Page 88 - madame-bovary

mairie to the church, sombre and waiting for customers.
When Madame Bovary looked up, she always saw him there,
like a sentinel on duty, with his skullcap over his ears and
his vest of lasting.
Sometimes in the afternoon outside the window of her
room, the head of a man appeared, a swarthy head with
black whiskers, smiling slowly, with a broad, gentle smile
that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately began and
on the organ, in a little drawing room, dancers the size of a
finger, women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in jackets, mon-
keys in frock coats, gentlemen in knee-breeches, turned
and turned between the sofas, the consoles, multiplied in
the bits of looking glass held together at their corners by a
piece of gold paper. The man turned his handle, looking to
the right and left, and up at the windows. Now and again,
while he shot out a long squirt of brown saliva against the
milestone, with his knee raised his instrument, whose hard
straps tired his shoulder; and now, doleful and drawling, or
gay and hurried, the music escaped from the box, droning
through a curtain of pink taffeta under a brass claw in ara-
besque. They were airs played in other places at the theatres,
sung in drawing rooms, danced to at night under lighted
lustres, echoes of the world that reached even to Emma.
Endless sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indi-
an dancing girl on the flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leapt
with the notes, swung from dream to dream, from sadness
to sadness. When the man had caught some coppers in his
cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth, hitched his
organ on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She