Gustave Flaubert - Madame Bovary
Sample translation 2
One day, at the climax of her illness, when she thought she was dying, she had asked for communion; and, while they were making her room ready for the sacrament, arranging her bedside-table cluttered with medicine bottles as an altar, and Félicité was scattering dahlia petals on the floor, Emma felt some powerful thing sweeping over her, delivering her from pain, from all perception, from all feeling. Her flesh lay down its burden, another life was beginning; to her it seemed that her soul, rising towards God, would be annihilated in His love, just like burning incense as it goes up in smoke. Holy water was sprinkled on the sheets of her bed; the priest took the white wafer from the holy ciborium; and she was swooning with a celestial joy as she parted her lips to receive the body of the Saviour offered to her. The curtains over her alcove swelled out gently around her, rather like clouds, and the rays from the two candles burning on the bedside-table seemed to her eyes like dazzling haloes. She let her head drop back, fancying that she heard upon the air the music of the harps of seraphim, that she glimpsed in a sky of blue, upon a throne of gold, God the Father, resplendent and majestical, and with a sign He was sending to earth angels on wings of fire to carry her off in their arms.
This splendid vision endured in her memory as the most beautiful thing it was possible to dream; and even now she struggled to recapture the sensation, which somehow lingered on, though less intense yet just as delectable. Her soul, wearied by pride, was at last finding rest in Christian humility; and, savouring the pleasure of weakness, Emma contemplated within herself the destruction of her will, leaving thus wide an entrance for the irruption of His grace. She glimpsed, amid the illusions of her hope, a state of purity floating above the earth, mingling into the sky, where she aspired to be.