l of which, only just
begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other
books.

She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any
folly. She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she
could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid
enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.

In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called
them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the
corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of
old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all
over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils,
her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three grey hairs on
her temples, she talked much of her old age.

She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed
around her showing his anxiety--

"Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?"

Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table,
sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head.

Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long
consultations together on the subject of Emma.

What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all
medical treatment? "Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame
Bovary senior.

"She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she
were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have
these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her
head, and from the idleness in which she lives."

"Yet she is always busy," said Charles.

"Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against
religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from
Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Anyone who
has no religion always ends by turning out badly."

So it was decided to stop Emma reading novels. The enterprise did not
seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through
Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had
discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply
to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous
trade? The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold. During
the three weeks that they had been together