every Friday, dress as she liked, harass at her bidding those patients
who did not pay. She opened his letter, watched his comings and goings,
and listened at the partition-wall when women came to consult him in his
surgery.

She must have her chocolate every morning, attentions without end. She
constantly complained of her nerves, her chest, her liver. The noise of
footsteps made her ill; when people left her, solitude became odious to
her; if they came back, it was doubtless to see her die. When Charles
returned in the evening, she stretched forth two long thin arms from
beneath the sheets, put them round his neck, and having made him sit
down on the edge of the bed, began to talk to him of her troubles: he
was neglecting her, he loved another. She had been warned she would be
unhappy; and she ended by asking him for a dose of medicine and a little
more love.

Chapter Two

One night towards eleven o'clock they were awakened by the noise of
a horse pulling up outside their door. The servant opened the
garret-window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below.
He came for the doctor, had a letter for him. Natasie came downstairs
shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other. The man left
his horse, and, following the servant, suddenly came in behind her. He
pulled out from his wool cap with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in
a rag and presented it gingerly to Charles, who rested on his elbow on
the pillow to read it. Natasie, standing near the bed, held the light.
Madame in modesty had turned to the wall and showed only her back.

This letter, sealed with a small seal in blue wax, begged Monsieur
Bovary to come immediately to the farm of the Bertaux to set a broken
leg. Now from Tostes to the Bertaux was a good eighteen miles across
country by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor. It was a dark night;
Madame Bovary junior was afraid of accidents for her husband. So it was
decided the stable-boy should go on first; Charles would start three
hours later when the moon rose. A boy was to be sent to meet him, and
show him the way to the farm, and open the gates for him.

Towards four o'clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his
cloak, set out for the Bertaux. Still sleepy from the warmth of his bed,
he let himself be lulled by the quiet trot of his horse. When it stopped
of its own accord in front of those holes surrounded with thorns that
are dug on the margin of furrows, Cha