He was well, looked well; his reputation was firmly established.

The country-folk loved him because he was not proud.  He petted the children, never went to the public house, and, moreover, his morals inspired confidence.  He was specially successful with catarrhs and chest complaints.  Being much afraid of killing his patients, Charles, in fact only prescribed sedatives, from time to time and emetic, a footbath, or leeches.  It was not that he was afraid of surgery; he bled people copiously like horses, and for the taking out of teeth he had the “devil’s own wrist.”

Finally, to keep up with the times, he took in “La Ruche Medicale,” a new journal whose prospectus had been sent him.  He read it a little after dinner, but in about five minutes the warmth of the room added to the effect of his dinner sent him to sleep; and he sat there, his chin on his two hands and his hair spreading like a mane to the foot of the lamp.  Emma looked at him and shrugged her shoulders.  Why, at least, was not her husband one of those men of taciturn passions who work at their books all night, and at last, when about sixty, the age of rheumatism sets in, wear a string of orders on their ill-fitting black coat?  She could have wished this name of Bovary, which was hers, had been illustrious, to see it displayed at the booksellers’, repeated in the newspapers, known to all France.  But Charles had no ambition.

An Yvetot doctor whom he had lately met in consultation had somewhat humiliated him at the very bedside of the patient, before the assembled relatives.  When, in the evening, Charles told her this anecdote, Emma inveighed loudly against his colleague.  Charles was much touched.  He kissed her forehead with a tear in his eyes.  But she was angered with shame; she felt a wild desire to strike him; she went to open the window in the passage and breathed in the fresh air to calm herself.

“What a man!  What a man!” she said in a low voice, biting her lips.

Besides, she was becoming more irritated with him.  As he grew older his manner grew heavier; at dessert he cut the corks of the empty bottles; after eating he cleaned his teeth with his tongue; in taking soup he made a gurgling noise with every spoonful; and, as he was getting fatter, the puffed-out cheeks seemed to push the eyes, always small, up to the temples.

Sometimes Emma tucked the red borders of his under-vest unto his waistcoat, rearranged his cravat, and threw away the dirty gloves he was going to put on; and this was not, as he fancied, for himself; it was for herself, by a diffusion of egotism, of nervous irritation.  Sometimes, too, she told him of what she had read, such as a passage in a novel, of a new play, or an anecdote of the “upper ten” that she had seen in a feuilleton; for, after all, Charles was something, an ever-open ear, and ever-ready approbation.  She confided many a thing to her greyhound.  She would have done so to the logs in the fireplace or to the pendulum of the clock.