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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: January 10, 2004 [EBook #10666]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PUBLIC VS. M. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Rosanna Yuen and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PUBLIC _vs_. M. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
+
+
+The folios referred to in the trial are the folios either of the _Revue
+de Paris_ or of the first edition of the book.--EDITOR.
+
+
+
+_Speech of the Prosecuting Attorney_,
+
+
+M. ERNEST PINARD
+
+
+Gentlemen, in entering upon this debate, the Public Attorney is in the
+presence of a difficulty which he cannot ignore. It cannot be put even
+in the nature of a condemnation, since offenses to public morals and to
+religion are somewhat vague and elastic expressions which it would be
+necessary to define precisely. Nevertheless, when we speak to
+right-minded, practical men we are sure of being sufficiently understood
+to distinguish whether a certain page of a book carries an attack
+against religion and morals or not. The difficulty is not in arousing a
+prejudice, it is far more in explaining the work of which you are to
+judge. It deals entirely with romance. If it were a newspaper article
+which we were bringing before you, it could be seen at once where the
+fault began and where it ended; it would simply be read by the ministry
+and submitted to you for judgment. Here we are not concerned with a
+newspaper article, but entirely with a romance, which begins the first
+of October, finishes the fifteenth of December, and is composed of six
+numbers, in the _Revue de Paris_, 1856. What is to be done in such a
+case? What is the duty of the Public Ministry? To read the whole
+romance? That is impossible. On the other hand, to read only the
+incriminating texts would expose us to deep reproach. They could say to
+us: If you do not show the case in all its parts, if you pass over that
+which precedes and that which follows the incriminating passages, it is
+evident that you wish to suppress the debate by restricting the ground
+of discussion. In order to avoid this twofold difficulty, there is but
+one course to follow, and that is, to relate to you the whole story of
+the romance without reading any of it, or pointing out any incriminating
+passage; then to cite incriminating texts, and finally to answer the
+objections that may arise against the general method of indictment.
+
+What is the title of the romance? _Madame Bovary_. This title in itself
+explains nothing. There is a second in parentheses: _Provincial Morals
+and Customs_. This is also a title which does not explain the thought of
+the author but which gives some intimation of it. The author does not
+endeavour to follow such or such a system of philosophy, true or false;
+he endeavours to produce certain pictures, and you shall see what kind
+of pictures! Without doubt, it is the husband who begins and who
+terminates the book; but the most serious portrait of the work, the one
+that illumines the other paintings, is that of Madame Bovary.
+
+Here I relate, I do not cite. It takes the husband first at college, and
+it must be stated that the boy already gave evidence of the kind of
+husband he would make. He is excessively heavy and timid, so timid that
+when he arrives at the college and is asked his name, he responds:
+"_Charbovari_" He is so dull that he works continually without
+advancing. He is never the first, nor is he the last in his class; he
+is the type, if not of the cipher at least of the laughing-stock of the
+college. After finishing his studies here, he goes to study medicine at
+Rouen, in a fourth-story room overlooking the Seine, which his mother
+rented for him, in the house of a dyer of her acquaintance. Here he
+studies his medical books, and arrives little by little, not at the
+degree of doctor of medicine, but that of health officer. He frequented
+the inns, failed in his studies, but as for the rest, he had no other
+passion than that of playing dominoes. This is M. Bovary.
+
+The time comes for him to marry. His mother finds him a wife in the
+widow of a sheriff's officer of Dieppe; she is virtuous and plain, is
+forty-five years old, and has six thousand a year income. Only, the
+lawyer who had her capital to invest set out one fine morning for
+America, and the younger Madame Bovary was so much affected, so struck
+down by this unexpected blow that she died of it. Here we have the first
+marriage and the first scene.
+
+M. Bovary, now being a widower, begins to think of marrying again. He
+questions his memory; there is no need of going far; there immediately
+comes to his mind the daughter of a neighboring farmer, Mile. Emma
+Rouault, who had strangely aroused Madame Bovary's suspicions. Farmer
+Rouault had but one daughter, and she had been brought up by the
+Ursuline sisters at Rouen. She was little interested in matters of the
+farm; her father was anxious for her to marry. The health officer
+presented himself, there was no difficulty about the _dot_, and you
+understand that with such a disposition on both sides, these things are
+quickly settled. The marriage takes place. M. Bovary is at his wife's
+knees, is the happiest of men and the blindest of husbands. His sole
+occupation is anticipating his wife's wishes.
+
+Here the rôle of M. Bovary ends; that of Madame Bovary becomes the
+serious work of the book.
+
+Gentlemen, does Madame Bovary love her husband, or try to love him? No;
+and from the beginning there has been what we might call the scene of
+initiation. From the moment of her marriage, another horizon stretched
+itself out before her, a new life appeared to her. The proprietor of
+Vaubyessard Castle gave a grand entertainment. He invited the health
+officer and his wife, and this was for her an initiation into all the
+ardour of voluptuousness! There she discovered the Duke of Laverdière
+who had had some success at Court; she waltzed with a viscount and
+experienced an unusual disturbance of mind. From this moment she lived
+a new life; her husband and all her surroundings became insupportable to
+her. One day, in looking over some furniture, she hit a piece of wire
+which tore her finger; it was the wire from her wedding bouquet.
+
+To try to dispel the _ennui_ that was consuming her, M. Bovary
+sacrificed his office and established himself at Yonville. Here was the
+scene of the first fall. We are now in the second number. Madame
+arrived at Yonville, and there, the first person she met upon whom she
+could fix her attention was--not the notary of the place, but the only
+clerk of that notary, Léon Dupuis. This is a young man who is making
+his own way and is about to set out for the capital. Any other than
+M. Bovary would have been disquieted by the visits of the young clerk,
+but M. Bovary is so ingenuous that he believes in his wife's
+virtue. Léon, wholly inexperienced, has the same idea. He goes away, and
+the occasion is lost; but occasions are easily found again.
+
+There was in the neighborhood of Yonville one Rodolphe Boulanger (you
+understand that I am narrating). He was a man of thirty-four years old
+and of a brutal temperament; he had had much success and many easy
+conquests; he then had an actress for a mistress. He saw Madame Bovary;
+she was young and charming; he resolved to make her his mistress. The
+thing was easy; three meetings were sufficient to bring it about. The
+first time he came to an agricultural meeting, the second time he paid
+her a visit, the third time he accompanied her on a horseback ride which
+her husband judged necessary to her health; it was then, in a first
+visit to the forest, that the fall took place. Their meetings
+multiplied after this, at Rodolphe's chateau and in the health officer's
+garden. The lovers reached the extreme limits of voluptuousness! Madame
+Bovary wished to elope with Rodolphe, but while Rodolphe dared not say
+no, he wrote a letter in which he tried to show her that for many
+reasons, he could not elope. Stricken down by the reception of this
+letter, Madame Bovary had a brain fever, following which typhoid fever
+declared itself. The fever killed the love, but the malady
+remained. This is the second scene.
+
+We come now to the third scene. The fall with Rodolphe was followed by a
+religious reaction, but it was short; Madame Bovary was about to fall
+anew. The husband thought the theatre useful in the convalescence of his
+wife and took her to Rouen. In a box opposite that occupied by M. and
+Madame Bovary, was Léon Dupuis, the notary's young clerk, who had made
+his way to Paris, and who had now become strangely experienced and
+knowing. He went to see Madame Bovary and proposed a _rendezvous_.
+Madame Bovary suggested the cathedral. On coming out of the cathedral,
+Léon proposed that they take a cab. She resisted at first, but Léon told
+her that this was done in Paris, and there was no further obstacle. The
+fall takes place in the cab! Meetings follow for Léon, as for Rodolphe,
+at the health officer's house, and then at a room which they rented in
+Rouen. Finally, she became weary of the second love, and here begins the
+scene of distress; it is the last of the romance.
+
+Madame Bovary was prodigal, having lavished gifts upon Rodolphe and
+Léon; she had led a life of luxury and, in order to meet such expense
+had put her name to a number of promissory notes. She had obtained a
+power of attorney from her husband in the management of their common
+patrimony, fell in with a usurer who discounted the notes which, not
+being paid at the expiration of the time, were renewed under the name of
+a boon companion. Then came the stamped paper, the protests, judgments
+and executions, and, finally, the posting for sale of the furniture of
+Monsieur Bovary, who knew nothing of all this. Reduced to the most
+cruel extremities, Madame Bovary asked money from everybody, but got
+none. Léon had nothing, and recoiled frightened at the idea of a crime
+that was suggested to him for procuring funds. Having gone through every
+degree of humiliation, Madame Bovary turned to Rodolphe; she was not
+successful; Rodolphe did not have 3000 francs. There remained to her but
+one course: to beg her husband's pardon? No. To explain the matter to
+him? No, for this husband would be generous enough to pardon her, and
+that was a humiliation which she could not accept: she must poison
+herself.
