“Why, you know well enough,” cried Lheureux. “It was about your little fancies⁠—the travelling trunks.”

He had drawn his hat over his eyes, and, with his hands behind his back, smiling and whistling, he looked straight at her in an unbearable manner. Did he suspect anything?

She was lost in all kinds of apprehensions. At last, however, he went on⁠—

“We made it up, all the same, and I’ve come again to propose another arrangement.”

This was to renew the bill Bovary had signed. The doctor, of course, would do as he pleased; he was not to trouble himself, especially just now, when he would have a lot of worry. “And he would do better to give it over to someone else⁠—to you, for example. With a power of attorney it could be easily managed, and then we (you and I) would have our little business transactions together.”