Madame Bovary | Page 6

and irregular that they could not be of
much use. They were given at spare moments in the sacristy, standing up, hurriedly,
between a baptism and a burial; or else the cure, if he had not to go out, sent for his pupil
after the Angelus*. They went up to his room and settled down; the flies and moths
fluttered round the candle. It was close, the child fell asleep, and the good man, beginning
to doze with his hands on his stomach, was soon snoring with his mouth wide open. On
other occasions, when Monsieur le Cure, on his way back after administering the
viaticum to some sick person in the neighbourhood, caught sight of Charles playing about
the fields, he called him, lectured him for a quarter of an hour and took advantage of the
occasion to make him conjugate his verb at the foot of a tree. The rain interrupted them or
an acquaintance passed. All the same he was always pleased with him, and even said the
"young man" had a very good memory.
*A devotion said at morning, noon, and evening, at the sound of a bell. Here, the evening
prayer.
Charles could not go on like this. Madame Bovary took strong steps. Ashamed, or rather
tired out, Monsieur Bovary gave in without a struggle, and they waited one year longer,
so that the lad should take his first communion.
Six months more passed, and the year after Charles was finally sent to school at Rouen,
where his father took him towards the end of October, at the time of the St. Romain fair.
It would now be impossible for any of us to remember anything about him. He was a
youth of even temperament, who played in playtime, worked in school-hours, was
attentive in class, slept well in the dormitory, and ate well in the refectory. He had in loco
parentis* a wholesale ironmonger in the Rue Ganterie, who took him out once a month
on Sundays after his shop was shut, sent him for a walk on the quay to look at the boats,
and then brought him back to college at seven o'clock before supper. Every Thursday
evening he wrote a long letter to his mother with red ink and three wafers; then he went
over his history note-books, or read an old volume of "Anarchasis" that was knocking
about the study. When he went for walks he talked to the servant, who, like himself, came
from the country.
*In place of a parent.
By dint of hard work he kept always about the middle of the class; once even he got a

certificate in natural history. But at the end of his third year his parents withdrew him
from the school to make him study medicine, convinced that he could even take his
degree by himself.
His mother chose a room for him on the fourth floor of a dyer's she knew, overlooking
the Eau-de-Robec. She made arrangements for his board, got him furniture, table and two
chairs, sent home for an old cherry-tree bedstead, and bought besides a small cast-iron
stove with the supply of wood that was to warm the poor child.
Then at the end of a week she departed, after a thousand injunctions to be good now that
he was going to be left to himself.
The syllabus that he read on the notice-board stunned him; lectures on anatomy, lectures
on pathology, lectures on physiology, lectures on pharmacy, lectures on botany and
clinical medicine, and therapeutics, without counting hygiene and materia medica--all
names of whose etymologies he was ignorant, and that were to him as so many doors to
sanctuaries filled with magnificent darkness.
He understood nothing of it all; it was all very well to listen-- he did not follow. Still he
worked; he had bound note-books, he attended all the courses, never missed a single
lecture. He did his little daily task like a mill-horse, who goes round and round with his
eyes bandaged, not knowing what work he is doing.
To spare him expense his mother sent him every week by the carrier a piece of veal
baked in the oven, with which he lunched when he came back from the hospital, while he
sat kicking his feet against the wall. After this he had to run off to lectures, to the
operation-room, to the hospital, and return to his home at the other end of the town. In the
evening, after the poor dinner of his landlord, he went back to his room and set to work
again in his wet clothes, which smoked as he sat in front of the hot stove.
On the fine summer evenings, at the time when the close streets are empty, when the
servants are playing shuttle-cock at