Charles’s conversation was commonplace as a street pavement, and everyone’s ideas trooped through it in their everyday garb, without exciting emotion, laughter, or thought.  He had never had the curiosity, he said, while he lived at Rouen, to go to the theatre to see the actors from Paris.  He could neither swim, nor fence, nor shoot, and one day he could not explain some term of horsemanship to her that she had come across in a novel.

A man, on the contrary, should he not know everything, excel in manifold activities, initiate you into the energies of passion, the refinements of life, all mysteries?  But this one taught nothing, knew nothing, wished nothing.  He thought her happy; and she resented this easy calm, this serene heaviness, the very happiness she gave him.

Sometimes she would draw; and it was great amusement to Charles to stand there bolt upright and watch her bend over her cardboard, with eyes half-closed the better to see her work, or rolling, between her fingers, little bread-pellets.  As to the piano, the more quickly her fingers glided over it the more he wondered.  She struck the notes with aplomb, and ran from top to bottom of the keyboard without a break.  Thus shaken up, the old instrument, whose strings buzzed, could be heard at the other end of the village when the window was open, and often the bailiff’s clerk, passing along the highroad bare-headed and in list slippers, stopped to listen, his sheet of paper in his hand.

Emma, on the other hand, knew how to look after her house.  She sent the patients’ accounts in well-phrased letters that had no suggestion of a bill.  When they had a neighbour to dinner on Sundays, she managed to have some tasty dish—­piled up pyramids of greengages on vine leaves, served up preserves turned out into plates—­and even spoke of buying finger-glasses for dessert.  From all this much consideration was extended to Bovary.

Charles finished by rising in his own esteem for possessing such a wife.  He showed with pride in the sitting room two small pencil sketched by her that he had had framed in very large frames, and hung up against the wallpaper by long green cords.  People returning from mass saw him at his door in his wool-work slippers.

He came home late—­at ten o’clock, at midnight sometimes.  Then he asked for something to eat, and as the servant had gone to bed, Emma waited on him.  He took off his coat to dine more at his ease.  He told her, one after the other, the people he had met, the villages where he had been, the prescriptions ha had written, and, well pleased with himself, he finished the remainder of the boiled beef and onions, picked pieces off the cheese, munched an apple, emptied his water-bottle, and then went to bed, and lay on his back and snored.

As he had been for a time accustomed to wear nightcaps, his handkerchief would not keep down over his ears, so that his hair in the morning was all tumbled pell-mell about his face and whitened with the feathers of the pillow, whose strings came untied during the night.  He always wore thick boots that had two long creases over the instep running obliquely towards the ankle, while the rest of the upper continued in a straight line as if stretched on a wooden foot.  He said that “was quite good enough for the country.”