Between the two lines the committee-men were walking with heavy steps, examining each animal, then consulting one another in a low voice.  One who seemed of more importance now and then took notes in a book as he walked along.  This was the president of the jury, Monsieur Derozerays de la Panville.  As soon as he recognised Rodolphe he came forward quickly, and smiling amiably, said—­

“What!  Monsieur Boulanger, you are deserting us?”

Rodolphe protested that he was just coming.  But when the president had disappeared—­

“Ma foi!*” said he, “I shall not go.  Your company is better than his.”

     Upon my word!

And while poking fun at the show, Rodolphe, to move about more easily, showed the gendarme his blue card, and even stopped now and then in front of some fine beast, which Madame Bovary did not at all admire.  He noticed this, and began jeering at the Yonville ladies and their dresses; then he apologised for the negligence of his own.  He had that incongruity of common and elegant in which the habitually vulgar think they see the revelation of an eccentric existence, of the perturbations of sentiment, the tyrannies of art, and always a certain contempt for social conventions, that seduces or exasperates them.  Thus his cambric shirt with plaited cuffs was blown out by the wind in the opening of his waistcoat of grey ticking, and his broad-striped trousers disclosed at the ankle nankeen boots with patent leather gaiters.

These were so polished that they reflected the grass.  He trampled on horses’s dung with them, one hand in the pocket of his jacket and his straw hat on one side.

“Besides,” added he, “when one lives in the country—­”

“It’s waste of time,” said Emma.

“That is true,” replied Rodolphe.  “To think that not one of these people is capable of understanding even the cut of a coat!”

Then they talked about provincial mediocrity, of the lives it crushed, the illusions lost there.

“And I too,” said Rodolphe, “am drifting into depression.”

“You!” she said in astonishment; “I thought you very light-hearted.”

“Ah! yes.  I seem so, because in the midst of the world I know how to wear the mask of a scoffer upon my face; and yet, how many a time at the sight of a cemetery by moonlight have I not asked myself whether it were not better to join those sleeping there!”

“Oh! and your friends?” she said.  “You do not think of them.”

“My friends!  What friends?  Have I any?  Who cares for me?” And he accompanied the last words with a kind of whistling of the lips.

But they were obliged to separate from each other because of a great pile of chairs that a man was carrying behind them.  He was so overladen with them that one could only see the tips of his wooden shoes and the ends of his two outstretched arms.  It was Lestiboudois, the gravedigger, who was carrying the church chairs about amongst the people.  Alive to all that concerned his interests, he had hit upon this means of turning the show to account; and his idea was succeeding, for he no longer knew which way to turn.  In fact, the villagers, who were hot, quarreled for these seats, whose straw smelt of incense, and they leant against the thick backs, stained with the wax of candles, with a certain veneration.