No sooner was Rodolphe at home than he sat down quickly at his bureau under the stag’s head that hung as a trophy¹ on the wall. But when he had the pen between his fingers, he could think of nothing, so that, resting on his elbows, he began to reflect. Emma seemed to him to have receded² into a far-off past, as if the resolution he had taken had suddenly placed a distance between them.

To get back something of her, he fetched from the cupboard at the bedside an old Rheims biscuit-box, in which he usually kept his letters from women, and from it came an odour of dry dust and withered³ roses. First he saw a handkerchief with pale little spots. It was a handkerchief of hers. Once when they were walking her nose had bled; he had forgotten it. Near it, chipped at all the corners, was a miniature given him by Emma: her toilette seemed to him pretentious⁴, and her languishing⁵ look in the worst possible taste. Then, from looking at this image and recalling the memory of its original, Emma’s features little by little grew confused in his remembrance, as if the living and the painted face, rubbing one against the other, had effaced⁶ each other. Finally, he read some of her letters; they were full of explanations relating to their journey, short, technical, and urgent, like business notes. He wanted to see the long ones again, those of old times. In order to find them at the bottom of the box, Rodolphe disturbed all the others, and mechanically began rummaging⁷ amidst this mass of papers and things, finding pell-mell bouquets⁸, garters, a black mask, pins, and hair — hair! dark and fair, some even, catching⁹ in the hinges of the box, broke when it was opened.

Thus

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