“Now,” said Hivert, “for all this trouble you’ll give us your performance.”

The blind man sank down on his haunches, with his head thrown back, whilst he rolled his greenish eyes, lolled out his tongue, and rubbed his stomach with both hands as he uttered a kind of hollow yell like a famished dog.  Emma, filled with disgust, threw him over her shoulder a five-franc piece.  It was all her fortune.  It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away.

The coach had gone on again when suddenly Monsieur Homais leant out through the window, crying—­

“No farinaceous or milk food, wear wool next the skin, and expose the diseased parts to the smoke of juniper berries.”

The sight of the well-known objects that defiled before her eyes gradually diverted Emma from her present trouble.  An intolerable fatigue overwhelmed her, and she reached her home stupefied, discouraged, almost asleep.

“Come what may come!” she said to herself.  “And then, who knows?  Why, at any moment could not some extraordinary event occur?  Lheureux even might die!”

At nine o’clock in the morning she was awakened by the sound of voices in the Place.  There was a crowd round the market reading a large bill fixed to one of the posts, and she saw Justin, who was climbing on to a stone and tearing down the bill.  But at this moment the rural guard seized him by the collar.  Monsieur Homais came out of his shop, and Mere Lefrangois, in the midst of the crowd, seemed to be perorating.

“Madame! madame!” cried Felicite, running in, “it’s abominable!”

And the poor girl, deeply moved, handed her a yellow paper that she had just torn off the door.  Emma read with a glance that all her furniture was for sale.

Then they looked at one another silently.  The servant and mistress had no secret one from the other.  At last Felicite sighed—­

“If I were you, madame, I should go to Monsieur Guillaumin.”

“Do you think—­”

And this question meant to say—­

“You who know the house through the servant, has the master spoken sometimes of me?”

“Yes, you’d do well to go there.”

She dressed, put on her black gown, and her hood with jet beads, and that she might not be seen (there was still a crowd on the Place), she took the path by the river, outside the village.

She reached the notary’s gate quite breathless.  The sky was sombre, and a little snow was falling.  At the sound of the bell, Theodore in a red waistcoat appeared on the steps; he came to open the door almost familiarly, as to an acquaintance, and showed her into the dining-room.

A large porcelain stove crackled beneath a cactus that filled up the niche in the wall, and in black wood frames against the oak-stained paper hung Steuben’s “Esmeralda” and Schopin’s “Potiphar.”  The ready-laid table, the two silver chafing-dishes, the crystal door-knobs, the parquet and the furniture, all shone with a scrupulous, English cleanliness; the windows were ornamented at each corner with stained glass.