+
+We come now to grievous scenes. The husband is there beside his wife's
+icy body. He has her night robe brought, orders her wrapped in it and
+her remains placed in a triple coffin.
+
+One day he opens a secretary and there finds Rodolphe's picture, his
+letters and Léon's. Do you think his love is then shattered? No, no! on
+the contrary, he is excited and extols this woman whom others have
+possessed, as proved by these souvenirs of voluptuousness which she had
+left to him; and from that moment he neglects his office, his family,
+lets go to the winds the last vestige of his patrimony, and is found
+dead one day in the arbor in his garden, holding in his hand a long lock
+of black hair. This is the romance. I have related it to you,
+suppressing no scene in it. It is called _Madame Bovary_. You could
+with justice give it another title and call it. _Story of the Adulteries
+of a Provincial Woman_.
+
+Gentlemen, the first part of my task is fulfilled. I have related, I
+shall now cite, and after the citations come the indictments which are
+brought upon two counts: offense against public morals and offense
+against religious morals. The offense against public morals lies in the
+lascivious pictures which I have brought before your eyes; the offense
+against religious morals consists in mingling voluptuous images with
+sacred things. I now come to the citations. I will be brief, for you
+will read the entire romance. I shall limit myself to citing four
+scenes, or rather four tableaux. The first will be that of the fall with
+Rodolphe; the second, the religious reaction between the two adulteries;
+the third, the fall with Léon, which is the second adultery, and finally
+the fourth, the death of Madame Bovary.
+
+Before raising the curtain on these four pictures, permit me to inquire
+what colour, what stroke of the brush M. Flaubert employs--for this
+romance is a picture, and it is necessary to know to what school he
+belongs--what colour he uses and what sort of portrait he makes of his
+heroine.
+
+The general colour of the author, allow me to tell you, is a lascivious
+colour, before, during, and after the falls! When she is a child ten or
+twelve years of age, she is at the Ursuline convent. At this age, when
+the young girl is not formed, when the woman cannot feel those emotions
+which reveal to her a new world, she goes to confession:
+
+"When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she
+might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined, her
+face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest. The
+comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal
+marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of
+unexpected sweetness."
+
+Is it natural for a little girl to invent small sins, since we know that
+for a child the smallest sins are confessed with the greatest
+difficulty? And again, at this age, when a little girl is not formed,
+does it not make what I have called a lascivious picture to show her
+inventing little sins in the shadow, under the whisperings of the
+priest, recalling comparisons she has heard about the affianced, the
+celestial lover and eternal marriage which gave her a shiver of
+voluptuousness?
+
+Would you see Madame Bovary in her lesser acts, in a free state, without
+a lover and without sin? I pass over those words, "the next day," and
+that bride who left nothing to be discovered which could be divined or
+found out, as the phrase in itself is more than equivocal; but we shall
+see how it was with the husband:
+
+The husband of the next day, "whom one would have taken for an old
+maid," the bridegroom of this bride who "left nothing to be discovered
+that could be divined," arose and went out, "his heart full of the
+felicities of the night, with mind tranquil and flesh content," going
+about "ruminating upon his happiness like one who is still enjoying
+after dinner the taste of the truffles he is digesting."
+
+It now remains, gentlemen, to determine upon the literary stamp of M.
+Flaubert and upon the strokes of his brush. Now, at the Castle
+Vaubyessard do you know what most attracted this young woman, what
+struck her most forcibly? It is always the same thing--the Duke of
+Laverdiere, as a lover--"as they say, of Marie-Antoinette, between the
+Messrs. de Coigny and de Lauzun." "Emma's eyes turned upon him of their
+own accord, as upon something extraordinary and august; he had lived at
+Court and slept in the bed of queens!" Can it be said that this is only
+an historic parenthesis? Sad and useless parenthesis! History can
+authorise suspicions, but has not the right to establish them as
+fact. History has spoken of the necklace in all romances; history has
+spoken of a thousand things; but these are only suspicions and, I
+repeat, I know not by what authority these suspicions should be
+established as facts. And, since Marie-Antoinette died with the dignity
+of a sovereign and the calmness of a Christian, her life-blood should
+efface faults of which there are the strongest suspicions. M. Flaubert
+was in need of a striking example in the painting of his heroine, but
+Heaven knows why he has taken this one to express, all at once, the
+perverse instincts and the ambition of Madame Bovary!
+
+Madame Bovary dances very well, and here she is waltzing:
+
+"They began slowly, then went more rapidly. They turned; all around them
+was turning--the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like
+a disc on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma's dress
+caught against his trousers. Their legs commingled; he looked down at
+her; she raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They
+started again, and with a more rapid movement; the Viscount, dragging
+her along, disappeared with her to the end of the gallery, where,
+panting, she almost fell, and for a moment rested her head upon his
+breast. And then, still turning, but more slowly, he guided her back to
+her seat. She leant back against the wall and covered her eyes with her
+hands."
+
+I know well that the waltz is more or less like this, but that makes it
+no more moral!
+
+Take Madame Bovary in her most simple acts, and we have always the same
+stroke of the brush, on every page. Even Justin, the neighbouring
+chemist's boy, undergoes some astonishment when he is initiated into the
+secrets of this woman's toilette. He carries his voluptuous admiration
+as far as the kitchen.
+
+"With his elbows on the long board on which she was ironing, he greedily
+watched all these women's clothes spread out about him, the dimity
+petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with
+running-strings, wide at the hips and growing narrower below.
+
+"What is that for?" asked the young fellow, passing his hand over the
+crinoline or the hooks and eyes.
+
+"'Why, haven't you ever seen anything?' Félicité answered laughing. 'As
+if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the same.'"
+
+The husband also asks, in the presence of this fresh-smelling woman,
+whether the odour comes from the skin or from the chemise.
+
+"Every evening he found a blazing fire, his dinner ready, easy-chairs,
+and a well-dressed woman, charming with an odour of freshness, though no
+one could say whence the perfume came, or if it were not her skin that
+made odourous her chemise."
+
+Enough of quotations in detail! You know now the physiognomy of Madame
+Bovary in repose, when she is inciting no one, when she does not sin,
+when she is still completely innocent, and when, on her return from a
+rendezvous, she is by the side of her husband, whom she detests; you
+know now the general colour of the picture, the general physiognomy of
+Madame Bovary. The author has taken the greatest care, employed all the
+prestige of his style in painting the portrait of this woman. Has he
+tried to show her on the side of intelligence? Never. From the side of
+the heart? Not at all. On the part of mind? No. From the side of
+physical beauty? Not even that. Oh! I know very well that the portrait
+of Madame Bovary after the adultery is most brilliant; but the picture
+is above all lascivious, the post is voluptuous, the beauty a beauty of
+provocation.
+
+I come now to the four important quotations; I shall make but four; I
+hold to my outline: I have said that the first would be the love for
+Rodolphe, the second the religious reaction, the third the love for
+Léon, the fourth her death.
+
+Here is the first. Madame Bovary is near her fall, nearly ready to
+succumb.
+
+"Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tendernesses to
+adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she
+might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him."
+
+What was it that seduced Rodolphe and prepared him? The opening of
+Madame Bovary's dress which had burst in places along the seams of the
+corsage. Rodolphe took his servant to Bovary's house, to bleed him. The
+servant was very ill, and Madame Bovary held the basin.
+
+"Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the
+movement she made in bending down, her skirt (it was a summer frock with
+four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread
+out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma, stooping,
+staggered a little as she stretched out her arms, the stuff here and
+there gave with the inflections of her bust."
+
+Here is Rodolphe's reflection: "He again saw Emma in her room, dressed
+as he had seen her, and he undressed her."
+
+It is the first day they had spoken to each other. "They looked at one
+another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and softly,
+without an effort, their fingers intertwined."
+
+These are the preliminaries of the fall. It is necessary to read the
+fall itself.
+
+"When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his
+wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature.
+
+"The next day at noon, Rodolphe appeared at Charles's door with two
+saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin
+side-saddle.
+
+"Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt
+she had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with
+his appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and
+white corduroy breeches."
+
+"As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse set off at a
+gallop. Rodolphe galloped by her side."
+
+Here they are in the forest.
+
+"He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness
+on the water. Faded waterlilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the
+noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide themselves.
+
+"'I am wrong! I am wrong!' she said. 'I am mad to listen to you!'"
+
+"'Why? Emma! Emma!'"
+
+"'Oh, Rodolphe!' said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder."
+
+"The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw
+back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with
+a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him."
