with a fine powder, despite the vestry-broom.

The children in list shoes ran about there as if it were an enclosure
made for them. The shouts of their voices could be heard through the
humming of the bell. This grew less and less with the swinging of the
great rope that, hanging from the top of the belfry, dragged its end on
the ground. Swallows flitted to and fro uttering little cries, cut the
air with the edge of their wings, and swiftly returned to their yellow
nests under the tiles of the coping. At the end of the church a lamp was
burning, the wick of a night-light in a glass hung up. Its light from a
distance looked like a white stain trembling in the oil. A long ray of
the sun fell across the nave and seemed to darken the lower sides and
the corners.

"Where is the cure?" asked Madame Bovary of one of the lads, who was
amusing himself by shaking a swivel in a hole too large for it.

"He is just coming," he answered.

And in fact the door of the presbytery grated; Abbe Bournisien appeared;
the children, pell-mell, fled into the church.

"These young scamps!" murmured the priest, "always the same!" Then,
picking up a catechism all in rags that he had struck with his foot,
"They respect nothing!" But as soon as he caught sight of Madame Bovary,
"Excuse me," he said; "I did not recognize you."

He thrust the catechism into his pocket, and stopped short, balancing
the heavy vestry key between his two fingers.

The light of the setting sun that fell full upon his face paled the
lasting of his cassock, shiny at the elbows, ravelled at the hem. Grease
and tobacco stains followed along his broad chest the lines of the
buttons, and grew more numerous the farther they were from his
neckcloth, in which the massive folds of his red chin rested; this was
dotted with yellow spots, that disappeared beneath the coarse hair of
his greyish beard. He had just dined, and was breathing noisily.

"How are you?" he added.

"Not well," replied Emma; "I am ill."

"Well, and so am I," answered the priest. "These first warm days weaken
one most remarkably, don't they? But, after all, we are born to suffer,
as St. Paul says. But what does Monsieur Bovary think of it?"

"He!" she said with a gesture of contempt.

"What!" replied the good fellow, quite astonished, "doesn't he prescribe
something for you?"

"Ah!" said Emma, "it is no earthly remedy I need."

But the cure from time to time looked into the church, where the
kne