"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.