se of showing off, had had the
table laid for four.

Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza;
then, turning to his neighbour--

"Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in
our 'Hirondelle.'"

"That is true," replied Emma; "but moving about always amuses me. I like
change of place."

"It is so tedious," sighed the clerk, "to be always riveted to the same
places."

"If you were like me," said Charles, "constantly obliged to be in the
saddle"--

"But," Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, "nothing, it
seems to me, is more pleasant--when one can," he added.

"Moreover," said the druggist, "the practice of medicine is not very
hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us
the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay
pretty well. We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases
of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a
few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a
serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of
scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our
peasant dwellings. 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 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
vapours 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 atmos