Charles's conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and every
one's ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting
emotion, laughter, or thought. He had never had the curiosity, he said,
while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from
Paris. He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could
not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in
a novel.

A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold
activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements
of life, all mysteries? But this one taught nothing, knew nothing,
wished nothing. He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm,
this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.

Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand
there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes
half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers,
little bread-pellets. As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers
glided over it the more he wondered. She struck the notes with aplomb,
and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break. Thus shaken
up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the
other end of the village when the window was open, and often the
bailiff's clerk, passing along the highroad bareheaded and in list
slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.

Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house. She sent the
patients' accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of a
bill. When they had a neighbor to dinner on Sundays, she managed to have
some dainty dish--piled up pyramids of green-gages on vine leaves,
served up preserves turned out into plates--and even spoke of buying
finger-glasses for dessert. From all this, much consideration was
extended to Bovary.

Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife.
He showed with pride in the sitting-room two small pencil sketches by
her that he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the
wall-paper by long green cords. People returning from mass saw him at
his door in his wool-work slippers.

He came home late--at ten o'clock, at midnight sometimes. Then he asked
for something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited on
him. He took off his coat to dine more at his ease. He told her, one
after the other,