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 round 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 Lucy 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 recognised all the intoxication and the anguish that had almost killed her.  The voice of a 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 her?”

“No, no!” she answered; “he is her lover!”

“Yet he vows vengeance on her family, while the other one who came on before said, ‘I love Lucie and she loves me!’ Besides, he went off with her father arm in arm.  For he certainly is her father, isn’t he—­the ugly little man with a cock’s feather in his hat?”

Despite Emma’s explanations, as soon as the recitative duet began in which Gilbert lays bare his abominable machinations to his master Ashton, Charles, seeing the false troth-ring that is to deceive Lucie, thought it was a love-gift sent by Edgar.  He confessed, moreover, that he did not understand the story because of the music, which interfered very much with the words.

“What does it matter?” said Emma.  “Do be quiet!”