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Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
page 282 of 449 (62%)
willed it. They would have known one another, loved one another. With
him, through all the kingdoms of Europe she would have travelled from
capital to capital, sharing his fatigues and his pride, picking up the
flowers thrown to him, herself embroidering his costumes. Then each
evening, at the back of a box, behind the golden trellis-work she would
have drunk in eagerly the expansions of this soul that would have sung
for her alone; from the stage, even as he acted, he would have looked
at her. But the mad idea seized her that he was looking at her; it was
certain. She longed to run to his arms, to take refuge in his strength,
as in the incarnation of love itself, and to say to him, to cry out,
"Take me away! carry me with you! let us go! Thine, thine! all my ardour
and all my dreams!"

The curtain fell.

The smell of the gas mingled with that of the breaths, the waving of the
fans, made the air more suffocating. Emma wanted to go out; the
crowd filled the corridors, and she fell back in her arm-chair with
palpitations that choked her. Charles, fearing that she would faint, ran
to the refreshment-room to get a glass of barley-water.

He had great difficulty in getting back to his seat, for his elbows were
jerked at every step because of the glass he held in his hands, and
he even spilt three-fourths on the shoulders of a Rouen lady in short
sleeves, who feeling the cold liquid running down to her loins, uttered
cries like a peacock, as if she were being assassinated. Her husband,
who was a millowner, railed at the clumsy fellow, and while she was with
her handkerchief wiping up the stains from her handsome cherry-coloured
taffeta gown, he angrily muttered about indemnity, costs, reimbursement.
At last Charles reached his wife, saying to her, quite out of breath--
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