+
+Then she arose and, after shaking off the fatigue of voluptuousness,
+returned to the domestic hearth, to that hearth where she would find a
+husband who adored her. After this first fall, after this first
+adultery, this first fault, is it a sentiment of remorse that she feels,
+in the presence of this deceived husband who adores her? No! with a bold
+front, she enters, glorifying adultery.
+
+"But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never
+had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something
+subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, 'I have a lover!
+a lover!' delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to
+her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of
+happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels
+where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium."
+
+Thus, from this first fault, this first fall, she glorified adultery,
+she sang the song of adultery, its poesy and its delights. This,
+gentlemen, to me is much more dangerous and immoral than the fall
+itself! Gentlemen, all pales before this glorification of adultery, even
+the rendezvous at night some time after:
+
+"To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She
+jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a
+mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild
+with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled
+him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up
+a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But
+Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.
+
+"'Come, now, Emma,' he said, 'it is time.'
+
+"'Yes, I am coming,' she answered.
+
+"Then, as the candles dazzled him, he turned to the wall and fell
+asleep. She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed.
+
+"Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm
+around her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden."
+
+"It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly
+Léon had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never
+thought of him now.
+
+"The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips
+seemed to them deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger;
+and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their
+souls sonorous crystalline, and reverberating in multiplied vibrations."
+
+Gentlemen, do you know of language anywhere in the world more
+expressive? Have you ever seen a more lascivious picture? Listen
+further:
+
+"Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had
+that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from
+success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with
+circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure and
+her ever-young illusions had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun
+make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed
+forth in all the plentitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled
+expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared,
+while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the
+fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black
+down. One would have thought that an artist apt in conception had
+arranged the curls of hair upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass,
+negligently and with the changing chances of their adultery that unbound
+them every day. Her voice now took more mellow inflections, her figure
+also; something subtle and penetrating escaped even from the folds of
+her gown and from the line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first
+married, thought her delicious and quite irresistible."
+
+Up to this time this woman's beauty had consisted of her grace, her
+elegance, and her clothes; finally she is shown to you without a veil
+and you can say whether adultery has embellished her or not.
+
+"'Take me away,' she cried, 'carry me off! Oh, I entreat you!'
+
+"And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the
+unexpected consent it breathed forth in a kiss."
+
+Here is a portrait, gentlemen, which M. Flaubert knows well how to draw.
+How the eyes of this woman enlarge! Something ravishing expands around
+her, and then her fall! Her beauty has never been so brilliant as the
+next day after her fall and the days following. What the author shows
+you is the poetry of adultery, and I ask you again whether these
+lascivious pages do not express a profound immorality!
+
+I come now to the second situation, which is the religious
+reaction. Madame Bovary is very ill, is at death's door. She is brought
+back to life, and her convalescence is made remarkable by a little
+religious awakening.
+
+"It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien came to see her. He
+inquired after her health, gave her news, exhorted her to religion in a
+coaxing little gossip that was not without its charm. The mere thought
+of his cassock comforted her."
+
+Finally, she goes to communion. I do not like much to meet these holy
+things in a romance; but at least, when one speaks of them, he need not
+travesty them by his language. Is there in this adulterous woman going
+to communion anything of the repentant faith of a Magdalene? No, no; she
+is always the same passionate woman, seeking illusions and seeking them
+even among the most august and holy things.
+
+"One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself
+dying, and had asked for the communion; and, while they were making the
+preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the
+night-table covered with sirups into an altar, and while Félicité was
+strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over
+her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all
+feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was
+beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would
+be annihilated in that love like a burning incense that melts into
+vapour."
+
+In what tongue does one pray to God in language addressed to a lover in
+the outpourings of adultery? Without doubt they will tell us it is local
+colour, and excuse it on the ground that a vapourous, romantic woman
+does nothing, even in religion, like anybody else. There is no local
+colour which can excuse this mixture! Voluptuous one day, religious the
+next, there is no woman, even in other countries, under the sky of Spain
+or Italy, who murmurs to God the adulterous caresses which she gives her
+lover. You can appreciate this language, gentlemen, and you will not
+excuse adulterous words being introduced in any way into the sanctuary
+of the Divinity!
+
+This is the second situation. I now come to the third, which is a series
+of adulteries.
+
+After the religious transition, Madame Bovary is again ready to
+fall. She goes to the theatre at Rouen. The play is _Lucia di
+Lammermoor_. Emma returns to her old self.
+
+"Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the pollution of marriage
+and the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon
+some great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and
+duty blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness."
+
+Seeing Lagardy upon the stage, she had a desire to run into his arms, to
+take refuge in his strength, even as in the incarnation of love, and of
+saying to him: "Take me, take me away, let us go! thine, thine, with
+thee are all my ardour and all my dreams!"
+
+Léon was with the Bovarys.
+
+"He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall
+of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot
+breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair."
+
+You were spoken to just now of the pollution of marriage; then you are
+shown adultery in all its poesy, in its ineffable seductions. I have
+said that the expression should be modified to read: the disillusions of
+marriage and the pollution of adultery. Very often when one is married,
+in the place of happiness without clouds which one promises himself, he
+finds but sacrifice and bitterness. The word disillusion can then be
+used justifiably, that of pollution, never.
+
+Léon and Emma have a rendezvous at the cathedral. They look around or
+they do not, it makes no difference. They go out.
+
+"A lad was playing about the close.
+
+"'Go and get me a cab!'
+
+"The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quartre-Vents; then they
+were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed.
+
+"'Ah! Léon! Really--I don't know--if I ought,' she whispered. Then with
+a more serious air, 'Do you know, it is very improper?'
+
+"'How so?' replied the clerk. 'It is done at Paris.'
+
+"And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her."
+
+We know now, gentlemen, that the fall did not take place in the cab.
+Through a scruple which honors him, the editor of the _Revue de Paris_
+has suppressed the passage of the fall in the cab. But if the _Revue_
+lowered the blinds of the cab, it does allow us to penetrate into the
+room where they found a rendezvous.
+
+Emma wished to leave it, because she had given her word that she would
+return that evening.
+
+"Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her heart she felt already that
+cowardly docility that is for some women at once the chastisement and
+atonement of adultery."
+
+Once upon the sidewalk, Léon continued to walk; she followed him as far
+as the hotel; he mounted the stairs, opened the door and entered. What
+an embrace! Words followed each other quickly after the kisses. They
+told the disappointments of the week, their presentiments, their fears
+about the letters; but now all was forgotten, and they were face to
+face, with their laugh of voluptuousness and terms of endearment.
+
+"The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat. The curtains
+were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too
+much towards the bell-shaped bed-side; and nothing in the world was so
+lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple
+colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms,
+hiding her face in her hands.
+
+"The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its
+calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion."
+
+We are told what happened in that room. Here is still a passage, very
+important as a piece of lascivious painting:
+
+"How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite of its rather
+faded splendour! They always found the furniture in the same place, and
+sometimes hairpins that she had forgotten the Thursday before under the
+pedestal of the clock. They lunched by the fireside on a little round
+table, inlaid with rosewood. Emma carved, put bits on his plate with
+all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed with a sonorous and
+libertine laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the glass
+to the rings on her fingers. They were so completely lost in the
+possession of each other that they thought themselves in their own
+house, and that they would live there till death, like two spouses
+eternally young. They said 'our room,' 'our carpet,' she even said 'my
+slippers,' a gift of Léon's, a whim she had had. They were pink satin,
+bordered with swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too
+short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was
+held on only by the toes to her bare foot.
+
+"He for the first time enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy of feminine
+refinements. He had never met this grace of language, this reserve of
+clothing, these poses of the weary dove. He admired the exaltation of
+her soul and the lace on her petticoat. Besides, was she not 'a lady'
+and a married woman--a real mistress, in fine?"
+
+This, gentlemen, is a description which leaves nothing to be desired, I
+hope, from the point of view of conviction. Here is another, or rather
+here is the continuation of the same scene:
+
+"She used some words which inflamed him, with some kisses which drew
+forth his soul. Where had she learned these caresses almost immaterial,
+so profound and evasive were they?"
+
+Oh! I well understand, gentlemen, the disgust inspired in her by that
+husband who wished to embrace her upon her return; I comprehend
+admirably that after a rendezvous of this kind, she felt with horror at
+night, "that man against her flesh stretched out asleep."
+
+That is not all, for according to the last tableau that I cannot omit,
+she came to be weary of her voluptuousness.
+
+"She was constantly promising herself a profound felicity on her next
+journey. Then she confessed to herself that she felt nothing
+extraordinary. This disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and
+Emma returned to him more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed
+hastily, tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around
+her hips like a gliding snake. She went on tip-toe, barefooted, to see
+once more that the door was closed; then, pale, serious, and without
+speaking, with one movement she threw herself upon his breast with a
+long shudder."
