be passing through life scarcely
touching it, and to bear on her brow the vague impress of some divine
destiny? She was so sad and so calm, at once so gentle and so reserved,
that near her one felt oneself seized by an icy charm, as we shudder in
churches at the perfume of the flowers mingling with the cold of the
marble. The others even did not escape from this seduction. The chemist
said--

"She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn't be misplaced in a
sub-prefecture."

The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the
poor her charity.

But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate. That dress with
the narrow folds hid a distracted heart, of whose torment those chaste
lips said nothing. She was in love with Leon, and sought solitude that
she might with the more ease delight in his image. The sight of his form
troubled the voluptuousness of this meditation. Emma thrilled at the
sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and
afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment that ended
in sorrow.

Leon did not know that when he left her in despair, she rose after he
had gone to see him in the street. She concerned herself about his
comings and goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history
to find an excuse for going to his room. The chemist's wife seemed happy
to her to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centred
upon this house, like the "Lion d'Or" pigeons, who came there to dip
their red feet and white wings in its gutters. But the more Emma
recognized her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be
evident, that she might make it less. She would have liked Leon to guess
it, and she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this.
What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of
shame also. She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was
past, that all was lost. Then pride, the joy of being able to say to
herself, "I am virtuous," and to look at herself in the glass taking
resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she
was making.

Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy
of passion, all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of
turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself
to pain, and seeking everywhere occasions for it. She was irritated by
an ill-served dish or by a h