"The ladies of the city admired her housewifely taste, the patients her courtesy, the poor her benevolence. But she herself was full of desire, full of rage and hatred. Her dress, with its rigid folds, concealed a troubled heart, whose pangs these chaste lips of hers did not reveal. She was in love with Léon.... She investigated his every footstep; she searched his countenance; she invented a whole history in order to have a pretext for a visit to his room. She esteemed the apothecary's wife happy because she slept under the same roof with him; and her thoughts were continually alighting on the house, precisely as the doves of the 'Golden Lion' that were always flying there to moisten their rosy feet and their white wings in the muddy water of the eaves." This is not a striking general comparison; it is a comparison borrowed from a positive occurrence in the village where Emma lives. So vividly does this village present itself to the mind's eye of the author. Sometimes he condenses an entire description into one powerful poetic phrase. So it is in the passage where he introduces the old maid-servant who has been summoned to a meeting of the agricultural union in order to receive for her faithful service of fifty-four years on one farm a silver medal valued at twenty-five francs. Katharina Niçaise Elizabeth Leroux, a little old woman who looks all shrivelled up in her poor garments, appears upon the estrade. We see her thin face with its deep wrinkles beneath her cap, and her long hands with their knotted joints, which had been coated by the dust of the barn, the grease of wool-picking, and the potash of the wash-tub, with so hard a crust that, although they had been washed in pure spring water, they still seemed dirty, and which could no longer be wholly closed, but always remained open, as though in testimony of too much toil. We see the nun-like rigidity of her expression, the animal stupidity of her wan visage, her motionless bewilderment at the unusual spectacle of banners, flourish of trumpets, and smiling gentlemen in black coats, decorated with the cross of the Legion of Honor. Then Flaubert condenses the picture into this one sentence:-- "Thus stood in the presence of these well-to-do old fogies this half-century of slavery." Trivially accurate as are the details of the description, the style of this recapitulating sentence is grand and finished. We feel plainly that for this author the art of literary composition was the highest of all arts. Not only was literary composition his unconditional, his sole calling, but, as may be stated without any undue exaggeration, his conception of the world was equivalent to the thought: The world exists in order that it may be described. He once gave expression to this opinion of his in a thoroughly suggestive manner. In his introduction to the posthumous poems of Louis Bouilhet, alluding to his friendship with the author, he addresses the following words to youth:--