Lheureux sat down in a large cane arm-chair, saying:  “What news?”

“See!”

And she showed him the paper.

“Well how can I help it?”

Then she grew angry, reminding him of the promise he had given not to pay away her bills.  He acknowledged it.

“But I was pressed myself; the knife was at my own throat.”

“And what will happen now?” she went on.

“Oh, it’s very simple; a judgment and then a distraint—­that’s about it!”

Emma kept down a desire to strike him, and asked gently if there was no way of quieting Monsieur Vincart.

“I dare say!  Quiet Vincart!  You don’t know him; he’s more ferocious than an Arab!”

Still Monsieur Lheureux must interfere.

“Well, listen.  It seems to me so far I’ve been very good to you.”  And opening one of his ledgers, “See,” he said.  Then running up the page with his finger, “Let’s see! let’s see!  August 3d, two hundred francs; June 17th, a hundred and fifty; March 23d, forty-six.  In April—­”

He stopped, as if afraid of making some mistake.

“Not to speak of the bills signed by Monsieur Bovary, one for seven hundred francs, and another for three hundred.  As to your little installments, with the interest, why, there’s no end to ’em; one gets quite muddled over ’em.  I’ll have nothing more to do with it.”

She wept; she even called him “her good Monsieur Lheureux.”  But he always fell back upon “that rascal Vincart.”  Besides, he hadn’t a brass farthing; no one was paying him now-a-days; they were eating his coat off his back; a poor shopkeeper like him couldn’t advance money.

Emma was silent, and Monsieur Lheureux, who was biting the feathers of a quill, no doubt became uneasy at her silence, for he went on—­

“Unless one of these days I have something coming in, I might—­”

“Besides,” said she, “as soon as the balance of Barneville—­”

“What!”

And on hearing that Langlois had not yet paid he seemed much surprised.  Then in a honied voice—­

“And we agree, you say?”

“Oh! to anything you like.”

On this he closed his eyes to reflect, wrote down a few figures, and declaring it would be very difficult for him, that the affair was shady, and that he was being bled, he wrote out four bills for two hundred and fifty francs each, to fall due month by month.

“Provided that Vincart will listen to me!  However, it’s settled.  I don’t play the fool; I’m straight enough.”

Next he carelessly showed her several new goods, not one of which, however, was in his opinion worthy of madame.

“When I think that there’s a dress at threepence-halfpenny a yard, and warranted fast colours!  And yet they actually swallow it!  Of course you understand one doesn’t tell them what it really is!” He hoped by this confession of dishonesty to others to quite convince her of his probity to her.