“She is a woman of great parts, who wouldn’t be misplaced in a sub-prefecture.”

The housewives admired her economy, the patients her politeness, the poor her charity.

But she was eaten up with desires, with rage, with hate.  That dress with the narrow folds hid a distracted fear, of whose torment those chaste lips said nothing.  She was in love with Leon, and sought solitude that she might with the more ease delight in his image.  The sight of his form troubled the voluptuousness of this mediation.  Emma thrilled at the sound of his step; then in his presence the emotion subsided, and afterwards there remained to her only an immense astonishment that ended in sorrow.

Leon did not know that when he left her in despair she rose after he had gone to see him in the street.  She concerned herself about his comings and goings; she watched his face; she invented quite a history to find an excuse for going to his room.  The chemist’s wife seemed happy to her to sleep under the same roof, and her thoughts constantly centered upon this house, like the “Lion d’Or” pigeons, who came there to dip their red feet and white wings in its gutters.  But the more Emma recognised her love, the more she crushed it down, that it might not be evident, that she might make it less.  She would have liked Leon to guess it, and she imagined chances, catastrophes that should facilitate this.

What restrained her was, no doubt, idleness and fear, and a sense of shame also.  She thought she had repulsed him too much, that the time was past, that all was lost.  Then, pride, and joy of being able to say to herself, “I am virtuous,” and to look at herself in the glass taking resigned poses, consoled her a little for the sacrifice she believed she was making.

Then the lusts of the flesh, the longing for money, and the melancholy of passion all blended themselves into one suffering, and instead of turning her thoughts from it, she clave to it the more, urging herself to pain, and seeking everywhere occasion for it.  She was irritated by an ill-served dish or by a half-open door; bewailed the velvets she had not, the happiness she had missed, her too exalted dreams, her narrow home.

What exasperated her was that Charles did not seem to notice her anguish.  His conviction that he was making her happy seemed to her an imbecile insult, and his sureness on this point ingratitude.  For whose sake, then was she virtuous?  Was it not for him, the obstacle to all felicity, the cause of all misery, and, as it were, the sharp clasp of that complex strap that bucked her in on all sides.

On him alone, then, she concentrated all the various hatreds that resulted from her boredom, and every effort to diminish only augmented it; for this useless trouble was added to the other reasons for despair, and contributed still more to the separation between them.  Her own gentleness to herself made her rebel against him.  Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tenderness to adulterous desires.  She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him.  She was surprised sometimes at the atrocious conjectures that came into her thoughts, and she had to go on smiling, to hear repeated to her at all hours that she was happy, to pretend to be happy, to let it be believed.