One night towards eleven o’clock they were awakened by the noise of a horse pulling up outside their door.  The servant opened the garret-window and parleyed for some time with a man in the street below.  He came for the doctor, had a letter for him.  Natasie came downstairs shivering and undid the bars and bolts one after the other.  The man left his horse, and, following the servant, suddenly came in behind her.  He pulled out from his wool cap with grey top-knots a letter wrapped up in a rag and presented it gingerly to Charles, who rested on his elbow on the pillow to read it.  Natasie, standing near the bed, held the light.  Madame in modesty had turned to the wall and showed only her back.

This letter, sealed with a small seal in blue wax, begged Monsieur Bovary to come immediately to the farm of the Bertaux to set a broken leg.  Now from Tostes to the Bertaux was a good eighteen miles across country by way of Longueville and Saint-Victor.  It was a dark night; Madame Bovary junior was afraid of accidents for her husband.  So it was decided the stable-boy should go on first; Charles would start three hours later when the moon rose.  A boy was to be sent to meet him, and show him the way to the farm, and open the gates for him.

Towards four o’clock in the morning, Charles, well wrapped up in his cloak, set out for the Bertaux.  Still sleepy from the warmth of his bed, he let himself be lulled by the quiet trot of his horse.  When it stopped of its own accord in front of those holes surrounded with thorns that are dug on the margin of furrows, Charles awoke with a start, suddenly remembered the broken leg, and tried to call to mind all the fractures he knew.  The rain had stopped, day was breaking, and on the branches of the leafless trees birds roosted motionless, their little feathers bristling in the cold morning wind.  The flat country stretched as far as eye could see, and the tufts of trees round the farms at long intervals seemed like dark violet stains on the cast grey surface, that on the horizon faded into the gloom of the sky.

Charles from time to time opened his eyes, his mind grew weary, and, sleep coming upon him, he soon fell into a doze wherein, his recent sensations blending with memories, he became conscious of a double self, at once student and married man, lying in his bed as but now, and crossing the operation theatre as of old.  The warm smell of poultices mingled in his brain with the fresh odour of dew; he heard the iron rings rattling along the curtain-rods of the bed and saw his wife sleeping.  As he passed Vassonville he came upon a boy sitting on the grass at the edge of a ditch.

“Are you the doctor?” asked the child.

And on Charles’s answer he took his wooden shoes in his hands and ran on in front of him.

The general practitioner, riding along, gathered from his guide’s talk that Monsieur Rouault must be one of the well-to-do farmers.