Homais asked to be allowed to keep on his skull-cap, for fear of coryza; then, turning to his neighbour—­

“Madame is no doubt a little fatigued; one gets jolted so abominably in our ‘Hirondelle.’”

“That is true,” replied Emma; “but moving about always amuses me.  I like change of place.”

“It is so tedious,” sighed the clerk, “to be always riveted to the same places.”

“If you were like me,” said Charles, “constantly obliged to be in the saddle”—­

“But,” Leon went on, addressing himself to Madame Bovary, “nothing, it seems to me, is more pleasant—­when one can,” he added.

“Moreover,” said the druggist, “the practice of medicine is not very hard work in our part of the world, for the state of our roads allows us the use of gigs, and generally, as the farmers are prosperous, they pay pretty well.  We have, medically speaking, besides the ordinary cases of enteritis, bronchitis, bilious affections, etc., now and then a few intermittent fevers at harvest-time; but on the whole, little of a serious nature, nothing special to note, unless it be a great deal of scrofula, due, no doubt, to the deplorable hygienic conditions of our peasant dwellings.  Ah! you will find many prejudices to combat, Monsieur Bovary, much obstinacy of routine, with which all the efforts of your science will daily come into collision; for people still have recourse to novenas, to relics, to the priest, rather than come straight to the doctor or the chemist.  The climate, however, is not, truth to tell, bad, and we even have a few nonagenarians in our parish.  The thermometer (I have made some observations) falls in winter to 4 degrees Centigrade at the outside, which gives us 24 degrees Reaumur as the maximum, or otherwise 54 degrees Fahrenheit (English scale), not more.  And, as a matter of fact, we are sheltered from the north winds by the forest of Argueil on the one side, from the west winds by the St. Jean range on the other; and this heat, moreover, which, on account of the aqueous vapours given off by the river and the considerable number of cattle in the fields, which, as you know, exhale much ammonia, that is to say, nitrogen, hydrogen and oxygen (no, nitrogen and hydrogen alone), and which sucking up into itself the humus from the ground, mixing together all those different emanations, unites them into a stack, so to say, and combining with the electricity diffused through the atmosphere, when there is any, might in the long run, as in tropical countries, engender insalubrious miasmata—­this heat, I say, finds itself perfectly tempered on the side whence it comes, or rather whence it should come—­that is to say, the southern side—­by the south-eastern winds, which, having cooled themselves passing over the Seine, reach us sometimes all at once like breezes from Russia.”

“At any rate, you have some walks in the neighbourhood?” continued Madame Bovary, speaking to the young man.