Madame Bovary

hapter Two Emma got out first, then Félicité, Monsieur Lheureux, and a nurse, and they had to wake up Charles in his corner, where he had slept soundly since night set in. Homais introduced himself; he offered his homages to madame and his respects to monsieur; said he was charmed to have been able to render them some slight service, and added with a cordial air that he had ventured to invite himself, his wife being away. When Madame Bovary was in the kitchen she went up to the chimney. With the tips of her fingers she caught her dress at the knee, and having thus pulled it up to her ankle, held out her foot in its black boot to the fire above the revolving leg of mutton. The flame lit up the whole of her, penetrating with a crude light the woof of her gowns, the fine pores of her fair skin, and even her eyelids, which she blinked now and again. A great red glow passed over her with the blowing of the wind through the half-open door. On the other side of the chimney a young man with fair hair watched her silently. As he was a good deal bored at Yonville, where he was a clerk at the notary’s, Monsieur Guillaumin, Monsieur Léon Dupuis (it was he who was the second habitue of the “Lion d’Or”) frequently put back his dinner-hour in hope that some traveler might come to the inn, with whom he could chat in the evening. On the days when his work was done early, he had, for want of something else to do, to come punctually, and endure from soup to cheese a tête-à-tête with Binet. It was therefore with delight that he accepted the landlady’s suggestion that he should dine in company with the newcomers, and they passed into the large parlour where Madame Lefrancois, for the purpose of showing off, had had the table laid for four. Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza; then, turning to his neighbour-- “Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in our ‘Hirondelle.’” “That is true,” replied Emma; “but moving about always amuses me. I like change of place.” “It is so tedious,” sighed the clerk, “to be always riveted to the same places.” “If you were like me,” said Charles, “constantly obliged to be in the saddle”-- “But,” Léon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, “nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant--when one can,” he added. “Moreover,” said the druggist, “the practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a...