. Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur
Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your
science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse
to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the
doctor or the chemist. The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad,
and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish. The thermometer (I
have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees and in the
hottest season rises to 25 or 30 degrees Centigrade at the outside,
which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54
degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more. And, as a matter of fact,
we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the
one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on the other; and
this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapors given off
by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which,
as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen,
and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which sucking up into
itself the humus from the ground, mixing together all those different
emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say, and combining with the
electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in
the long run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious
miasmata,--this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side
whence it comes, or rather whence it should come--that is to say, the
southern side--by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled
themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once, like
breezes from Russia."

"At any rate, you have some walks in the neighborhood?" continued Madame
Bovary, speaking to the young man.

"Oh, very few," he answered. "There is a place they call La Pature, on
the top of the hill, on the edge of the forest. Sometimes, on Sundays, I
go and stay there with a book, watching the sunset."

"I think there is nothing so admirable as sunsets," she resumed; "but
especially by the side of the sea."

"Oh, I adore the sea!" said Monsieur Leon.

"And then, does it not seem to you," continued Madame Bovary, "that the
mind travels more freely on this limitless expanse, the contemplation of
which elevates the soul, gives ideas of the infinite, the ideal?"

"It is the same with mountainous landscapes," continued Leon. "A cousin
of mine who traveled in