nd the flute was heard like the murmur of
a fountain or the warbling of birds. Lucia attacked her cavatina in G
major bravely. She plained of love; she longed for wings. Emma too,
fleeing from life, would have liked to fly away in an embrace. Suddenly
Edgar-Lagardy appeared.

He had that splendid pallor that gives something of the majesty of
marble to the ardent races of the South. His vigorous form was tightly
clad in a brown-coloured doublet; a small chiselled poniard hung against
his left thigh, and he cast around laughing looks showing his white
teeth. They said that a Polish princess having heard him sing one night
on the beach at Biarritz, where he mended boats, had fallen in love
with him. She had ruined herself for him. He had deserted her for other
women, and this sentimental celebrity did not fail to enhance his
artistic reputation. The diplomatic mummer took care always to slip into
his advertisements some poetic phrase on the fascination of his person
and the susceptibility of his soul. A fine organ, imperturbable
coolness, more temperament than intelligence, more power of emphasis
than of real singing, made up the charm of this admirable, charlatan
nature, in which there was something of the hairdresser and the
toreador.

From the first scene he evoked enthusiasm. He pressed Lucia in his arms,
he left her, he came back, he seemed desperate; he had outbursts of
rage, then elegiac gurglings of infinite sweetness, and the notes
escaped from his bare neck full of sobs and kisses. Emma leant forward
to see him, clutching the velvet of the box with her nails. She was
filling her heart with these melodious lamentations that were drawn out
to the accompaniment of the double-basses, like the cries of the
drowning in the tumult of a tempest. She recognized all the intoxication
and the anguish that had almost killed her. The voice of the prima donna
seemed to her to be but echoes of her conscience, and this illusion that
charmed her as some very thing of her own life. But no one on earth had
loved her with such love. He had not wept like Edgar that last moonlit
night when they said, "To-morrow! to-morrow!" The theatre rang with
cheers; they recommenced the entire movement; the lovers spoke of the
flowers on their tomb, of vows, exile, fate, hopes; and when they
uttered the final adieu, Emma gave a sharp cry that mingled with the
vibrations of the last chords.

"But why," asked Bovary, "does that gentleman persecute