She wanted to learn Italian; she bought dictionaries, a grammar, and a supply of white paper.  She tried serious reading, history, and philosophy.  Sometimes in the night Charles woke up with a start, thinking he was being called to a patient.  “I’m coming,” he stammered; and it was the noise of a match Emma had struck to relight the lamp.  But her reading fared like her piece of embroidery, all of which, only just begun, filled her cupboard; she took it up, left it, passed on to other books.

She had attacks in which she could easily have been driven to commit any folly.  She maintained one day, in opposition to her husband, that she could drink off a large glass of brandy, and, as Charles was stupid enough to dare her to, she swallowed the brandy to the last drop.

In spite of her vapourish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed.  She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely.  After discovering three grey hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age.

She often fainted.  One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed around her showing his anxiety—­

“Bah!” she answered, “what does it matter?”

Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table, sitting in an arm-chair at his bureau under the phrenological head.

Then he wrote to his mother begging her to come, and they had many long consultations together on the subject of Emma.

What should they decide?  What was to be done since she rejected all medical treatment?  “Do you know what your wife wants?” replied Madame Bovary senior.

“She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work.  If she were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn’t have these vapours, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her head, and from the idleness in which she lives.”

“Yet she is always busy,” said Charles.

“Ah! always busy at what?  Reading novels, bad books, works against religion, and in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire.  But all that leads you far astray, my poor child.  Anyone who has no religion always ends by turning out badly.”

So it was decided to stop Emma reading novels.  The enterprise did not seem easy.  The good lady undertook it.  She was, when she passed through Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had discontinued her subscription.  Would they not have a right to apply to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous trade?  The farewells of mother and daughter-in-law were cold.  During the three weeks that they had been together they had not exchanged half-a-dozen words apart from the inquiries and phrases when they met at table and in the evening before going to bed.