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308.
... Her heart drank its full of the melodious laments that hung suspended in the air against the sound of the double-basses like the cries of shipwrecked sailors against the tumult of the storm. Here was the same ecstasy, the same anguish that had brought her to the brink of death. The soprano's voice seemed but the echo of her own soul, and this illusion that held her under its spell a part of her own life. But no one on earth had ever loved her with so great a love. That last moonlight night, when they had told each other, "Till tomorrow! Till tomorrow!" he had not wept as Edgar was weeping now. The house was bursting with applause. The whole stretto was repeated: the lovers sang about the flowers on their graves, about vows and exile and fate and hope and when their voices rose in the final farewell, Emma herself uttered a sharp cry that was drowned in the blast of the final chords.
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, trans. Francis Steegmuller, Random House, New York, 1957, p. 252 - 253.
PLACE: Rouen, France
TIME: 1840's
CIRCUMSTANCE: a rather romantic identification on Emma's part occurs to the strains of Lucia di Lammermore, an Italian opera by Donizetti
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