+
+I notice here two things, gentlemen, an admirable picture, the product
+of a talented hand, but an execrable picture from a moral point of
+view. Yes, M. Flaubert knows how to embellish his paintings with all
+the resources of art, but without the discretion of art. With him there
+is no gauze, no veils, it is nature in all her nudity, in all her
+crudity!
+
+Still another quotation:
+
+"They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession
+that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he was
+weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of
+marriage."
+
+The platitudes of marriage and the poetry of adultery! Sometimes it is
+the pollution of marriage, sometimes the platitudes, but always the
+poetry of adultery. These, gentlemen, are the situations which
+M. Flaubert loves to paint, and which, unfortunately, he paints only too
+well.
+
+I have related three scenes: the scene with Rodolphe, and you have seen
+the fall in the forest, the glorification of adultery, and this woman
+whose beauty became greater with this poesy. I have spoken of the
+religious transition, and you saw there a prayer imprinted with
+adulterous language. I have spoken of the second fall, I have unrolled
+before you the scenes which took place with Léon. I have shown you the
+scene of the cab--suppressed--and I have shown you the picture of the
+room and the bed. Now that we believe your convictions are formed, we
+come to the last scene,--that of the punishment.
+
+Numerous excisions have been made, it would appear, by the _Revue de
+Paris_. Here are the terms in which M. Flaubert complains of it:
+
+"Some consideration which I do not appreciate has led the _Revue de
+Paris_ to suppress the number of December 1st. Its scruples being
+revived on the occasion of the present number, it has seen fit to cut
+out still more passages. In consequence, I wish to deny all
+responsibility in the lines which follow; the reader is informed that he
+sees only fragments and not the complete work."
+
+Let us pass, then, over these fragments and come to the death. She
+poisons herself. She poisons herself, why? Ah! it is a very little
+thing, is death, she thinks; I am going to fall asleep and all will be
+finished. Then, without remorse, without an avowal, without a tear of
+repentance over this suicide which is brought about by adulteries in the
+night watches, she goes to receive the sacrament for the dying. Why the
+sacrament, since in her last thought she is going to annihilation? Why,
+when there is not a tear, not a sigh of the Magdalene over her crime of
+infidelity, her suicide, or her adulteries?
+
+After this scene comes that of extreme unction. These are holy and
+sacred words for all. It is with these words that our ancestors have
+fallen asleep, our fathers and our relatives, and it is with them that
+one day our children will see us sleep. When one wishes to make use of
+them, it should be done with exactness; it is not necessary, at least to
+accompany them with the voluptuous image of a past life.
+
+You know how the priest makes the holy unctions upon the forehead, the
+ears, upon the mouth, the feet, pronouncing at the same time the
+liturgical phrases: _quidquam per pedes, per auras, per pectus_, etc.,
+always following with the words _misericordia_ ... sin on one side and
+pity on the other. These holy, sacred words should be reproduced
+exactly; and if they cannot be reproduced exactly, at least nothing
+voluptuous should be put with them.
+
+"She turned her face slowly and seemed filled with joy on seeing
+suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of a
+temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first
+mystical transports, with the visions of eternal beatitude that were
+beginning.
+
+"The priest rose to take the crucifix; then she stretched forward her
+neck as one who is athirst, and gluing her lips to the body of the
+Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest
+kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he recited the _Misereatur_
+and the _Indulgentiam_, dipped his right thumb in the oil and began to
+give extreme unction. First, upon the eyes, that had so coveted all
+worldly pomp; then upon the nostrils, that had been greedy of the warm
+breeze and amorous odours; then upon the mouth that had uttered lies,
+that had been curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then upon the
+hands, that had delighted in sensual touches; and finally upon the soles
+of the feet, so swift of yore, when she was running to satisfy her
+desires, and that would now walk no more."
+
+Now, in the prayers for the dying which the priest recites, at the end
+or at the close of each verse occur these words: "Christian soul, go out
+to a higher region." They are murmured at the moment when the last
+breath of the dying escapes from his lips. The priest recites, etc.
+
+"As the death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his
+prayers mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all
+seemed lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled
+like a passing-bell."
+
+After the fashion of alternating these words, the author has tried to
+make for them a sort of reply. He puts upon the sidewalk a blind man who
+intones a song of which the profane words are a kind of response to the
+prayers for the dying.
+
+"Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs and the
+clattering of a stick; and a voice rose--a raucous voice--that sang--
+
+"'Maids in the warmth of a summer day
+Dream of love and of love alway.
+The wind is strong this summer day,
+Her petticoat has flown away.'"
+
+This is the moment when Madame Bovary dies.
+
+Thus we have here the picture: on one side the priest reciting the
+prayers for the dying; on the other the hand-organ player who excites
+from the dying woman
+
+"an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous
+face of the poor wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a
+menace.... She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all
+drew near. She was dead."
+
+And then later, when the body is cold, above all should the cadaver,
+which the soul has just left, be respected. When the husband is there
+on his knees, weeping for his wife, when he extends the shroud over her,
+any other would have stopped, but M. Flaubert makes a final stroke with
+his brush:
+
+"The sheet sank in from her breast to her knees, and then rose at the
+tips of her toes."
+
+This the scene of death. I have abridged it and have grouped it after a
+fashion. It is now for you to judge and determine whether there is a
+mixture of the sacred and the profane in it, or rather, a mixture of the
+sacred and the voluptuous.
+
+I have related the romance, I have brought a charge against it and,
+permit me to say, against the kind of art that M. Flaubert cultivates,
+the kind that is realistic but not discreet. You shall see to what
+limits he has gone. A copy of the _Artiste_ lately came to my hand; it
+is not for us to make accusations against the _Artiste_, but to learn to
+what school M. Flaubert belongs, and I ask your permission to read you
+some lines, which have nothing to do with M. Flaubert's prosecuted book,
+only to show to what a degree he excels in this kind of painting. He
+loves to paint temptations, especially the temptations to which Madame
+Bovary succumbed. Well, I find a model of its kind in the lines to
+follow, from the _Artiste_, for the month of January, signed _Gustave
+Flaubert_, upon the temptation of Saint Anthony. Heaven knows it is a
+subject upon which many things might be said, but I do not believe it
+possible to give more vivacity to the image, stronger lines to the
+picture. Apollonius says to Saint Anthony:--
+
+"What is knowledge? What is glory? Wouldst thou refresh thine eyes
+under the humid jasmines? Wouldst thou feel thy body sink itself, as in
+a wave, in the sweet flesh of swooning women?"
+
+Ah! well! here is the same colour, the same strength of the brush, the
+same vivacity of expression!
+
+To resume. I have analyzed the book, I have related the story without
+forgetting a page, I have then made the charge, which was the second
+part of my task. I have exhibited some of the portraits, I have shown
+Madame Bovary in repose, by the side of her husband, in contact with
+those whom she could not tempt, and I have pointed out to you the
+lascivious colour of that portrait! Then I have analyzed some of the
+great scenes: the fall with Rodolphe, the religious transition, the
+meetings with Léon, the death scene, and in all this I find the double
+count of offense against public morals and against religion.
+
+I had need of but two scenes: Do you not see the moral outrage in the
+fall with Rodolphe? Do you not see the glorification of adultery in it?
+And then, the religious outrage, which I find in the drawing of the
+confession, in the religious transition, and finally, the scene of
+death.
+
+You have before you, gentlemen, three guilty ones: M. Flaubert, the
+author of the book, M. Pichat who accepted it, and M. Pillet, who
+printed it. In this matter, there is no misdemeanor without publicity,
+and all those concerned in the publicity should be equally blamed. But
+we hasten to say that the manager of the _Revue_ and the printer are
+only in the second rank. The principal offender is the author,
+M. Flaubert; M. Flaubert who admonished by a note from the editor,
+protested against the suppression which had been made in his work. After
+him comes M. Laurent Pichat, from whom you will demand a reason, not
+for the suppression which he has made, but of that which he should have
+made; and finally comes the printer, who is a sentinel at the door of
+scandal. M. Pillet, besides, is an honourable man against whom I have
+nothing to say. We ask but one thing of you, which is to apply the law
+to him. Printers should read; when they do not read or have read what
+they print, it is at their own risk and peril. Printers are not
+machines; they have a privilege, they take an oath, they are in a
+special situation and they are responsible. Again, they are, if you
+will permit the expression, like an advanced guard; if they allow a
+misdemeanor to pass, it is like allowing the enemy to pass. Make the
+penalty as mild as you will for Pillet, be as indulgent as you like with
+the manager of the _Revue_; but as for Flaubert, the principal culprit,
+it is for him you should reserve your severities!
