child's head all her shattered, broken little vanities. She dreamed of
high station; she already saw him, tall, handsome, clever, settled as
an engineer or in the law. She taught him to read, and even, on an old
piano, she had taught him two or three little songs. But to all this
Monsieur Bovary, caring little for letters, said, "It was not worth
while. Would they ever have the means to send him to a public school, to
buy him a practice, or start him in business? Besides, with cheek a man
always gets on in the world." Madame Bovary bit her lips, and the child
knocked about the village.

He went after the labourers, drove away with clods of earth the ravens
that were flying about. He ate blackberries along the hedges, minded the
geese with a long switch, went haymaking during harvest, ran about in
the woods, played hop-scotch under the church porch on rainy days, and
at great fetes begged the beadle to let him toll the bells, that he
might hang all his weight on the long rope and feel himself borne upward
by it in its swing. Meanwhile he grew like an oak; he was strong on
hand, fresh of colour.

When he was twelve years old his mother had her own way; he began
lessons. The cure took him in hand; but the lessons were so short and
irregular that they could not be of much use. They were given at spare
moments in the sacristy, standing up, hurriedly, between a baptism and
a burial; or else the cure, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil
after the Angelus*. They went up to his room and settled down; the
flies and moths fluttered round the candle. It was close, the child
fell asleep, and the good man, beginning to doze with his hands on his
stomach, was soon snoring with his mouth wide open. On other occasions,
when Monsieur le Cure, on his way back after administering the viaticum
to some sick person in the neighbourhood, caught sight of Charles