Chapter summary
Léon escapes from the notary's office on a Saturday and goes to Yonville, where he finds Emma Bovary that evening in the alley behind the garden, under a thunderstorm; she promises to find a way for them to see each other every week. Counting on money, Emma buys yellow curtains for the bedroom on credit from Lheureux and dreams of a rug, and her aunt, Aunt Rolet, starts having lunch at her house every day. To obtain the weekly permission, Emma feigns a sudden passion for the piano, stops playing when Charles Bovary finds cheaper lessons, and when Homais and the visitors lament her abandoned talent, it is Charles who again proposes the lessons, and she obtains permission to go to Rouen once a week.
Analysis
Emma promises Léon meetings every week, by whatever means, without hesitation, because she counts on money to come: the text says she was full of hope, that she was going to receive money. That is why she buys yellow curtains on credit from Lheureux and dreams of a rug. She makes adultery into something that must be paid for, and the one waiting for the payment is Lheureux, who replies that it is not the end of the world and serves her twenty times a day without a murmur.
Emma builds the alibi on her own, and the sentence with which she closes the argument, said to justify her insistence on the lessons, is also the logic of adultery itself:
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