he was
being overwhelmed Napoleon began to roar, while Justin dried his shoes
with a wisp of straw. But a knife was wanted; Charles offered his.

"Ah!" she said to herself, "he carries a knife in his pocket like a
peasant."

The hoar-frost was falling, and they turned back to Yonville.

In the evening Madame Bovary did not go to her neighbor's, and when
Charles had left and she felt herself alone, the comparison recurred
with the clearness of a sensation almost actual, and with that
lengthening of perspective which memory gives to things. Looking from
her bed at the clear fire that was burning, she still saw, as she had
down there, Leon standing up with one hand bending his cane, and with
the other holding Athalie, who was quietly sucking a piece of ice. She
thought him charming; she could not tear herself away from him; she
recalled his other attitudes on other days, the words he had spoken, the
sound of his voice, his whole person; and she repeated, pouting out her
lips as if for a kiss--

"Yes, charming! charming! Is he not in love?" she asked herself; "but
with whom? With me?"

All the proofs arose before her at once; her heart leapt. The flame of
the fire threw a joyous light upon the ceiling; she turned on her back,
stretching out her arms.

Then began the eternal lamentation: "Oh, if Heaven had but willed it!
And why not? What prevented it?"

When Charles came home at midnight, she seemed to have just awakened,
and as he made a noise undressing, she complained of a headache, then
asked carelessly what had happened that evening.

"Monsieur Leon," he said, "went to his room early."

She could not help smiling, and she fell asleep, her soul filled with a
new delight.

The next day, at dusk, she received a visit from Monsieur Lheureux, the
draper. He was a man of ability, was this shopkeeper. Born a Gascon but
bred a Norman, he grafted upon his southern volubility the cunning of
the Cauchois. His fat, flabby, beardless face seemed dyed by a decoction
of liquorice, and his white hair made even more vivid the keen
brilliance of his small black eyes. No one knew what he had been
formerly; a pedlar, said some, a banker at Routot, according to others.
What was certain was, that he made complex calculations in his head that
would have frightened Binet himself. Polite to obsequiousness, he always
held himself with his back bent in the position of one who bows or who
invites.

After leaving at the door his ha