Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert & Adam Thorpe

Author:Gustave Flaubert & Adam Thorpe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Classics, Fiction
ISBN: 9780099529866
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

XI

HE HAD RECENTLY read an article praising a new method of curing club foot, and, as he was a devotee of progress, he entertained the patriotic idea that Yonville, so as to put itself on a par, should have strephopodic operations.

‘For,’ he said to Emma, ‘what do we risk? Consider …’ (and he enumerated, on his fingers, the benefits of the endeavour): ‘success all but certain, relief and improved looks for the invalid, celebrity speedily attained for the operating surgeon. Why should your husband, for example, not wish to unburden this poor Hippolyte, of the Lion d’Or? Observe that he would not fail to recount the story of his cure to every traveller, and then’ (Homais lowered his voice and looked about him), ‘what is to stop me sending a little note about it to the newspaper? Heh? Good Lord! An article circulates … it is talked about … and finally it’s a rolling snowball! And who knows, who knows?’

Indeed, Bovary might succeed; Emma had no evidence that he was not skilled, and how satisfying for her to have committed him to a step by which his reputation and his fortune would find themselves enhanced. All she was asking for was something to lean on that was more substantial than love.

Charles, entreated by her and the apothecary, let himself be convinced. He sent to Rouen for Doctor Duval’s volume,30 and, every evening, taking his head in his hands, he plunged into his reading.

While he was studying the equinus, the varus and the valgus, that’s to say the strephocatopodia, the strephendopodia and the strephexopodia (or, to put it more plainly, the different deviations of the foot, either downwards, inwards or outwards), with the strephypopodia and the strephanopodia (in other words, twisting under and stretching upwards), Monsieur Homais, using all sorts of arguments, was exhorting the inn’s stable lad to have himself operated on.

‘You might just feel, perhaps, a slight pain; it’s a simple puncture like a small bleeding, less than the rooting out of little corns.’

Hippolyte, pondering, rolled his stupid eyes.

‘Yet,’ the pharmacist continued, ‘it’s no concern of mine. It’s for your own sake. Out of pure humanity! I would like to see you, my friend, unburdened of your dreadful lameness, with this swaying of the lumbar region, which, whatever you say, must be of a considerable disadvantage to you in the exercise of your occupation.’

Then Homais described how much more lively and brisk he would feel afterwards, and even gave him to believe that he would be better off in terms of pleasing the women; and the ostler began to smile dully. Then he assailed him through vanity:

‘Good grief, where’s the man in you? How would it be, then, if you’d had to serve, going off and fighting under the flag? Oh, Hippolyte!’

And Homais went away, declaring that he could not understand this stubbornness, this blindness in denying himself the benefits of science.

The poor wretch yielded, because it was a sort of conspiracy. Binet, who never troubled his head over

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