In spite of her vaporish airs (as the housewives of Yonville called them), Emma, all the same, never seemed gay, and usually she had at the corners of her mouth that immobile contraction that puckers the faces of old maids, and those of men whose ambition has failed. She was pale all over, white as a sheet; the skin of her nose was drawn at the nostrils, her eyes looked at you vaguely. After discovering three gray hairs on her temples, she talked much of her old age.
She often fainted. One day she even spat blood, and, as Charles fussed round her showing his anxiety—
"Bah!" she answered, "what does it matter?"
Charles fled to his study and wept there, both his elbows on the table, sitting in an armchair at his bureau under the phrenological head.
Then he wrote to his mother to beg her to come, and they had many long consultations together on the subject of Emma.
What should they decide? What was to be done since she rejected all medical treatment?
"Do you know what your wife wants?" replied Madame Bovary, senior. "She wants to be forced to occupy herself with some manual work. If she were obliged, like so many others, to earn her living, she wouldn't have these vapors, that come to her from a lot of ideas she stuffs into her head, and from the idleness in which she lives."
"Yet she is always busy," said Charles.
"Ah! always busy at what? Reading novels, bad books, works against religion, in which they mock at priests in speeches taken from Voltaire. But all that leads you far astray, my poor child. Any one who has no religion always ends by turning out badly."
So they decided to stop Emma from reading novels. The enterprise did not seem easy. The good lady undertook it. She was, when she passed through Rouen, to go herself to the lending-library and represent that Emma had discontinued her subscription. Would they not have a right to apply to the police if the librarian persisted all the same in his poisonous trade?