Unconsciously, Leon, while talking, had placed his foot on one of the bars of the chair on which Madame Bovary was sitting.  She wore a small blue silk necktie, that kept up like a ruff a gauffered cambric collar, and with the movements of her head the lower part of her face gently sunk into the linen or came out from it.  Thus side by side, while Charles and the chemist chatted, they entered into one of those vague conversations where the hazard of all that is said brings you back to the fixed centre of a common sympathy.  The Paris theatres, titles of novels, new quadrilles, and the world they did not know; Tostes, where she had lived, and Yonville, where they were; they examined all, talked of everything till to the end of dinner.

When coffee was served Felicite went away to get ready the room in the new house, and the guests soon raised the siege.  Madame Lefrancois was asleep near the cinders, while the stable-boy, lantern in hand, was waiting to show Monsieur and Madame Bovary the way home.  Bits of straw stuck in his red hair, and he limped with his left leg.  When he had taken in his other hand the cure’s umbrella, they started.

The town was asleep; the pillars of the market threw great shadows; the earth was all grey as on a summer’s night.  But as the doctor’s house was only some fifty paces from the inn, they had to say good-night almost immediately, and the company dispersed.

As soon as she entered the passage, Emma felt the cold of the plaster fall about her shoulders like damp linen.  The walls were new and the wooden stairs creaked.  In their bedroom, on the first floor, a whitish light passed through the curtainless windows.

She could catch glimpses of tree tops, and beyond, the fields, half-drowned in the fog that lay reeking in the moonlight along the course of the river.  In the middle of the room, pell-mell, were scattered drawers, bottles, curtain-rods, gilt poles, with mattresses on the chairs and basins on the ground—­the two men who had brought the furniture had left everything about carelessly.

This was the fourth time that she had slept in a strange place.

The first was the day of her going to the convent; the second, of her arrival at Tostes; the third, at Vaubyessard; and this was the fourth.  And each one had marked, as it were, the inauguration of a new phase in her life.  She did not believe that things could present themselves in the same way in different places, and since the portion of her life lived had been bad, no doubt that which remained to be lived would be better.

Chapter Three

The next day, as she was getting up, she saw the clerk on the Place.  She had on a dressing-gown.  He looked up and bowed.  She nodded quickly and reclosed the window.

Leon waited all day for six o’clock in the evening to come, but on going to the inn, he found no one but Monsieur Binet, already at table.  The dinner of the evening before had been a considerable event for him; he had never till then talked for two hours consecutively to a “lady.”  How then had he been able to explain, and in such language, the number of things that he could not have said so well before?  He was usually shy, and maintained that reserve which partakes at once of modesty and dissimulation.