‘Weren’t you happy? Is it my fault? I did all I could!’

‘Yes, that is true – you are good – you.’

And she pressed her hand slowly over his hair. The sweetness of this sensation deepened his sadness; he felt his whole being dissolving in despair at the thought that he must lose her, just when she was confessing more love for him than ever. And he could think of nothing; he did not know, he did not dare; the urgent need for some immediate resolution gave the finishing stroke to the turmoil of his mind.

So she had done, she thought, with all the treachery, and meanness, and numberless desires that had tortured her. She hated no one now; a twilight dimness was settling upon her thoughts, and, of all earthly noises, Emma heard none but the intermittent lamentations of this poor heart, sweet and indistinct like the echo of a symphony dying away.

‘Bring me the child,’ she said, raising herself on her elbow.

‘You are not worse, are you?’ asked Charles.

‘No, no!’

Solemn and still half-asleep, the child was carried in on the servant’s arm in her long white nightgown, her bare feet peeping out. She looked wondering at the disordered room, and screwed up her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning on the table. They reminded her, no doubt, of the morning of New Year’s day and Mid-Lent, when thus awakened early by candlelight she came to her mother’s bed to fetch her presents, for she began saying – ‘But where is it, mamma?’ And as everybody was silent, ‘But I can’t see my little stocking.’

Félicité held her over the bed while she still kept looking towards the mantelpiece.

‘Has nurse taken it?’ she asked.

And at this name, that carried her back to the memory of her adulteries and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned away her head, as at the loathing of another bitterer poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe remained perched on the bed.

‘Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you are! how hot you are!’

Her mother looked at her. ‘I am frightened!’ cried the child, recoiling.

Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled.

‘That will do. Take her away,’ cried Charles, who was sobbing in the alcove.

Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed less agitated; and at every insignificant word, at every respiration a little more easy, he regained hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his arms.

‘Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See! look at her.’

His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he said of himself, ‘never beating about the bush,’ he prescribed an emetic in order to empty the stomach completely.

Before long she was vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp-string nearly breaking.

Then she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, railed at it, and implored it to be quick, and her stiffened arms thrust away everything that Charles, in a worse agony than herself, tried to make her drink. He stood up, weeping, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling sound in his throat, and choked by sobs that shook his whole body. Félicité was running hither and thither in the room. Homais stood motionless, giving vent to great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, still retaining his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy.

‘The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the moment that the cause ceases – ’

‘The effect must cease,’ said Homais, ‘that is evident.’

‘Oh, save her!’ cried Bovary.

And, without listening to the chemist, who was still venturing the hypothesis, that it was ‘perhaps a salutary paroxysm,’ Canivet was about to administer some theriac, when they heard the cracking of a whip; all the windows rattled, and a post-chaise drawn by three horses abreast, up to their ears in mud, drove at a gallop round the corner of the market. It was Doctor Larivière.

The apparition of a god would not have caused more commotion. Bovary raised his hands; Canivet stopped short; and Homais pulled off his skullcap long before the doctor had come in.

He belonged to that great school of surgery begotten of Bichat, to that generation, now extinct, of philosophical practitioners, who, loving their art with a fanatical love, exercised it with enthusiasm and wisdom. Everyone in his hospital trembled when he was angry; and his students so revered him that they tried, as soon as they were themselves in practice, to imitate him as much as possible. So that in all the towns about they were found wearing his long wadded merino overcoat and black frock-coat, whose buttoned cuffs slightly covered his brawny hands – very beautiful hands, and that never knew gloves, as though to be more ready to plunge into suffering. Disdainful of honours, of titles, and of academies, like one of the old Knight-Hospitallers, generous, fatherly to the poor, and practising virtue without believing in it, he would almost have passed for a saint if the keenness of his intellect had not caused him to be feared as a demon. His glance, more penetrating than his bistouries, looked straight into your soul, and dissected every lie behind all assertions and all reticences. And thus he went along, full of that debonair majesty that is given by the consciousness of great talent, of fortune, and of forty years of a laborious and irreproachable life.

He frowned as soon as he had passed the door when he saw the cadaverous face of Emma stretched out on her back with gaping mouth. Then, while apparently listening to Canivet, he rubbed his fingers up and down beneath his nostrils, and repeated – ‘Good! good!’

But he made a slow gesture with his shoulders. Bovary watched him; they looked at one another; and this man, accustomed as he was to the sight of pain, could not keep back a tear that fell on his shirt-frill.

He tried to take Canivet into the next room. Charles followed him.

‘She is very ill, isn’t she? If we put on sinapisms? Anything! Oh, think of something, you who have saved so many!’

Charles caught him in both his arms, and gazed at him wildly, imploringly, half-fainting against his breast.

‘Come, my poor fellow, courage! There is nothing more to be done.’

And Doctor Larivière turned away.

‘You are going?’

‘I will come back.’

He went out only to give an order to the coachman, with Monsieur Canivet, who did not care either to have Emma die under his hands.

The chemist rejoined them on the Place. He could not by temperament keep away from celebrities, so he begged Monsieur Larivière to do him the signal honour of accepting some breakfast.

He sent quickly to the Lion d’Or for some pigeons; to the butcher’s for all the cutlets that were to be had; to Tuvache for cream; and to Lestiboudois for eggs; and the druggist himself aided in the preparations, while Madame Homais was saying as she pulled together the strings of her jacket – ‘You must excuse us, sir, for in this poor place, when one hasn’t been told the night before – ’

‘Wine glasses!’ whispered Homais.

‘If only we were in town, we could fall back upon stuffed trotters.’

‘Be quiet! Sit down, doctor!’

He thought fit, after the first few mouthfuls, to give some details as to the catastrophe.

‘We first had a feeling of siccity in the pharynx, then intolerable pains at the epigastrium, super-purgation, coma.’

‘But how did she poison herself?’

‘I don’t know, doctor, and I don’t even know where she can have procured the arsenious acid.’

Justin, who was just bringing in a pile of plates, began to tremble.

‘What’s the matter?’ said the chemist.

At this question the young man dropped the whole lot on the ground with a crash.

‘Imbecile!’ cried Homais, ‘you awkward lout! blockhead! you confounded ass!’

But suddenly controlling himself – ‘I wished, doctor, to make an analysis, and primo I delicately introduced a tube – ’