“Speak to us,” said Charles; “collect yourself; it is your Charles, who loves you. Do you know me? See! here is your little girl! Oh, kiss her!”

The child stretched out her arms to her mother to cling to her neck. But turning away her head, Emma said in a broken voice “No, no! no one!”

She fainted again. They carried her to her bed. She lay there stretched at full length, her lips apart, her eyelids closed, her hands open, motionless, and white as a waxen image. Two streams of tears flowed from her eyes and fell slowly upon the pillow.

Charles, standing up, was at the back of the alcove, and the chemist, near him, maintained that meditative silence that is becoming on the serious occasions of life.

“Do not be uneasy,” he said, touching his elbow; “I think the paroxysm is past.”

“Yes, she is resting a little now,” answered Charles, watching her sleep. “Poor girl! poor girl! She had gone off now!”

Then Homais asked how the accident had come about. Charles answered that she had been taken ill suddenly while she was eating some apricots.

“Extraordinary!” continued the chemist. “But it might be that the apricots had brought on the syncope. Some natures are so sensitive to certain smells; and it would even be a very fine question to study both in its pathological and physiological relation. The priests know the importance of it, they who have introduced aromatics into all their ceremonies. It is to stupefy the senses and to bring on ecstasies—a thing, moreover, very easy in persons of the weaker sex, who are more delicate than the other. Some are cited who faint at the smell of burnt hartshorn, of new bread—”

“Take care; you’ll wake her!” said Bovary in a low voice.

“And not only,” the druggist went on, “are human beings subject to such anomalies, but animals also. Thus you are not ignorant of the singularly aphrodisiac effect produced by the Nepeta cataria, vulgarly called catmint, on the feline race; and, on the other hand, to quote an example whose authenticity I can answer for. Bridaux (one of my old comrades, at present established in the Rue Malpalu) possesses a dog that falls into convulsions as soon as you hold out a snuff-box to him. He often even makes the experiment before his friends at his summer-house at Guillaume Wood. Would anyone believe that a simple sternutation could produce such ravages on a quadrupedal organism? It is extremely curious, is it not?”

“Yes,” said Charles, who was not listening to him.

“This shows us,” went on the other, smiling with benign self-sufficiency, “the innumerable irregularities of the nervous system. With regard to madame, she has always seemed to me, I confess, very susceptible. And so I should by no means recommend to you, my dear friend, any of those so-called remedies that, under the pretence of attacking the symptoms, attack the constitution. No; no useless physicking! Diet, that is all; sedatives, emollients, dulcification. Then, don’t you think that perhaps her imagination should be worked upon?”

“In what way? How?” said Bovary.

“Ah! that is it. Such is indeed the question. ‘That is the question,’ as I lately read in a newspaper.”

But Emma, awaking, cried out—

“The letter! the letter!”