Four o’clock struck, and she rose to return to Yonville, mechanically obeying the force of old habits.

The weather was fine. It was one of those March days, clear and sharp, when the sun shines in a perfectly white sky. The Rouen folk were walking about in Sunday clothes with happy looks. She reached the Place du Parvis. People were coming out after vespers; the crowd flowed out through the three doors like a stream through the three arches of a bridge, and in the middle one, motionless as a rock, stood the beadle.

Then she remembered the day when, all anxious and full of hope, she had entered that vast nave; it had opened out before her, less profound than her love; and she walked on weeping beneath her veil, giddy, staggering, almost fainting.

‘Take care!’ cried a voice issuing from the gate of a courtyard that was thrown open.

She stopped to let pass a black horse, pawing the ground between the shafts of a tilbury, driven by a gentleman in sable furs. Who was it? She knew him. The carriage darted by and disappeared.

Why, it was he – the Viscount. She turned away; the street was empty. She was so overwhelmed, so sad, that she had to lean against a wall to keep herself from falling.

Then she thought she had been mistaken. Anyhow, she did not know. All within her and around her was abandoning her. She felt lost, sinking at random into indefinable abysses, and it was almost with joy that, on reaching the Croix-Rouge, she saw the good Homais, who was watching a large box full of pharmaceutical stores being hoisted 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 a pensive, Napoleonic attitude.

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 wine-shop, you’d do better to diet 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 liards, and don’t forget my advice: you’ll be the better for it.’

Hivert openly cast some doubt on its efficacy. But the druggist said that he would cure him himself with an antiphlogistic ointment 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 her whole fortune. It struck her as superb to fling it away like this.

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 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 might even 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 Mère Lefrançois, in the midst of the crowd, seemed to be perorating.

‘Madame! madame!’ cried Félicité, 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 Félicité 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 doorknobs, 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 linen-draper, 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 Vinçart 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 of dirtying it. The notary replied in a gallant tone – ‘Beautiful things spoil nothing.’

Then she tried to move him, and, growing moved herself, she began telling him about the poorness of her home, her worries, her wants. He could understand that; an elegant woman! and, without leaving off eating, he had turned completely round towards her, so that his knee brushed against her boot, the sole of which curled as it smoked against the stove.

But when she asked for a thousand écus, he closed his lips, and declared he was very sorry he had not had the management of her fortune before, for there were hundreds of ways very convenient, even for a lady, of turning her money to account. They might, either in the turf-peats of Grumesnil or building-ground at Havre, almost without risk, have ventured on some excellent speculations; and he let her consume herself with rage at the thought of the fabulous sums that she would certainly have made.

‘How was it,’ he went on, ‘that you didn’t come to me?’

‘I hardly know,’ she said.

‘Why, hey? Did I frighten you so much? It is I on the contrary, who ought to complain. We hardly know one another; yet I am very devoted to you. You do not doubt that, I hope?’

He held out his hand, took hers, covered it with a greedy kiss, then held it on his knee; and he played delicately with her fingers murmuring a thousand blandishments. His insipid voice murmured like a running brook; a light shone in his eyes through the glimmering of his spectacles, and his hand was advancing up Emma’s sleeve to press her arm. She felt against her cheek his panting breath. This man oppressed her horribly.

She sprang up and said to him – ‘Sir, I am waiting.’

‘For what?’ said the notary, who suddenly became very pale.

‘This money.’

But – ’ Then, yielding to the outburst of too powerful a desire, ‘Well, yes!’

He dragged himself towards her on his knees, regardless of his dressing-gown.