chunk: When Emma is nearly fully recovered, she and Charles attend the opera, at Charles' insistence, in nearby Rouen. The opera reawakens Emma's passions, and she encounters Léon who, now educated and working in Rouen, is also attending the opera. They begin an affair. While Charles believes that she is taking piano lessons, Emma travels to the city each week to meet Léon, always in the same room of the same hotel, which the two come to view as their home. The love affair is ecstatic at first, but Léon grows bored with Emma's emotional excesses, and Emma grows ambivalent about Léon. Emma indulges her fancy for luxury goods with purchases made on credit from the crafty merchant Lheureux, who arranges for her to obtain power of attorney over Charles' estate. Emma's debt steadily mounts.