+
+My task is accomplished; we await the objections on the part of the
+defense. The general objection will be: But after all the romance is
+moral on the whole, for is not adultery punished?
+
+To this objection there are two replies: I believe that in a
+hypothetically moral work, a moral conclusion cannot be reached by the
+presentation of the lascivious details we find here. And again I say:
+that the work is not moral at the foundation.
+
+I say, gentlemen, that lascivious details cannot be covered by a moral
+conclusion, otherwise one could relate all the orgies imaginable,
+describe all the turpitude of a public woman, making her die in a
+charity bed of a hospital. It would be allowable to study and depict
+all the poses of lasciviousness. It would be going against all the
+rules of good sense. It would place the poison at the door of all, the
+remedy at the doors of few, if there were any remedy. Who are the ones
+to read M. Flaubert's romance? Are they men who are interested in
+political or social economy? No! The light pages of Madame Bovary fall
+into hands still lighter, into the hands of young girls, sometimes of
+married women. Well, when the imagination has been seduced, when this
+seduction has fallen upon the heart, when the heart shall have told it
+to the senses, do you believe that cold reason would have much power
+against this seduction of sense and sentiment? And then, man should not
+clothe himself too much in his power and his virtue; man has low
+instincts and high ideas, and, with all, virtue is only the consequence
+of an effort ofttimes laborious. Lascivious pictures have generally more
+influence than cold reason. This is what I respond to that theory, that
+is, as a first response; but I have a second.
+
+I hold that the romance of _Madame Bovary_, from a philosophic point of
+view, is not moral. Without doubt Madame Bovary died of poison; she
+suffered much, it is true; but she died at her own time and in her own
+way, not because she had committed adultery but because she wished to;
+she died in all the prestige of her youth and beauty; she died after
+having two lovers, leaving a husband who loved her, who adored her, who
+found Rodolphe's portrait, his letters and Léon's, who read the letters
+of a woman twice an adulteress, and who, after that, loved her still
+more, even on the other side of the tomb. Who would condemn this woman
+in the book? No one. Such is the conclusion. There is not in the book a
+person who condemns her. If you can find one wise person, if you can
+find one single principal virtue by which the adulteress is condemned, I
+am wrong. But if in all the book there is not a person who makes her
+bow her head, there is not an idea, a line, by virtue of which the
+adulteress is scourged, it is I who am right, and the book is immoral!
+
+Should it be in the name of conjugal honor that the book be condemned?
+No, for conjugal honor is represented here by a devoted husband who,
+after the death of his wife, meets Rodolphe and seeks to find upon the
+face of the lover the features of the woman he loved. I ask you whether
+you could stigmatize this woman in the name of conjugal honor when there
+is not in the book a single word where the husband does not bow before
+the adulteress?
+
+Should it be in the name of public opinion? No, for public opinion is
+personified in a grotesque being, in the Homais apothecary surrounded by
+ridiculous persons whom this woman dominated.
+
+Will you condemn it in the name of religious sentiment? No, for this
+sentiment you see personified in the curate Bournisien, a priest as
+grotesque as the apothecary, believing only in physical suffering, never
+in moral, and little more than a materialist.
+
+Will you condemn it in the name of the author's conscience? I know not
+what the author thinks, but in chapter 10, the only philosophical one of
+his book, I read the following:
+
+"There is always after the death of any one a kind of stupefaction; so
+difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign
+ourselves to believe in it."
+
+This is not a cry of unbelief, but it is at least a cry of
+scepticism. Without doubt it is difficult to comprehend and believe it,
+but why this stupefaction which manifest's itself at death? Why?
+Because this surprise is something that is a mystery, because it is
+difficult to comprehend and judge, although one must resign himself to
+it. And as for me, I say that if death is the beginning of annihilation,
+that if the devoted husband feels his love increase on learning of the
+adulteries of his wife, that if opinion is represented by a grotesque
+being, that if religious sentiment is represented by a ridiculous
+priest, one person alone is right, and that is Emma Bovary,--Messalina
+was right against Juvenal.
+
+This is the conclusion of the book, drawn not by the author, but by a
+man who reflects and goes to the depths of things, by a man who has
+sought in this book for a person who could rule this woman. There is
+none there. The only person who ruled was Madame Bovary. It is
+necessary to seek elsewhere than in the book; we must look to Christian
+morals, which are the foundation of modern civilization. By this
+standard all explains itself, all becomes clear.
+
+In its name the adulteress is stigmatized, condemned, not because her
+act is an imprudence, exposing her to disillusions and regrets, but
+because it is a crime against the family. You stigmatize and condemn
+suicide, not because it is a foolish thing (the fool is not
+responsible), not because it is a cowardly act (for it sometimes
+requires a certain physical courage), but because it is a scorn of duty
+in the life we are living, and the cry of unbelief in the life to come.
+
+This code of morals stigmatizes realistic literature, not because it
+paints the passions: hatred, vengeance, love--the world sees but the
+surface and art should paint them--but not paint them without bridle,
+without limits. Art without rules is not art. It is like a woman who
+discards all clothing. To impose upon art the one rule of public decency
+is not to subject it, not to dishonor it. One grows great only by rule.
+These, gentlemen, are the principles which we profess, this the doctrine
+which we defend with conscience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Plea for the Defense, by_
+
+
+M. SENARD
+
+
+Gentlemen, M. Gustave Flaubert has been accused before you of making a
+bad book; of having, in this book, outraged public morals and religion.
+M. Gustave Flaubert is beside me and affirms before you that he has made
+an honest book; he affirms before you that the thought in his book, from
+the first line to the last, is a moral thought; and that, if it were not
+perverted (and you have seen during the last hour how great a talent one
+may have for perverting a thought) it would be (and will become again
+presently) for you, as it has been already for the readers of the book,
+an eminently moral and religious thought capable of being translated
+into these words: the excitation of virtue through the horror of vice.
+
+I bring M. Gustave Flaubert's affirmation here to you, and I put it
+fearlessly in the light of the prosecuting attorney's speech, for this
+affirmation is grave; and it is through the personality of its maker,
+through the circumstances which have led to the writing of the book,
+that I am going to make it understood to you.
+
+The affirmation is grave on account of the personality that makes it:
+and, permit me to say to you that M. Gustave Flaubert is not to me an
+unknown man who has instructions to give me, and who has need of
+recommendations from me--I speak not only of his morality but of his
+position. I come here, into this precinct, fulfilling a duty of
+conscience after reading the book, after feeling myself exalted, by this
+reading, in all that is honest and profoundly religious. But, at the
+same time that I come fulfilling a duty of conscience, I come to fulfill
+a duty of friendship. I remember, and I can never forget, that his
+father was an old friend of mine. His father, by whose friendship I was
+long honoured, to the last day of his life, his father,--permit me to
+say his illustrious father,--was for thirty years surgeon-in-chief at
+the hospital at Rouen. He was in charge of the Dupuytren dissecting
+room, and in giving to science great instruction, he has endowed it with
+some great names; I will mention but one, that of Cloquet. He has not
+only left for himself a good name in science, he has left a grand
+memento in his immense service to humanity. And at the same time I am
+recalling my bond of friendship with him, I wish to tell you that his
+son, who has been dragged into Court for an outrage against morals and
+religion, this son is the friend of my children, as I was the friend of
+his father. I know his thought, I know his intentions, and the
+counsellor has the right here of placing himself as a personal guaranty
+of his client.
+
+Gentlemen, a great name and great memories have obligations. Children
+were not wanting to M. Flaubert. There were three of them, two sons, and
+a daughter who died at twenty-one. The eldest has been judged worthy to
+succeed his father; and he is to-day, as he has been for many years,
+carrying on the mission which his father conducted for thirty years. The
+younger son is here; he is at your bar. In leaving them a considerable
+fortune and a great name, their father has left upon them the obligation
+of being men of intelligence and of heart; that is to say, useful men.
+The brother of my client has been thrown into a career where each day
+brings its own service. This one has devoted his life to study and to
+letters, the work before you being his first work. This first work,
+gentlemen, which provokes the passions, as the Government Attorney has
+said, is the result of long study and much thought. M. Gustave Flaubert
+is a man of serious character, turning his attention, through his very
+nature, to serious subjects, to sad subjects. He is not the man whom the
+prosecuting attorney, in fifteen or twenty lines bitten out here and
+there, has presented to you as a maker of lascivious pictures. No; there
+is in his nature, I repeat, all that is gravest, most serious, and even
+the saddest that one could imagine. His book, by restoring a single
+phrase, by putting beside the quoted lines the lines which precede and
+follow, will take on its veritable colour, as soon as you understand the
+intentions of the author. And, of the too clever words to which you have
+listened, there will remain to you only the memory of a sentiment of
+profound admiration for a talent which can thus transform things.
