er (you
understand that I am narrating). He was a man of thirty-four years old
and of a brutal temperament; he had had much success and many easy
conquests; he then had an actress for a mistress. He saw Madame Bovary;
she was young and charming; he resolved to make her his mistress. The
thing was easy; three meetings were sufficient to bring it about. The
first time he came to an agricultural meeting, the second time he paid
her a visit, the third time he accompanied her on a horseback ride which
her husband judged necessary to her health; it was then, in a first
visit to the forest, that the fall took place. Their meetings
multiplied after this, at Rodolphe's chateau and in the health officer's
garden. The lovers reached the extreme limits of voluptuousness! Madame
Bovary wished to elope with Rodolphe, but while Rodolphe dared not say
no, he wrote a letter in which he tried to show her that for many
reasons, he could not elope. Stricken down by the reception of this
letter, Madame Bovary had a brain fever, following which typhoid fever
declared itself. The fever killed the love, but the malady
remained. This is the second scene.

We come now to the third scene. The fall with Rodolphe was followed by a
religious reaction, but it was short; Madame Bovary was about to fall
anew. The husband thought the theatre useful in the convalescence of his
wife and took her to Rouen. In a box opposite that occupied by M. and
Madame Bovary, was Leon Dupuis, the notary's young clerk, who had made
his way to Paris, and who had now become strangely experienced and
knowing. He went to see Madame Bovary and proposed a _rendezvous_.
Madame Bovary suggested the cathedral. On coming out of the cathedral,
Leon proposed that they take a cab. She resisted at first, but Leon told
her that this was done in Paris, and there was no further obstacle. The
fall takes place in the cab! Meetings follow for Leon, as for Rodolphe,
at the health officer's house, and then at a room which they rented in
Rouen. Finally, she became weary of the second love, and here begins the
scene of distress; it is the last of the romance.

Madame Bovary was prodigal, having lavished gifts upon Rodolphe and
Leon; she had led a life of luxury and, in order to meet such expense
had put her name to a number of promissory notes. She had obtained a
power of attorney from her husband in the management of their common
patrimony, fell in with a usurer who discounted the notes which