at his bureau under the phrenological head.

Then he wrote to his mother to beg her to come, and they had many long
consultations together on the subject of Emma.

What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all
medical treatment?

"Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame Bovary, senior. "She
wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she were
obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have
these vapors, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her
head, and from the idleness in which she lives."

"Yet she is always busy," said Charles.

"Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against
religion, in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire.
But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Any one who has no
religion always ends by turning out badly."

So they decided to stop Emma from reading novels. The enterprise did not
seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through
Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had
discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply to
the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous
trade?

The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During the three
weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged half-a-dozen
words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at table and in
the evening before going to bed.

Madame Bovary left on a Wednesday, the market-day at Yonville.

The Place since morning had been blocked by a row of carts, which, on
end and their shafts in the air, spread all along the line of houses
from the church to the inn. On the other side there were canvas booths,
where cotton checks, blankets, and woollen stockings were sold, together
with harness for horses, and packets of blue ribbon, whose ends
fluttered in the wind. The coarse hardware was spread out on the ground
between pyramids of eggs and hampers of cheeses, from which sticky
straw stuck out. Near the corn-machines clucking hens passed their necks
through the bars of flat cages. The people, crowding in the same place
and unwilling to move thence, sometimes threatened to smash the
shop-front of the chemist. On Wednesdays his shop was never empty, and
the people pushed in less to buy drugs than for consultations, so great
was Homais's reputation in the neighboring villages. His r