+
+I have told you that M. Gustave Flaubert was a serious and grave man.
+His studies, conforming to his nature, have been serious and broad. They
+have embraced not only all branches of literature, but the right
+branches. M. Flaubert is not the man to be content with observations of
+even the best where he lived; he has sought out the best in other
+places; _Qui mores multorum vidit et urbes_.
+
+After his father's death and the completion of his studies at college,
+he visited Italy, and from 1848 to 1852 traveled through the countries
+of the Orient,--Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor--in which countries,
+doubtless, a man traveling through and bringing to his travels a fine
+intelligence, could acquire something exalted, something poetic, as well
+as the colour and prestige of style which the public minister has just
+pointed out, to make good the misdemeanor that he imputes. That prestige
+of style, those literary qualities pointed to with _éclat_ in this
+debate, are there, but after no fashion can they be brought up for
+indictment.
+
+Since his return, in 1852, M. Gustave Flaubert has written and sought to
+produce in a grand outline the result of his close and serious studies,
+the result of what he had gathered in his journeys.
+
+What is the outline he has chosen, the subject he has taken, and how has
+he treated it? My client belongs to any of the schools, whose names I
+have just learned in the Attorney's speech. Heaven knows he belongs to
+the realistic school, in that he occupies himself with the reality of
+things. He belongs to the psychological school, in the sense that it is
+not material things which engage him, but human sentiment and the
+development of the passions wherever the human being is placed. He
+belongs to the romantic school less perhaps than to any other, because,
+if romanticism appears in his book, as does realism, it appears only in
+some ironical expressions here and there, which the public attorney has
+taken seriously. What M. Flaubert especially wished was to take a
+subject of study from real life, creating from it some true types of the
+middle class, arriving finally at some useful result. Yes, what has most
+occupied my client in the studies to which he has devoted himself, is
+precisely this useful aim, followed out in putting upon the scene three
+or four personages from actual society, living in the conditions of real
+life, and presenting them to the eyes of the reader in a true picture of
+what is met with very often in the world.
+
+The Prosecuting Attorney, summing up his opinion of _Madame Bovary_, has
+said:
+
+"The second title of this work might be: _The Story of the Adulteries of
+a Provincial Woman_."
+
+I protest vigorously against this title. This alone, had I not listened
+to your speech from beginning to end, would prove to me the prejudice in
+which you are firmly bound. No! the second title of this work is not:
+_The Story of the Adulteries of a Provincial Woman_; it is, if it is
+absolutely necessary to have a second title: the story of the education
+too often met with in the provinces; the story of the perils to which
+such an education leads; the story of degradation, of dishonesty, of
+suicide, considered as a consequence of a first fault, and a fault led
+up to through wrong-doing, by which a young woman is often carried
+away. It is the story of an education, and the deplorable life of which
+such an education is often the preface. This is what M. Flaubert
+desired to paint, and not the adulteries of a woman of the provinces.
+You will see this at once on reading the incriminated book.
+
+Now, the prosecuting attorney perceives in all this, and through it all,
+a lascivious colour. If it were possible to take the number of lines of
+the book which he has cut out, and put parallel to them other lines that
+he has left, we should have a total proportion of about one to five
+hundred; and you would see that this proportion of one to five hundred
+was in no way of a lascivious colour; it exists only under the
+conditions of being cut out and commented upon.
+
+Now, what has M. Flaubert desired to paint? First, education given to a
+woman which is above the conditions to which she was born--something
+that too often happens among us, it must be confessed. Then, the mixture
+of discordant elements that are thus produced in the intelligence of the
+woman; and then when marriage comes, especially if the marriage is not
+in accordance with the education, but rather with the conditions under
+which the woman was born, the author explains all these facts which
+occur in the situation that he depicts.
+
+What has he shown? He shows a woman entering upon vice because of a
+disappointing match; then vice in its last degree, degradation and
+wretchedness. Presently, when through the reading of several passages,
+I shall have made you acquainted with the book as a whole, I shall
+demand of this tribunal the privilege of their accepting the question on
+these terms: Would this book, put into the hands of a young woman, have
+the effect of leading her towards easy pleasures, towards adultery, or,
+on the contrary, would it show her the danger of the first step, and
+bring upon her a shiver of horror? The question thus put, your
+conscience would soon decide.
+
+I have here stated that M. Flaubert wished to paint a woman who, instead
+of trying to adapt herself to the conditions in which she was placed, to
+her position and her birth, instead of seeking to make herself a part of
+the life to which she belonged, was occupied with a thousand foreign
+aspirations drawn from an education too far above her; instead of
+accommodating herself to the duties of her position, of being the
+tranquil wife of a country doctor with whom she should pass her days, in
+place of seeking her happiness in her house and in her marriage, sought
+it in interminable fancies; and then, meeting a young man upon the way
+who coquetted with her, she played the same game with him (Heaven knows
+they were both inexperienced enough!) urging herself on by degrees, and
+frightened when she turned to the religion of her early years and found
+it insufficient. We shall see presently why this was so. At first, the
+young man's ignorance and her own preserves her from danger. But she
+soon meets a man, of the kind of which there are too many in the world,
+who takes possession of her--this poor woman, already perverted and
+ready to stray. Here is the main point; now it is necessary to see what
+the book makes of it.
+
+The Public Minister becomes incensed, and I believe wrongly so from the
+standard of conscience and the human heart, over that first scene, where
+Madame Bovary finds a sort of pleasure, of joy, in having broken her
+prison, and returns to her home saying: "I have a lover." Do you believe
+that this is not the first cry of the human heart! The proof is between
+you and me. But we must look a little further, and then we shall see
+that, if the first moment, the first instant of the fall, excites in
+this woman a sort of transport of joy, of delirium, in some lines
+farther on the deception makes itself manifest and, following the
+expression of the author, she seems humiliated in her own eyes.
+
+Yes, deception, grief, and remorse come to her at the same time. The man
+in whom she has confided, to whom she has given herself up, has only
+made use of her for the moment, as he would a plaything; remorse and
+regret now rend her heart. It has shocked you to hear this called the
+disillusion of adultery; you would have preferred _pollution_ at the
+hand of a writer who placed before you a woman who, not having
+comprehended marriage, felt herself _polluted_ by contact with her
+husband, and who, having sought her ideal elsewhere, found the
+_disillusions_ of adultery. This word has shocked you; in the place of
+_disillusions_, you would have wished _pollution_ of adultery. This
+tribunal shall be the judge. As for me, if I had depicted the same
+personage I would have said to her: Poor woman! if you believe that your
+husband's kisses are monotonous and wearisome, if you have found only
+platitudes--this word has been especially brought to our notice--the
+platitudes of marriage--if you seem to see pollution in a union where
+love does not preside, take care, for your dreams are an illusion, and
+you will one day be cruelly deceived. But this man, gentlemen, who knows
+how to speak strongly, makes use of the word pollution to express what
+we would have called disillusion, and he has used the true word,
+although vague to him who can bring to it no intelligence. I would have
+liked better his not speaking so strongly, his not pronouncing the word
+_pollution_, but rather averting the woman from deception, from
+disillusion, and saying to her: Where you believe you will find love,
+you will find only libertinism; where you think you will find happiness,
+there is only bitterness. A husband who goes tranquilly about his
+affairs, who kisses you, puts on his house cap and eats his soup with
+you, is a prosaic husband revolting to you; you aspire to a man who will
+love you, idolize you; poor child! that man will be a libertine who will
+have taken you for a minute for the sake of playing with you. There will
+be some illusion about it the first time, perhaps the second; you may
+come back home joyous, singing the song of adultery. "I have a lover!"
+but the third time you will not wish to go to him, for the disillusion
+will have come. The man you have dreamed of will have lost all his
+prestige; you will have found again in love the platitudes of marriage,
+and this time with scorn, disdain, disgust and poignant remorse.
+
+This, gentlemen, is what M. Flaubert has said, what he has painted, what
+is in each line of his book; and this is what distinguishes his work
+from all other works of the kind. Under his hand, the great
+irregularities of society figure on each page, and adultery walks abroad
+full of disgust and shame. He has brought into the common relations of
+life the most powerful teaching that can be given to a young woman. And
+Heaven knows that to those of our young women who do not find in lofty,
+honest principle and stern religion enough to keep them steady in the
+accomplishment of their duties as mothers, or who do not find it in that
+resignation and practical science of life which bids us accommodate
+ourselves to what we have, but who carry their dreams to the outside
+(and the most honest, the most pure of our young women, in the prosaic
+life of their households, are sometimes tormented by that which is going
+on outside), a book like this would bring but one reflection. Of that
+you may be sure. And this is what M. Flaubert has intended.
