“What! you didn’t know it? There is to be an execution in next week. It’s Lheureux who is selling him out; he has killed him with bills.”

“What a terrible catastrophe!” cried the druggist, who always found expressions in harmony with all imaginable circumstances.

Then the landlady began telling him the story that she had heard from Theodore, Monsieur Guillaumin’s servant, and although she detested Tellier, she blamed Lheureux. He was “a wheedler, a sneak.”

“There!” she said. “Look at him! he is in the market; he is bowing to Madame Bovary, who’s got on a green bonnet. Why, she’s taking Monsieur Boulanger’s arm.”