When he was twelve years old his mother had her own way; he began lessons.  The cure took him in hand; but the lessons were so short and irregular that they could not be of much use.  They were given at spare moments in the sacristy, standing up, hurriedly, between a baptism and a burial; or else the cure, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil after the Angelus*.  They went up to his room and settled down; the flies and moths fluttered round the candle.  It was close, the child fell asleep, and the good man, beginning to doze with his hands on his stomach, was soon snoring with his mouth wide open.  On other occasions, when Monsieur le Cure, on his way back after administering the viaticum to some sick person in the neighbourhood, caught sight of Charles playing about the fields, he called him, lectured him for a quarter of an hour and took advantage of the occasion to make him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree.  The rain interrupted them or an acquaintance passed.  All the same he was always pleased with him, and even said the “young man” had a very good memory.

     A devotion said at morning, noon, and evening, at the sound
     of a bell.  Here, the evening prayer.

Charles could not go on like this.  Madame Bovary took strong steps.  Ashamed, or rather tired out, Monsieur Bovary gave in without a struggle, and they waited one year longer, so that the lad should take his first communion.

Six months more passed, and the year after Charles was finally sent to school at Rouen, where his father took him towards the end of October, at the time of the St. Romain fair.

It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him.  He was a youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in school-hours, was attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well in the refectory.  He had in loco parentis* a wholesale ironmonger in the Rue Ganterie, who took him out once a month on Sundays after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the boats, and then brought him back to college at seven o’clock before supper.  Every Thursday evening he wrote a long letter to his mother with red ink and three wafers; then he went over his history note-books, or read an old volume of “Anarchasis” that was knocking about the study.  When he went for walks he talked to the servant, who, like himself, came from the country.

     In place of a parent.

By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once even he got a certificate in natural history.  But at the end of his third year his parents withdrew him from the school to make him study medicine, convinced that he could even take his degree by himself.

His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer’s she knew, overlooking the Eau-de-Robec.  She made arrangements for his board, got him furniture, table and two chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron stove with the supply of wood that was to warm the poor child.