+
+And notice carefully one thing: M. Flaubert is not the man who has
+painted a charming adultery for you, in order to arrive later with the
+_Deus ex machina_; no, you are carried too quickly on to the last
+page. Adultery with him is only a series of torments, remorse and
+regret; and then he arrives at the final, frightful expiation. It is
+excessive. If M. Flaubert sins, it is through excess; and I will show
+you presently what is meant by this. The expiation is not allowed to
+wait, and it is that which makes the book eminently moral and useful. It
+does not promise the young woman some beautiful years at the end of
+which she can say: after this, one is willing to die. No! from the
+second day there is bitterness and disillusion. The conclusion for
+morality is found in each line of the book.
+
+This book is written with a power of observation to which the Government
+Attorney has rendered justice. And it is here that I would call your
+attention to it, because if the accusation is without foundation, it
+must fall. This book is written with a power truly remarkable for
+observing the smallest details. An article in the _Artiste_, signed
+Flaubert, has served as yet another text for the accusation. Let the
+Government Attorney note, first that this article is foreign to the
+indictment; then, that we will hold him innocent and moral in the eyes
+of this tribunal on one condition, which is, that he will have the
+goodness to read the entire article from the place of the cutting.
+
+The most noticeable thing in M. Flaubert's book is what some accounts
+have called a fidelity wholly Daguerreian in the reproduction of the
+type of things, and in the intimate nature of the thought of the human
+heart;--and this reproduction becomes more powerful still by the magic
+of his style. Now notice, that if he had applied this fidelity only to
+the scenes of degradation, you could say with reason: the author has
+been pleased to paint the scenes of degradation with that power of
+description which is peculiarly his own. From the first to the last page
+of his book, he keeps close to all the facts in Emma's life, without any
+kind of reserve, from her infancy in her father's house, to her
+education in the convent, sparing nothing. And those of us who have read
+the book from beginning to end can say--and this is a notable point
+which should put him in a favorable light with you, not only bringing
+him acquittal, but removing from him every kind of misunderstanding--that
+when he comes to the difficult parts, precisely at the time of
+degradation, in place of doing as some classic authors have done, (as
+the Public Attorney knows full well, but whom he forgot when he wrote
+his address) a few pages of whose writings I have with me here, (not to
+read to you but for you to run through in Court--and I might quote a few
+lines here presently), in place of doing as our great classic authors,
+our great masters have done, who never hesitate at description when they
+have come to the scene of a union of the senses between man and woman,
+M. Flaubert contents himself with a word. All his descriptive power
+disappears, because his thought is chaste; because where he might write
+in his own manner and with the magic of his style, he feels that there
+are some things that should not be described or even touched upon. The
+Public Attorney finds that he has still said too much. When I have shown
+him some men who, in great philosophical works, have delighted in
+descriptions of these things, and when in the light of this fact I have
+shown that this man, who possesses the descriptive faculty to so high a
+degree and who, far from using it, desists and abstains from it, I shall
+indeed have the right to ask why this accusation has been brought?
+
+Nevertheless, gentlemen, just as he has described to us the pleasant
+cradle of Emma's infancy, with its foliage, its rose-colored and white
+flowers which gladdened her with their blossoms and their perfume, so he
+has described her when she went out from there into other paths, into
+paths where she found mire, where her feet became soiled from its
+contact, when the mire rose higher than herself and--he need not have
+told it! But that would be to suppress the book completely, and I am
+going far enough to say would suppress its moral element under a pretext
+of defending it; for if a fault cannot be shown, if it cannot be pointed
+out, if in a picture of real life which aims to show, through thought,
+peril, fall and punishment, you would debar painting such as this, it is
+evident you would cut out of the book its whole purpose.
+
+This book was not a matter of a few hours' amusement for my client. It
+represents two or three years of incessant study. And now I am going to
+tell you something more: M. Flaubert who, after so many years of labor,
+so many of study, so many journeys, so many notes culled from authors he
+had read,--and Heaven grant you may see the fountain-head from which he
+has drawn, for this strange fact will take upon itself his
+justification--M. Flaubert (and his lascivious colour)--you will find
+impregnated wholly with Bossuet and Massillon. It is in the study of
+these authors that we shall presently find him seeking, not to
+plagiarize, but to reproduce in his descriptions the thoughts and
+colours employed by them. And can you believe, after all that, having
+done this work with so much love for it, and with a decided purpose,
+that, full of confidence in himself, and after so much study and
+meditation, he would wish to throw himself immediately into the arena?
+He would have done it, no doubt, had he been an unknown man, if his name
+had belonged to himself in sole ownership, had he believed himself able
+to dispose of it and use it as it seemed good to him; but, I repeat, he
+is one of those upon whom rests the obligation of rank. His name is
+Flaubert, he is the second son of M. Flaubert, and he has desired to
+make a place for himself in literature, profoundly respecting the moral
+and religious phases of it,--not through the notoriety of a lawsuit, for
+such a purpose could not enter his thoughts--but through personal
+dignity, not wishing his name to be at the head of a publication that
+did not seem to some persons and to those in whom he had faith, worthy
+of being published. M. Flaubert read in fragments, and even in
+totality, to friends holding high places in the world of letters, the
+pages which he hoped some day to print, and I assure you that not one of
+them has been offended by what has just now excited such lively severity
+on the part of the Government Attorney. No one even thought of it. They
+simply examined and studied the literary value of the book. As to the
+moral purpose, it is so evident, so written in every line in terms so
+unequivocal that there was no need of raising the question.
+
+Reassured upon the value of the book, encouraged, furthermore, by the
+most eminent men of the press, M. Flaubert thought only of printing it
+and giving it to the public. I repeat: everyone was unanimous in
+rendering homage to its literary merit, to its style, and at the same
+time to the excellent thought that pervaded it, from the first line to
+the last. And when this action was brought it was not he alone who was
+surprised and profoundly troubled, but, permit me to say, we, who cannot
+understand the action, and I myself most of all, who had read the book
+with a very lively interest as soon as it was published. But we are his
+intimate friends. Heaven knows that there are some shades of meaning
+that might escape us in our easy-going habits which never could escape
+women of great intelligence, of great purity and unquestioned
+chastity. These are not names which can be pronounced in this audience,
+but if I could tell you what has been said to Flaubert, what has been
+said to me, even, by mothers of families who have read this book, if I
+could tell you their astonishment, after receiving from that reading an
+impression so good that they believed they should thank the author for
+it, if I could tell you their astonishment, their grief, when they
+learned that this book was thought to oppose public morals and religious
+faith, the faith of their whole life, God knows there would be in the
+sum of this appreciation sufficient to fortify me, had I need of being
+fortified for this combat with the Public Attorney.
+
+However, in the midst of all the appreciative voices of contemporaneous
+literature there is one which I wish to mention to you. There is one who
+is not only respected by reason of a grand and beautiful character, who,
+in the midst of adversity, of suffering even, has struggled courageously
+each day; who is not only great by virtue of many deeds useless to
+recall here, but great through his literary works which must be recalled
+because here he is an authority; great especially through the purity
+which exists in all his works, through the chastity of all his writings:
+Lamartine.
+
+Lamartine did not know my client; he did not know that he
+existed. Lamartine, at his home in the country, read _Madame Bovary_ in
+each number of the _Revue de Paris_, and Lamartine found there such
+power that it recurred to him again and again, as I am going to tell
+you.
+
+After some days, Lamartine returned to Paris, and the next day informed
+himself where M. Gustave Flaubert lived. He sent to the _Revue_ to learn
+where M. Gustave Flaubert lived, who had published in the magazine some
+articles under the title of _Madame Bovary_. He then directed his
+secretary to go and present his compliments to M. Flaubert, to express
+for him the satisfaction he had found in reading his book, and also his
+desire to see the new author who revealed himself in an essay of that
+order.
+
+My client went to Lamartine's house; and he found in him not only a man
+who encouraged him, but who said to him:
+
+"You have made the best book I have read in twenty years."
+
+In a word, his praise was such that, in his modesty, my client scarcely
+liked to repeat it to me. Lamartine proved to him that he had read each
+number, proving it most graciously by repeating entire pages from
+them. Lamartine only added:
+
+"While I have read even to the last page without reserve, I did blame
+the last pages. You have hurt me, you have literally made me suffer! The
+punishment is beyond all proportion to the crime; you have created a
+pitiably frightful death! Assuredly the woman who defiles the marriage
+bed should expect punishment, but this is horrible; it is a punishment
+such as I have never seen. You have gone too far; you have done mischief
+to my nerves. That power of description which you have applied to the
+last moment of death has left upon me an indelible suffering!"
