Madame Bovary | Page 9

of all sizes. Some
damp clothes were drying inside the chimney-corner. The shovel, tongs, and the nozzle of
the bellows, all of colossal size, shone like polished steel, while along the walls hung
many pots and pans in which the clear flame of the hearth, mingling with the first rays of
the sun coming in through the window, was mirrored fitfully.
Charles went up the first floor to see the patient. He found him in his bed, sweating under
his bed-clothes, having thrown his cotton nightcap right away from him. He was a fat
little man of fifty, with white skin and blue eyes, the forepart of his head bald, and he
wore earrings. By his side on a chair stood a large decanter of brandy, whence he poured
himself a little from time to time to keep up his spirits; but as soon as he caught sight of
the doctor his elation subsided, and instead of swearing, as he had been doing for the last
twelve hours, began to groan freely.
The fracture was a simple one, without any kind of complication.
Charles could not have hoped for an easier case. Then calling to mind the devices of his
masters at the bedsides of patients, he comforted the sufferer with all sorts of kindly
remarks, those Caresses of the surgeon that are like the oil they put on bistouries. In order

to make some splints a bundle of laths was brought up from the cart-house. Charles
selected one, cut it into two pieces and planed it with a fragment of windowpane, while
the servant tore up sheets to make bandages, and Mademoiselle Emma tried to sew some
pads. As she was a long time before she found her work-case, her father grew impatient;
she did not answer, but as she sewed she pricked her fingers, which she then put to her
mouth to suck them. Charles was surprised at the whiteness of her nails. They were shiny,
delicate at the tips, more polished than the ivory of Dieppe, and almond-shaped. Yet her
hand was not beautiful, perhaps not white enough, and a little hard at the knuckles;
besides, it was too long, with no soft inflections in the outlines. Her real beauty was in
her eyes. Although brown, they seemed black because of the lashes, and her look came at
you frankly, with a candid boldness.
The bandaging over, the doctor was invited by Monsieur Rouault himself to "pick a bit"
before he left.
Charles went down into the room on the ground floor. Knives and forks and silver goblets
were laid for two on a little table at the foot of a huge bed that had a canopy of printed
cotton with figures representing Turks. There was an odour of iris-root and damp sheets
that escaped from a large oak chest opposite the window. On the floor in corners were
sacks of flour stuck upright in rows. These were the overflow from the neighbouring
granary, to which three stone steps led. By way of decoration for the apartment, hanging
to a nail in the middle of the wall, whose green paint scaled off from the effects of the
saltpetre, was a crayon head of Minerva in gold frame, underneath which was written in
Gothic letters "To dear Papa."
First they spoke of the patient, then of the weather, of the great cold, of the wolves that
infested the fields at night.
Mademoiselle Rouault did not at all like the country, especially now that she had to look
after the farm almost alone. As the room was chilly, she shivered as she ate. This showed
something of her full lips, that she had a habit of biting when silent.
Her neck stood out from a white turned-down collar. Her hair, whose two black folds
seemed each of a single piece, so smooth were they, was parted in the middle by a
delicate lie that curved slightly with the curve of the head; and, just showing the tip of the
ear, it was joined behind in a thick chignon, with a wavy movement at the temples that
the country doctor saw now for the first time in his life. The upper part of her cheek was
rose-coloured. She had, like a man, thrust in between two buttons of her bodice a
tortoise-shell eyeglass.
When Charles, after bidding farewell to old Rouault, returned to the room before leaving,
he found her standing, her forehead against the window, looking into the garden, where
the bean props had been knocked down by the wind. She turned round. "Are you looking
for anything?" she asked.
"My whip, if you please," he answered.
He began rummaging on the bed, behind the doors, under the chairs. It had fallen to the

floor, between the sacks and the wall.