black
skullcap opened the shutters of his house, and the rural po-
liceman, wearing his sabre over his blouse, passed by. Night
and morning the post-horses, three by three, crossed the
street to water at the pond. From time to time the bell of a
public house door rang, and when it was windy one could
hear the little brass basins that served as signs for the hair-
dresser’s shop creaking on their two rods. This shop had as
decoration an old engraving of a fashion-plate stuck against
a windowpane and the wax bust of a woman with yellow
hair. He, too, the hairdresser, lamented his wasted call-
ing, his hopeless future, and dreaming of some shop in a
big town—at Rouen, for example, overlooking the harbour,
near the theatre—he walked up and down all day from the

Madame Bovary