es, and Emma, changing her place, leant her elbow on the table,
turning over the leaves of "L'Illustration". She had brought her ladies'
journal with her. Leon sat down near her; they looked at the engravings
together, and waited for one another at the bottom of the pages. She
often begged him to read her the verses; Leon declaimed them in a
languid voice, to which he carefully gave a dying fall in the love
passages. But the noise of the dominoes annoyed him. Monsieur Homais
was strong at the game; he could beat Charles and give him a double-six.
Then the three hundred finished, they both stretched themselves out in
front of the fire, and were soon asleep. The fire was dying out in the
cinders; the teapot was empty, Leon was still reading.

Emma listened to him, mechanically turning around the lampshade, on the
gauze of which were painted clowns in carriages, and tight-rope dances
with their balancing-poles. Leon stopped, pointing with a gesture to his
sleeping audience; then they talked in low tones, and their conversation
seemed the more sweet to them because it was unheard.

Thus a kind of bond was established between them, a constant commerce
of books and of romances. Monsieur Bovary, little given to jealousy, did
not trouble himself about it.

On his birthday he received a beautiful phrenological head, all marked
with figures to the thorax and painted blue. This was an attention of
the clerk's. He showed him many others, even to doing errands for him
at Rouen; and the book of a novelist having made the mania for cactuses
fashionable, Leon bought some for Madame Bovary, bringing them back on
his knees in the "Hirondelle," pricking his fingers on their hard hairs.

She had a board with a balustrade fixed against her window to hold the
pots. The clerk, too, had his small hanging garden; they saw each other
tending their flowers at their windows.

Of the windows of the village there was one yet more often occupied; for
on Sundays from morning to night, and every morning when the weather was
bright, one could see at the dormer-window of the garret the profile of
Monsieur Binet bending over his lathe, whose monotonous humming could be
heard at the Lion d'Or.

One evening on coming home Leon found in his room a rug in velvet and
wool with leaves on a pale ground. He called Madame Homais, Monsieur
Homais, Justin, the children, the cook; he spoke of it to his chief;
every one wanted to see this rug. Why did the doctor'