He had so often heard these things said that they did not strike him as original.  Emma was like all his mistresses; and the charm of novelty, gradually falling away like a garment, laid bare the eternal monotony of passion, that has always the same forms and the same language.  He did not distinguish, this man of so much experience, the difference of sentiment beneath the sameness of expression.  Because lips libertine and venal had murmured such words to him, he believed but little in the candour of hers; exaggerated speeches hiding mediocre affections must be discounted; as if the fullness of the soul did not sometimes overflow in the emptiest metaphors, since no one can ever give the exact measure of his needs, nor of his conceptions, nor of his sorrows; and since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars.

But with that superior critical judgment that belongs to him who, in no matter what circumstance, holds back, Rodolphe saw other delights to be got out of this love.  He thought all modesty in the way.  He treated her quite sans facon.* He made of her something supple and corrupt.  Hers was an idiotic sort of attachment, full of admiration for him, of voluptuousness for her, a beatitude that benumbed her; her soul sank into this drunkenness, shrivelled up, drowned in it, like Clarence in his butt of Malmsey.

     Off-handedly.

By the mere effect of her love Madame Bovary’s manners changed.  Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth, “as if to defy the people.”  At last, those who still doubted doubted no longer when one day they saw her getting out of the “Hirondelle,” her waist squeezed into a waistcoat like a man; and Madame Bovary senior, who, after a fearful scene with her husband, had taken refuge at her son’s, was not the least scandalised of the women-folk.  Many other things displeased her.  First, Charles had not attended to her advice about the forbidding of novels; then the “ways of the house” annoyed her; she allowed herself to make some remarks, and there were quarrels, especially one on account of Felicite.

Madame Bovary senior, the evening before, passing along the passage, had surprised her in company of a man—­a man with a brown collar, about forty years old, who, at the sound of her step, had quickly escaped through the kitchen.  Then Emma began to laugh, but the good lady grew angry, declaring that unless morals were to be laughed at one ought to look after those of one’s servants.

“Where were you brought up?” asked the daughter-in-law, with so impertinent a look that Madame Bovary asked her if she were not perhaps defending her own case.

“Leave the room!” said the young woman, springing up with a bound.

“Emma!  Mamma!” cried Charles, trying to reconcile them.