tightly drawn skin, his ribs severally protruded and his hind legs
were nailed together, but were slightly drawn up; black blood had
trickled through the hairs, and collected in stalactites at the end
of his tail, which hung straight down the length of the cross. The
soldiers crowded around the beast, diverting themselves by calling
him 'Consul!' and 'Citizen of Rome!' and threw pebbles into his eyes
to scatter the swarming gnats."

And now take any characteristic series of pictures or incidents from
Madame Bovary: take Bovary's bungling and gruesome operations on the
club-footed ostler's leg, with the entire village clustering agape;
take the picture of the eyeless, idiotic beggar on the road to
Rouen; or the scene in which Emma offers herself for three thousand
francs to Rodolphe; or the following bit, only a bit, from the
detailed account of the heroine's last hours, after the arsenical
poisoning:

"Emma's head was turned towards her right shoulder, the corner of
her mouth, which was open, seemed like a black hole at the lower
part of her face; her two thumbs were bent into the palms of her
hands; a kind of white dust besprinkled her lashes, and her eyes
were beginning to disappear in that viscous pallor that looks like a
thin web, as if spiders had spun it over. The sheet sunk in from her
breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes, and it
seemed to Charles that infinite masses, an enormous load, were
weighing upon her.

"The church clock struck two. They could hear the loud murmur of the
river flowing in the darkness at the foot of the terrace. Monsieur
Bournisien from time to time blew his nose noisily and Homais' pen