“Yet I love him,” she said to herself.

No matter!  She was not happy—­she never had been.  Whence came this insufficiency in life—­this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?  But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet’s heart in an angel’s form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him?  Ah! how impossible!  Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie.  Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.

A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard from the convent-clock.  Four o’clock!  And it seemed to her that she had been there on that form an eternity.  But an infinity of passions may be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space.

Emma lived all absorbed in hers, and troubled no more about money matters than an archduchess.

Once, however, a wretched-looking man, rubicund and bald, came to her house, saying he had been sent by Monsieur Vincart of Rouen.  He took out the pins that held together the side-pockets of his long green overcoat, stuck them into his sleeve, and politely handed her a paper.

It was a bill for seven hundred francs, signed by her, and which Lheureux, in spite of all his professions, had paid away to Vincart.  She sent her servant for him.  He could not come.  Then the stranger, who had remained standing, casting right and left curious glances, that his thick, fair eyebrows hid, asked with a naive air—­

“What answer am I to take Monsieur Vincart?”

“Oh,” said Emma, “tell him that I haven’t it.  I will send next week; he must wait; yes, till next week.”

And the fellow went without another word.

But the next day at twelve o’clock she received a summons, and the sight of the stamped paper, on which appeared several times in large letters, “Maitre Hareng, bailiff at Buchy,” so frightened her that she rushed in hot haste to the linendraper’s.  She found him in his shop, doing up a parcel.

“Your obedient!” he said; “I am at your service.”

But Lheureux, all the same, went on with his work, helped by a young girl of about thirteen, somewhat hunch-backed, who was at once his clerk and his servant.

Then, his clogs clattering on the shop-boards, he went up in front of Madame Bovary to the first door, and introduced her into a narrow closet, where, in a large bureau in sapon-wood, lay some ledgers, protected by a horizontal padlocked iron bar.  Against the wall, under some remnants of calico, one glimpsed a safe, but of such dimensions that it must contain something besides bills and money.  Monsieur Lheureux, in fact, went in for pawnbroking, and it was there that he had put Madame Bovary’s gold chain, together with the earrings of poor old Tellier, who, at last forced to sell out, had bought a meagre store of grocery at Quincampoix, where he was dying of catarrh amongst his candles, that were less yellow than his face.