She soon began vomiting blood.  Her lips became drawn.  Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string nearly breaking.

After this she began to scream horribly.  She cursed the poison, railed at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust away with her stiffened arms everything that Charles, in more agony than herself, tried to make her drink.  He stood up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling sound in his throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his whole body.  Felicite was running hither and thither in the room.  Homais, motionless, uttered great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, always retaining his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy.

“The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the moment that the cause ceases—­”

“The effect must cease,” said Homais, “that is evident.”

“Oh, save her!” cried Bovary.

And, without listening to the chemist, who was still venturing the hypothesis, “It is perhaps a salutary paroxysm,” Canivet was about to administer some theriac, when they heard the cracking of a whip; all the windows rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to their ears in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of the market.  It was Doctor Lariviere.

The apparition of a god would not have caused more commotion.  Bovary raised his hands; Canivet stopped short; and Homais pulled off his skull-cap long before the doctor had come in.

He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of Bichat, to that generation, now extinct, of philosophical practitioners, who, loving their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with enthusiasm and wisdom.  Everyone in his hospital trembled when he was angry; and his students so revered him that they tried, as soon as they were themselves in practice, to imitate him as much as possible.  So that in all the towns about they were found wearing his long wadded merino overcoat and black frock-coat, whose buttoned cuffs slightly covered his brawny hands—­very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be more ready to plunge into suffering.  Disdainful of honours, of titles, and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospitallers, generous, fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, he would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect had not caused him to be feared as a demon.  His glance, more penetrating than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected every lie athwart all assertions and all reticences.  And thus he went along, full of that debonair majesty that is given by the consciousness of great talent, of fortune, and of forty years of a labourious and irreproachable life.

He frowned as soon as he had passed the door when he saw the cadaverous face of Emma stretched out on her back with her mouth open.  Then, while apparently listening to Canivet, he rubbed his fingers up and down beneath his nostrils, and repeated—­