h all the wildness, that she did not know, but that these
must surely yield.

She grew pale and suffered from palpitations of the heart. Charles
prescribed valerian and camphor baths. Everything that was tried only
seemed to irritate her the more.

On certain days she chattered with feverish rapidity, and this
over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which she
remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was
pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms.

As she was constantly complaining about Tostes, Charles fancied that her
illness was no doubt due to some local cause, and fixing on this idea,
began to think seriously of setting up elsewhere.

From that moment she drank vinegar, contracted a sharp little cough, and
completely lost her appetite.

It cost Charles much to give up Tostes after living there four years and
when he was "beginning to get on there." Yet if it must be! He took her
to Rouen to see his old master. It was a nervous complaint: change of
air was needed.

After looking about him on this side and on that, Charles learnt that in
the Neufchatel arrondissement there was a considerable market-town
called Yonville l'Abbaye, whose doctor, a Polish refugee, had decamped a
week before. Then he wrote to the chemist of the place to ask the number
of the population, the distance from the nearest doctor, what his
predecessor had made a year, and so forth; and the answer being
satisfactory, he made up his mind to move towards the spring, if Emma's
health did not improve.

One day when, in view of her departure, she was tidying a drawer,
something pricked her finger. It was a wire of her wedding-bouquet. The
orange blossoms were yellow with dust and the silver-bordered satin
ribbons frayed at the edges. She threw it into the fire. It flared up
more quickly than dry straw. Then it was like a red bush in the cinders,
slowly devoured. She watched it burn. The little pasteboard berries
burst, the wire twisted, the gold lace melted; and the shrivelled paper
corollas, fluttering like black butterflies at the back of the stove, at
last flew up the chimney.

When they left Tostes in the month of March, Madame Bovary was
pregnant.

PART II.

I.

A NEW FIELD.

Yonville-l'Abbaye (so called from an old Capuchin abbey of which not
even the ruins remain) is a market-town twenty-four miles from Rouen,
between the Abbeville and Beauvais roads, at the foot of a