Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Sample translation 1
One day, at the crisis of her illness, believing herself at death's door, she had asked for the sacrament. While they got her room ready, setting out the chest of drawers, with its array of medicine bottles, as an altar, and while Félicité strewed dahlia petals over the floor, Emma felt a powerful influence sweep over her, relieving her of all pain, all perception, all feeling. Her flesh found rest; a new life had begun; it was as if her soul, ascending to God, were about to be swallowed up in His love like burning incense vanishing in smoke. The sheets were sprinkled with holy water, the priest took the white wafer from the sacred pyx, and as she parted her lips to receive the Body of the Saviour, she swooned with a celestial bliss. The curtains swelled softly around the bed like clouds, the beams of the two tapers on the chest of drawers appeared as dazzling aureoles of light. Then she let her head drop back on to the pillow, seeming to hear through space the harps of the seraphs playing, and to see, seated upon a throne of gold in an azure Heaven with His Saints around Him bearing branches of green palm, God the Father, resplendent in majesty, at whose command angels with wings of flame descended to Earth to carry her up in their arms.
This glorious vision remained in her memory as the most beautiful dream that could be dreamed. She strove to recapture the sensation of it, which lingered, if with a less exclusive purity, yet with as profound an enchantment. Her soul, deformed by pride, found rest at last in Christian humility. Relishing the pleasures of weakness, Emma contemplated the destruction of her will within her, which was to leave the way wide open to the flowing tide of grace. Amid the illusions that her wishes prompted, she glimpsed a realm of purity, floating above the earth, melting into the sky, where she aspired to be.