She reflected occasionally that these were, nevertheless, the most beautiful days of her life - the honeymoon days, as people called them. To be sure, their sweetness would be best enjoyed far off, in one of those lands with exciting names where the first weeks of marriage can me savored so much more deliciously and languidly! The post chaise with its blue silk curtains would have climbed slowly up the mountain roads, and the postilion's song would have re-echoed among the cliffs, mingling with the tinkling of goat bells and the dull roar of waterfalls. They would have breathed the fragrance of lemon trees at sunset by the shore of some bay; and at night, alone on the terrace of a villa their fingers intertwined, they would have gazed at the stars and planned their lives. It seemed to her that certain portions of the earth must product happiness - as thought it were a plant native only to those soils and doomed to languish elsewhere. Why couldn't she be leaning over the balcony on some Swiss chalet? Or nursing her melancholy in a cottage in Scotland, with a husband clad in a long black velvet coat and wearing soft leather shows, a high-crowned hat and fancy cuffs?

She might have been glad to confide all these things to someone. But how speak about so elusive a malaise, one that keeps changing its shape like the clouds and its direction like the winds? She could find no words; and hence neither occasion no courage came to hand.

Still, if Charles had made the slightest efforts, if he had had the slightest inkling, if his glance had a single time divined her thought, it seemed to her that her heart would have been relived of its fullness as quickly ad easily as a tree drops its ripe fruit at the touch of a hand. But even as they were brought closer together by the details of daily life, she was separated from him by a growing sense of inward detachment.

Charles's conversation was flat as a sidewalk, a place of passage for ideas of everyman; they wore drab everyday clothes, and they inspired neither laughter nor dreams. When he had lived in Rouen, he said, he had never had an interest in going to the theatre to see Parisian company that was acting there. He couldn't swim or fence or fire a pistol; one day he couldn't tell her the meaning of a riding term she had come upon in a novel.

Wasn't it a man's role, thought, to know everything? Shouldn't he be expert at all kinds of things, able to initiate you into the intensities of passion, the refinements of life, all the mysteries? This man could teach you nothing; he knew nothing, he wished for nothing. He took it for granted that she was content; and she resented his settled clam, his serene dullness, the very happiness she herself brought him.

And finally the last in the French series. I must say I'm happy to give French literature a rest for a while. I'm tired of reading books about unrequited love, longing and passion. Madame Bovary is wonderful, but mostly not the best novel for my current state of mind.