“Call the servant,” said Charles.  “You know, dearie, that mamma does not like to be disturbed.”

Autumn was setting in, and the leaves were already falling, as they did two years ago when she was ill.  Where would it all end?  And he walked up and down, his hands behind his back.

Madame was in her room, which no one entered.  She stayed there all day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian’s shop.  In order not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of manoeuvring, she at last succeeded in banishing him to the second floor, while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of orgies and thrilling situations.  Often, seized with fear, she cried out, and Charles hurried to her.

“Oh, go away!” she would say.

Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her masses of hair, too heavy, and, gazing upon the stars, longed for some princely love.  She thought of him, of Leon.  She would then have given anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her.

These were her gala days.  She wanted them to be sumptuous, and when he alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally, which happened pretty well every time.  He tried to make her understand that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel, but she always found some objection.

One day she drew six small silver-gilt spoons from her bag (they were old Roualt’s wedding present), begging him to pawn them at once for her, and Leon obeyed, though the proceeding annoyed him.  He was afraid of compromising himself.

Then, on, reflection, he began to think his mistress’s ways were growing odd, and that they were perhaps not wrong in wishing to separate him from her.

In fact someone had sent his mother a long anonymous letter to warn her that he was “ruining himself with a married woman,” and the good lady at once conjuring up the eternal bugbear of families, the vague pernicious creature, the siren, the monster, who dwells fantastically in depths of love, wrote to Lawyer Dubocage, his employer, who behaved perfectly in the affair.  He kept him for three quarters of an hour trying to open his eyes, to warn him of the abyss into which he was falling.  Such an intrigue would damage him later on, when he set up for himself.  He implored him to break with her, and, if he would not make this sacrifice in his own interest, to do it at least for his, Dubocage’s sake.

At last Leon swore he would not see Emma again, and he reproached himself with not having kept his word, considering all the worry and lectures this woman might still draw down upon him, without reckoning the jokes made by his companions as they sat round the stove in the morning.  Besides, he was soon to be head clerk; it was time to settle down.  So he gave up his flute, exalted sentiments, and poetry; for every bourgeois in the flush of his youth, were it but for a day, a moment, has believed himself capable of immense passions, of lofty enterprises.  The most mediocre libertine has dreamed of sultanas; every notary bears within him the debris of a poet.