“The gentleman isn’t in,” answered a servant.
This seemed to him a good omen.
He went upstairs.
She was not disturbed at his approach; on the contrary, she apologised for having neglected to tell him where they were staying.
“Oh, I divined it!” said Leon.
He pretended he had been guided towards her by chance, by, instinct.
She began to smile; and at once, to repair his folly, Leon told her that he had spent his morning in looking for her in all the hotels in the town one after the other.
“So you have made up your mind to stay?” he added.
“Yes,” she said, “and I am wrong.
One ought not to accustom oneself to impossible pleasures when there are a thousand demands upon one.”
“Oh, I can imagine!”
“Ah! no; for you, you are a man!”
But men too had had their trials, and the conversation went off into certain philosophical reflections.
Emma expatiated much on the misery of earthly affections, and the eternal isolation in which the heart remains entombed.
To show off, or from a naive imitation of this melancholy which called forth his, the young man declared that he had been awfully bored during the whole course of his studies.
The law irritated him, other vocations attracted him, and his mother never ceased worrying him in every one of her letters.
As they talked they explained more and more fully the motives of their sadness, working themselves up in their progressive confidence.
But they sometimes stopped short of the complete exposition of their thought, and then sought to invent a phrase that might express it all the same.
She did not confess her passion for another; he did not say that he had forgotten her.
Perhaps he no longer remembered his suppers with girls after masked balls; and no doubt she did not recollect the rendezvous of old when she ran across the fields in the morning to her lover’s house.
The noises of the town hardly reached them, and the room seemed small, as if on purpose to hem in their solitude more closely.
Emma, in a dimity dressing-gown, leant her head against the back of the old arm-chair; the yellow wall-paper formed, as it were, a golden background behind her, and her bare head was mirrored in the glass with the white parting in the middle, and the tip of her ears peeping out from the folds of her hair.
“But pardon me!” she said. “It is wrong of me. I weary you with my eternal complaints.”
“No, never, never!”
“If you knew,” she went on, raising to the ceiling her beautiful eyes, in which a tear was trembling, “all that I had dreamed!”
“And I!
Oh, I too have suffered!
Often I went out; I went away. I dragged myself along the quays, seeking distraction amid the din of the crowd without being able to banish the heaviness that weighed upon me.
In an engraver’s shop on the boulevard there is an Italian print of one of the Muses.
She is draped in a tunic, and she is looking at the moon, with forget-me-nots in her flowing hair.
Something drove me there continually; I stayed there hours together.”
Then in a trembling voice, “She resembled you a little.”
Madame Bovary turned away her head that he might not see the irrepressible smile she felt rising to her lips.
“Often,” he went on, “I wrote you letters that I tore up.”
She did not answer.
He continued— “I sometimes fancied that some chance would bring you.
I thought I recognised you at street-corners, and I ran after all the carriages through whose windows I saw a shawl fluttering, a veil like yours.”
She seemed resolved to let him go on speaking without interruption.
Crossing her arms and bending down her face, she looked at the rosettes on her slippers, and at intervals made little movements inside the satin of them with her toes.
At last she sighed.
“But the most wretched thing, is it not—is to drag out, as I do, a useless existence.
If our pains were only of some use to someone, we should find consolation in the thought of the sacrifice.”
He started off in praise of virtue, duty, and silent immolation, having himself an incredible longing for self-sacrifice that he could not satisfy.
“I should much like,” she said, “to be a nurse at a hospital.”
“Alas! men have none of these holy missions, and I see nowhere any calling—unless perhaps that of a doctor.”
With a slight shrug of her shoulders, Emma interrupted him to speak of her illness, which had almost killed her.
What a pity!
She should not be suffering now!
Leon at once envied the calm of the tomb, and one evening he had even made his will, asking to be buried in that beautiful rug with velvet stripes he had received from her.
For this was how they would have wished to be, each setting up an ideal to which they were now adapting their past life.