Yet she had loathing of this hypocrisy. She was seized with the temptation to flee somewhere with Léon to try a new life; but at once a vague chasm full of darkness opened within her soul.
"Besides, he no longer loves me," she thought. "What is to become of me? What help is to be hoped for, what consolation, what solace?"
She was left broken, breathless, inert, sobbing in a low voice, with flowing tears.
"Why don't you tell master?" the servant asked her when she came in during these crises.
"It is the nerves," said Emma. "Do not speak to him of it; it would worry him."
"Ah! yes," Félicité went on, "you are just like La Guérine, Père Guérin's daughter, the fisherman at Pollet, that I used to know at Dieppe before I came to you. She was so sad, so sad, that to see her standing upright on the threshold of her house, she seemed to you like a winding-sheet spread out before the door. Her illness, it appears, was a kind of fog that she had in her head, and the doctors could not do anything, nor the priest either. When she was taken too bad she went off quite alone to the seashore, so that the customs officer, going his rounds, often found her lying flat on her face, crying on the shingle. Then, after her marriage, it went off, they say."
"But with me," replied Emma, "it was after marriage that it began."
