“My wife doesn’t care about it,” said Charles; “although she has been advised to take exercise, she prefers always sitting in her room reading.”

“Like me,” replied Leon.  “And indeed, what is better than to sit by one’s fireside in the evening with a book, while the wind beats against the window and the lamp is burning?”

“What, indeed?” she said, fixing her large black eyes wide open upon him.

“One thinks of nothing,” he continued; “the hours slip by.  Motionless we traverse countries we fancy we see, and your thought, blending with the fiction, playing with the details, follows the outline of the adventures.  It mingles with the characters, and it seems as if it were yourself palpitating beneath their costumes.”

“That is true!  That is true?” she said.

“Has it ever happened to you,” Leon went on, “to come across some vague idea of one’s own in a book, some dim image that comes back to you from afar, and as the completest expression of your own slightest sentiment?”

“I have experienced it,” she replied.

“That is why,” he said, “I especially love the poets.  I think verse more tender than prose, and that it moves far more easily to tears.”

“Still in the long run it is tiring,” continued Emma.  “Now I, on the contrary, adore stories that rush breathlessly along, that frighten one.  I detest commonplace heroes and moderate sentiments, such as there are in nature.”

“In fact,” observed the clerk, “these works, not touching the heart, miss, it seems to me, the true end of art.  It is so sweet, amid all the disenchantments of life, to be able to dwell in thought upon noble characters, pure affections, and pictures of happiness.  For myself, living here far from the world, this is my one distraction; but Yonville affords so few resources.”

“Like Tostes, no doubt,” replied Emma; “and so I always subscribed to a lending library.”

“If madame will do me the honour of making use of it”, said the chemist, who had just caught the last words, “I have at her disposal a library composed of the best authors, Voltaire, Rousseau, Delille, Walter Scott, the ‘Echo des Feuilletons’; and in addition I receive various periodicals, among them the ‘Fanal de Rouen’ daily, having the advantage to be its correspondent for the districts of Buchy, Forges, Neufchatel, Yonville, and vicinity.”

For two hours and a half they had been at table; for the servant Artemis, carelessly dragging her old list slippers over the flags, brought one plate after the other, forgot everything, and constantly left the door of the billiard-room half open, so that it beat against the wall with its hooks.