“Bring me the child,” she said, raising herself on her elbow.
“You are not worse, are you?” asked Charles.
“No, no!”
The child, serious, and still half-asleep, was carried in on the servant’s arm in her long white nightgown, from which her bare feet peeped out. She looked wonderingly at the disordered room, and half-closed her eyes, dazzled by the candles burning on the table. They reminded her, no doubt, of the morning of New Year’s day and Mid-Lent, when thus awakened early by candle-light she came to her mother’s bed to fetch her presents, for she began saying—
“But where is it, mamma?” And as everybody was silent, “But I can’t see my little stocking.”
Félicité held her over the bed while she still kept looking towards the mantelpiece.
“Has nurse taken it?” she asked.
And at this name, that carried her back to the memory of her adulteries and her calamities, Madame Bovary turned away her head, as at the loathing of another bitterer poison that rose to her mouth. But Berthe remained perched on the bed.
“Oh, how big your eyes are, mamma! How pale you are! how hot you are!”
Her mother looked at her. “I am frightened!” cried the child, recoiling.
Emma took her hand to kiss it; the child struggled.
“That will do. Take her away,” cried Charles, who was sobbing in the alcove.
Then the symptoms ceased for a moment; she seemed less agitated; and at every insignificant word, at every respiration a little more easy, he regained hope. At last, when Canivet came in, he threw himself into his arms.
“Ah! it is you. Thanks! You are good! But she is better. See! look at her.”
His colleague was by no means of this opinion, and, as he said of himself, “never beating about the bush,” he prescribed, an emetic in order to empty the stomach completely.
She soon began vomiting blood. Her lips became drawn. Her limbs were convulsed, her whole body covered with brown spots, and her pulse slipped beneath the fingers like a stretched thread, like a harp- string nearly breaking.
After this she began to scream horribly. She cursed the poison, railed at it, and implored it to be quick, and thrust away with her stiffened arms everything that Charles, in more agony than herself, tried to make her drink. He stood up, his handkerchief to his lips, with a rattling sound in his throat, weeping, and choked by sobs that shook his whole body. Félicité was running hither and thither in the room. Homais, motionless, uttered great sighs; and Monsieur Canivet, always retaining his self-command, nevertheless began to feel uneasy.
“The devil! yet she has been purged, and from the moment that the cause ceases—”
“The effect must cease,” said Homais, “that is evident.”
“Oh, save her!” cried Bovary.