took off her gloves, she wiped her hands,
then fanned her face with her handkerchief, while athwart the throbbing
of her temples she heard the murmur of the crowd and the voice of the
councilor intoning his phrases. He said:

"Continue, persevere; listen neither to the suggestions of routine, nor
to the over-hasty councils of a rash empiricism. Apply yourselves, above
all, to the amelioration of the soil, to good manures, to the
development of the equine, bovine, ovine, and porcine races. Let these
shows be to you pacific arenas, where the victor in leaving it will hold
forth a hand to the vanquished, and will fraternize with him in the
hope of better success. And you, aged servants, humble domestics, whose
hard labor no Government up to this day has taken into consideration,
come hither to receive the reward of your silent virtues, and be assured
that the state henceforward has its eye upon you; that it encourages
you, protects you; that it will accede to your just demands, and
alleviate as much as in it lies the burden of your painful sacrifices."

Monsieur Lieuvain then sat down; Monsieur Derozerays got up, beginning
another speech. His was not perhaps so florid as that of the councilor,
but it recommended itself by a more direct style, that is to say, by
more special knowledge and more elevated considerations. Thus the praise
of the Government took up less space in it; religion and agriculture
more. He showed in it the relations of these two, and how they had
always contributed to civilization. Rodolphe with Madame Bovary was
talking dreams, presentiments, magnetism. Going back to the cradle of
society, the orator painted those fierce times when men lived on acorns
in the heart of woods. Then they had left off the skins of beasts, had
put on cloth, tilled the soil, planted the vine. Was this a good, and in
this discovery was there not more of injury than of gain? Monsieur
Derozerays set himself this problem. From magnetism little by little
Rodolphe had come to affinities, and while the president was citing
Cincinnatus and his plough, Diocletian planting his cabbages, and the
emperors of China inaugurating the year by the sowing of seed, the young
man was explaining to the young woman that these irresistible
attractions find their cause in some previous state of existence.

"Thus we," he said, "why did we come to know one another? What chance
willed it? It was because across the infinite, like two streams that
flow