hairdresser, lamented his wasted
calling, his hopeless future, and dreaming of some shop in a big
town--at Rouen, for example, overlooking the harbor, near the
theater--he walked up and down all day from the mairie to the church,
sombre, and waiting for customers. When Madame Bovary looked up, she
always saw him there, like a sentinel on duty, with his skull-cap over
his ears and his waistcoat of lasting.

Sometimes in the afternoon, outside the window of her room, the head of
a man appeared, a swarthy head with black whiskers, smiling slowly, with
a broad, gentle smile that showed his white teeth. A waltz immediately
began, and on the organ, in a little drawing-room, dancers the size of a
finger, women in pink turbans, Tyrolians in jackets, monkeys in
frock-coats, gentlemen in knee-breeches, turned and turned between the
sofas, the consoles, multiplied in the bits of looking-glass held
together at their corners by a piece of gold paper. The man turned his
handle, looking to the right and left, and up at the windows. Now and
again, while he shot out a long squirt of brown saliva against the
milestone, with his knee he raised his instrument, whose hard straps
tired his shoulder; and now, doleful and drawling, or gay and hurried,
the music escaped from the box, droning through a curtain of pink
taffeta under a brass claw in arabesque. They were airs played in other
places at the theaters, sung in drawing-rooms, danced to at night under
lighted lustres, echoes of the world that reached even to Emma. Endless
sarabands ran through her head, and, like an Indian dancing-girl on the
flowers of a carpet, her thoughts leaped with the notes, swung from
dream to dream, from sadness to sadness. When the man had caught some
coppers in his cap, he drew down an old cover of blue cloth, hitched his
organ on to his back, and went off with a heavy tread. She watched him
going.

But it was above all the meal-times that were unbearable to her, in this
small room on the ground-floor, with its smoking stove, its creaking
door, the walls that sweated, the damp flags; all the bitterness of life
seemed served up on her plate, and with the smoke of the boiled beef
arose from her secret soul whiffs of sickliness. Charles was a slow
eater; she played with a few nuts, or, leaning on her elbow, amused
herself with drawing lines along the oil-cloth table-cover with the
point of her knife.

She now let everything in her household take care of itsel