on to the “Hirondelle.” In his hand he held tied in a silk handkerchief six cheminots for his wife.
Madame Homais was very fond of these small, heavy turban-shaped loaves, that are eaten in Lent with salt butter; a last vestige of Gothic food that goes back, perhaps, to the time of the Crusades, and with which the robust Normans gorged themselves of yore, fancying they saw on the table, in the light of the yellow torches, between tankards of hippocras and huge boars’ heads, the heads of Saracens to be devoured. The druggist’s wife crunched them up as they had done — heroically, despite her wretched teeth. And so whenever Homais journeyed to town, he never failed to bring her home some that he bought at the great baker’s in the Rue Massacre.
“Charmed to see you,” he said, offering Emma a hand to help her into the “Hirondelle.” Then he hung up his cheminots to the cords of the netting, and remained bareheaded in an attitude pensive and Napoleonic.
But when the blind man appeared as usual at the foot of the hill he exclaimed —
“I can’t understand why the authorities tolerate such culpable industries. Such unfortunates should be locked up and forced to work. Progress, my word! creeps at a snail’s pace. We are floundering about in mere barbarism.”
The blind man held out his hat, that flapped about at the door, as if it were a bag in the lining that had come unnailed.
“This,” said the chemist, “is a scrofulous affection.”
And though he knew the poor devil, he pretended to see him for the first time, murmured something about “cornea,” “opaque cornea,” “sclerotic,” “facies,” then asked him in a paternal tone —
“My friend, have you long had this terrible infirmity? Instead of getting drunk at the public, you’d do better to die yourself.”
He advised him to take good wine, good beer, and good joints. The blind man went on with his song; he seemed, moreover, almost idiotic. At last Monsieur Homais opened his purse —
“Now there’s a sou; give me back two lairds, and don’t forget my advice: you’ll be the better for it.”
Hivert openly cast some doubt on the efficacy of it. But the druggist said that he would cure himself with an antiphlogistic pomade of his own composition, and he gave his address — “Monsieur Homais, near the market, pretty well known.”
“Now,” said Hivert, “for all this trouble you’ll give us your performance.”
The blind man sank down on his haunches, with his head thrown back, whilst he rolled his greenish eyes, lolled out his tongue, and rubbed his stomach with both hands as he uttered a kind of hollow yell like a famished dog. Emma, filled with disgust, threw him over her shoulder a five-franc piece. It was all her fortune. It seemed to her very fine thus to throw it away.
The coach had gone on again when suddenly Monsieur Homais leant out through the window, crying —
“No farinaceous or milk food, wear wool next the skin, and expose the diseased parts to the smoke of juniper berries.”
The sight of the well-known objects that defiled before her eyes gradually diverted Emma from her present trouble. An intolerable fatigue overwhelmed her, and she reached her home stupefied, discouraged, almost asleep.
“Come what may come!” she said to herself. “And then, who knows? Why, at any moment could not some extraordinary event occur? Lheureux even might die!”
At nine o’clock in the morning she was awakened by the sound of voices in the Place. There was a crowd round the market reading a large bill fixed to one of the posts, and she saw Justin, who was climbing on to a stone and tearing down the bill. But at this moment the rural guard seized him by the collar. Monsieur Homais came out of his shop, and Mere Lefrangois, in the midst of the crowd, seemed to be perorating.
“Madame! madame!” cried Felicite, running in, “it’s abominable!”
And the poor girl, deeply moved, handed her a yellow paper that she had just torn off the door. Emma read with a glance that all her furniture was for sale.
Then they looked at one another silently. The servant and mistress had no secret one from the other. At last Felicite sighed —
“If I were you, madame, I should go to Monsieur Guillaumin.”
“Do you think — ”
And this question meant to say —
“You who know the house through the servant, has the master spoken sometimes of me?”
“Yes, you’d do well to go there.”
She dressed, put on her black gown, and her hood with jet beads, and that she might not be seen (there was still a crowd on the Place), she took the path by the river, outside the village.
She reached the notary’s gate quite breathless. The sky was sombre, and a little snow was falling. At the sound of the bell, Theodore in a red waistcoat appeared on the steps; he came to open the door almost familiarly, as to an acquaintance, and showed her into the dining-room.
A large porcelain stove crackled beneath a cactus that filled up the niche in the wall, and in black wood frames against the oak-stained paper hung Steuben’s “Esmeralda” and Schopin’s “Potiphar.” The ready-laid table, the two silver chafing-dishes, the crystal door-knobs, the parquet and the furniture, all shone with a scrupulous, English cleanliness; the windows were ornamented at each corner with stained glass.
“Now this,” thought Emma, “is the dining-room I ought to have.”
The notary came in pressing his palm-leaf dressing-gown to his breast with his left arm, while with the other hand he raised and quickly put on again his brown velvet cap, pretentiously cocked on the right side, whence looked out the ends of three fair curls drawn from the back of the head, following the line of his bald skull.
After he had offered her a seat he sat down to breakfast, apologising profusely for his rudeness.
“I have come,” she said, “to beg you, sir — ”
“What, madame? I am listening.”
And she began explaining her position to him. Monsieur Guillaumin knew it, being secretly associated with the linendraper, from whom he always got capital for the loans on mortgages that he was asked to make.
So he knew (and better than she herself) the long story of the bills, small at first, bearing different names as endorsers, made out at long dates, and constantly renewed up to the day, when, gathering together all the protested bills, the shopkeeper had bidden his friend Vincart take in his own name all the necessary proceedings, not wishing to pass for a tiger with his fellow-citizens.
She mingled her story with recriminations against Lheureux, to which the notary replied from time to time with some insignificant word. Eating his cutlet and drinking his tea, he buried his chin in his sky-blue cravat, into which were thrust two diamond pins, held together by a small gold chain; and he smiled a singular smile, in a sugary, ambiguous fashion. But noticing that her feet were damp, he said —
“Do get closer to the stove; put your feet up against the porcelain.”
She was afraid
