“Good! good!”

But he made a slow gesture with his shoulders.  Bovary watched him; they looked at one another; and this man, accustomed as he was to the sight of pain, could not keep back a tear that fell on his shirt-frill.

He tried to take Canivet into the next room.  Charles followed him.

“She is very ill, isn’t she?  If we put on sinapisms?  Anything!  Oh, think of something, you who have saved so many!”

Charles caught him in both his arms, and gazed at him wildly, imploringly, half-fainting against his breast.

“Come, my poor fellow, courage!  There is nothing more to be done.”

And Doctor Lariviere turned away.

“You are going?”

“I will come back.”

He went out only to give an order to the coachman, with Monsieur Canivet, who did not care either to have Emma die under his hands.

The chemist rejoined them on the Place.  He could not by temperament keep away from celebrities, so he begged Monsieur Lariviere to do him the signal honour of accepting some breakfast.

He sent quickly to the “Lion d’Or” for some pigeons; to the butcher’s for all the cutlets that were to be had; to Tuvache for cream; and to Lestiboudois for eggs; and the druggist himself aided in the preparations, while Madame Homais was saying as she pulled together the strings of her jacket—­

“You must excuse us, sir, for in this poor place, when one hasn’t been told the night before—­”

“Wine glasses!” whispered Homais.

“If only we were in town, we could fall back upon stuffed trotters.”

“Be quiet!  Sit down, doctor!”

He thought fit, after the first few mouthfuls, to give some details as to the catastrophe.

“We first had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then intolerable pains at the epigastrium, super purgation, coma.”

“But how did she poison herself?”

“I don’t know, doctor, and I don’t even know where she can have procured the arsenious acid.”

Justin, who was just bringing in a pile of plates, began to tremble.

“What’s the matter?” said the chemist.

At this question the young man dropped the whole lot on the ground with a crash.

“Imbecile!” cried Homais, “awkward lout! block-head! confounded ass!”

But suddenly controlling himself—­

“I wished, doctor, to make an analysis, and primo I delicately introduced a tube—­”

“You would have done better,” said the physician, “to introduce your fingers into her throat.”

His colleague was silent, having just before privately received a severe lecture about his emetic, so that this good Canivet, so arrogant and so verbose at the time of the clubfoot, was to-day very modest.  He smiled without ceasing in an approving manner.

Homais dilated in Amphytrionic pride, and the affecting thought of Bovary vaguely contributed to his pleasure by a kind of egotistic reflex upon himself.  Then the presence of the doctor transported him.  He displayed his erudition, cited pell-mell cantharides, upas, the manchineel, vipers.