Without Lifting A Finger

 

The next day Charles went to sit down on the seat in the arbour. Rays of light were straying through the trellis, the vine leaves threw their shadows on the sand, the jasmines perfumed the air, the heavens were blue, Spanish flies buzzed round the lilies in bloom, and Charles was suffocating like a youth beneath the vague love influences that filled his aching heart.  At seven o'clock little Berthe, who had not seen him all the afternoon, went to fetch him to dinner.  His head was thrown back against the wall, his eyes closed, his mouth open, and in his hand was a long tress of black hair.  "Come along, papa," she said.  And thinking he wanted to play; she pushed him gently. He fell to the ground. He was dead.  Thirty-six hours after, at the druggist's request, Monsieur Canivet came thither. He made a post-mortem and found nothing.  When everything had been sold, twelve francs seventy-five centimes remained, that served to pay for Mademoiselle Bovary's goin...

California Dreamin': Bracing for the Worst, Hoping for the Best. Took a walk on the Boardwalk, as far as 62nd St (where it was closed). Walked back on the "safer side" of Long Beach's "Peninsula" (facing Naples), which isn't as safe as you might think. Beautiful Day in CA.💛 #rlswihart13  #thepeninsula  #longbeach  #hopingforthebest  #readmorepoetry2026💕 "

Each time Leon had to tell her everything that he had done since their last meeting. She asked him for some verses--some verses "for herself," a "love poem" in honour of her. But he never succeeded in getting a rhyme for the second verse; and at last ended by copying a sonnet in a "Keepsake." This was less from vanity than from the one desire of pleasing her. He did not question her ideas; he accepted all her tastes; he was rather becoming her mistress than she his. She had tender words and kisses that thrilled his soul. Where could she have learnt this corruption almost incorporeal in the strength of its profanity and dissimulation? * From Google AI:

She appears in Madame Bovary (just before Leon meets Emma in the cathedral). Apparently Nabokov made a mistake in ID-ing the biblical dancer -- he thought she was Miriam (who dances in Exodus with a tambourine, after the Israelites safely cross the Red Sea) and not Salome (who dances for Herod's birthday).  Almost certainly the local moniker "Marianne" is an heirloom from the French Revolution.

 

We visited the Flaubert Medical History Museum (more for Flaubert than Medical History) in Rouen no more than a month ago, so poor Hippolyte's operation stands out quite vividly: A doctor of medicine, fifty years of age, enjoying a good position and self-possessed, Charles's colleague did not refrain from laughing disdainfully when he had uncovered the leg, mortified to the knee. Then having flatly declared that it must be amputated, he went off to the chemist's to rail at the asses who could have reduced a poor man to such a state. Shaking Monsieur Homais by the button of his coat, he shouted out in the shop-- "These are the inventions of Paris! These are the ideas of those gentry of the capital! It is like strabismus, chloroform, lithotrity, a heap of monstrosities that the Government ought to prohibit. But they want to do the clever, and they cram you with remedies without, troubling about the consequences. We are not so clever, not we! We are not savants, coxcombs,...