+
+And when Gustave Flaubert said to him:
+
+"But, Monsieur de Lamartine, do you know that I have been indicted and
+summoned to a court of correction for an offense against public morals
+and religion for having made a book like that?"
+
+Lamartine answered:
+
+"I believe that I have been all my life a man who, in literary works as
+well as others, comprehends fully what makes for public and religious
+morals; my dear child, it is not possible to find in France a tribunal
+that will convict you."
+
+This is what passed between Lamartine and Flaubert yesterday, and I have
+the right to say to you that this approval is among those which are
+worthy to be well weighed.
+
+This well understood, let us see how my conscience could tell me that
+_Madame Bovary_ was a good book, a good deed. And I ask your permission
+to add that I do not take to these things easily, this facility is not
+my habit. Some literary works I take up which, although emanating from
+our great writers, do not remain two minutes before my eyes. I will pass
+to you in the council chamber some lines that I took no delight in
+reading, and I will ask your permission to say to you that when I came
+to the end of M. Flaubert's work, I was convinced that a cutting made by
+the _Revue de Paris_ was the cause of all this. I shall ask you further
+to add my appreciation to this highest and most distinguished
+appreciation which I am about to mention.
+
+Here, gentlemen, is a portfolio filled with the opinions of all the
+literary men of our time upon the work with which we are engaged, among
+whom are some of the most distinguished, expressing their astonishment
+upon reading this new work, at once so moral and so useful!
+
+Now, how has it come about that a work like this can incur a process of
+law? If you will permit me, I will tell you. The _Revue de Paris_, whose
+reading committee had read the work in its entirety, for the manuscript
+was sent long before it was published, evidently found nothing to
+criticise. When it came time to print the copy of December 1st, 1856,
+one of the directors of the _Revue_ became affrighted at the scene in
+the cab. He said: "This is not conventional, we must suppress it."
+Flaubert was offended by the suppression. He was not willing that it
+should be made unless a note to that effect were placed at the bottom of
+the page. It was he who exacted the note. It is he who, on account of
+his self-respect as an author, neither wishing to have his work
+mutilated nor, on the other hand wishing to make trouble for the
+_Revue_, said: "You may suppress it if it seems best to you, but you
+will state that you have suppressed something." And they agreed upon
+the following note:
+
+"The directors have seen the necessity of suppressing a passage here
+which did not seem fitting to the _Revue de Paris_; we give notice of it
+to the author."
+
+Here is the suppressed passage which I am going to read to you. We have
+only a proof, which we had great difficulty in procuring. The first part
+has not a single correction; one word is corrected in the second part.
+
+"'Where to, sir?' asked the coachman.
+
+"'Where you like,' said Léon, forcing Emma into the cab.
+
+"And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont,
+crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoléon, the Pont Neuf, and
+stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille.
+
+"'Go on,' cried a voice that came from within.
+
+"The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour
+Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop.
+
+"'No, straight on!' cried the same voice.
+
+"The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours,
+trotted quietly beneath the elm-trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put
+his leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the
+side alley by the meadow to the margin of the waters.
+
+"It went along by the river, along the towing-path paved with sharp
+pebbles, and for a long while in the direction of Oyssel, beyond the
+isles.
+
+"But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatre-mares, Sotteville, La
+Grande-Chaussée, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of
+the Jardin des Plantes.
+
+"'Get on, will you?' cried the voice more furiously.
+
+"And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the Quai
+des Curandiers, the Quai aux Meules, once more over the bridge, by the
+Place du Champ de Mars, and behind the hospital gardens, where old men
+in black coats were walking in the sun along the terrace all green with
+ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard Cauchoise,
+then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills.
+
+"It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered
+about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont
+Gargan, at La Rouge-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue
+Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien,
+Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise--in front of the Customs, at the 'Vieille
+Tour,' the 'Trois Pipes,' and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to
+time, the coachman on his box cast despairing eyes at the
+public-houses. He could not understand what furious desire for
+locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to
+now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth behind
+him. Then he lashed his perspiring jades afresh, but indifferent to
+their jolting, running up against things here and there, not caring if
+he did, demoralised, and almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and
+depression.
+
+"And on the harbour in the midst of the drays and casks and in the
+streets at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes
+at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds
+drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb,
+and tossing about like a vessel.
+
+"Once, in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun
+beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed
+beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of
+paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off alighted like white
+butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom.
+
+"At about six o'clock, the carriage stopped in a back street of the
+Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down,
+and without turning her head.
+
+"On reaching the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the
+diligence. Hivert, who had waited for her fifty-three minutes, had at
+last started.
+
+"Nothing, however, could prevent her setting out; she had promised to
+return that evening. Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her heart
+she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at once
+the chastisement and atonement of adultery."
+
+M. Flaubert calls my attention to the fact that the Public Attorney
+condemned this last clause.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+No, I have pointed it out.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+It is certain that if he had made a reproach it would have fallen before
+these words: "at once the chastisement and atonement of adultery."
+Furthermore, that could be made a matter of reproach with as much
+foundation as the other quotations, for in all that you have condemned
+there is no point that can be seriously held.
+
+Now, gentlemen, this kind of fantastic journey having displeased the
+editors of the _Revue_, it was suppressed. This was certainly excess of
+reserve on the part of the _Revue_; and it is very certain that it is
+not an excess of reserve which could furnish material for a lawsuit. You
+shall see now what has furnished the material. What is not seen, what
+has been suppressed, comes thus to appear a very strange thing. People
+imagine many things, and often those which do not exist, as you have
+seen from the reading of the original passage. Heavens! Do you know what
+they imagined? Probably that there was in the suppressed passage
+something analogous to that which you will have the goodness to read in
+one of the most marvellous romances from the pen of an honorable member
+of the French Academy, M. Mérimée.
+
+M. Mérimée, in a romance entitled _The Double Mistake_, describes a
+scene which took place in a postchaise. It is not the locality where the
+carriage is that is of importance, it is, as here, in the detail of what
+is done in the interior. I do not wish to abuse the audience, and will
+pass the book to the Public Attorney and to the court. If we had
+written a half, or a quarter part of what M. Mérimée wrote, I should
+find some embarrassment in the task that has been given me, or rather I
+should have to modify it; in place of saying what I have said, and what
+I affirm, that M. Flaubert has written a good book, an honest book,
+useful and moral, I should say: literature has its rights; M. Mérimée
+has made a very remarkable literary work, and it is not necessary to
+show ourselves too particular about details when the whole is
+irreproachable. I take my stand there; I should acquit, and you will
+acquit. Great Heavens! It is not by omission that an author can sin in
+a matter of this kind. And besides, you will have the detail of that
+which took place in the cab. But as my client himself was content to
+make a journey, revealing what passed in the interior of the carriage
+only by a bare hand which appeared under the yellow silk curtains and
+threw out bits of torn paper which were scattered by the wind and
+settled down afar off like white butterflies upon a field of red clover
+all in flower, as my client was content with that, no one knew anything
+about it and everyone supposed--from the suppression itself--that he had
+at least said as much as the member of the French Academy. You have
+seen that there was nothing in it.
+
+Ah, well! this unfortunate suppression has caused the lawsuit! That is
+to say, when, in the offices where they have charge, and with infinite
+reason, of inspecting all writings which could offend public morals,
+they saw this cut, they took warning. I am obliged to declare, and,
+gentlemen of the _Revue_, allow me to state that they started the work
+of their scissors two words too far off; they should have begun before
+they got into the cab. To cut after that was more difficult. This
+cutting was indeed most unfortunate; but if you have committed the
+error, gentlemen of the _Revue_, assuredly you will atone for it to-day.
+
+They said in the inspecting office: Take heed of what is to follow, and
+when the following number appeared, they made war on it to the syllable.
+The people in the office are not obliged to read all; and when they saw
+that some one had written about a woman removing all her clothing, they
+were startled enough without going further. It is true that, differing
+from our great masters, Flaubert has not taken the trouble to describe
+the alabaster of her bare arms, throat, etc. He has not said, as did a
+poet whom we love:
+
+I see her alabaster limbs ardent and pure,
+Smooth as ebony, like the lily, coral, roses, veins of azure,
+Such indeed, as in former times thou showedst to me
+Of nudity embellished and adorned;
+When nights slipped by, and pillows soft
+Saw thee from my kisses waking and sleeping oft.
+
+He has said nothing like this of André Chénier's. But he finally said:
+
+"She abandoned herself.... Her clothing fell from her."
+
+She abandoned herself! Why not? Is all description to be prohibited?
+But when one makes an incriminating charge, he should read the whole,
+and the Government Attorney has not read the whole. The passage he makes
+the charge against does not stop where he stopped; it has a corrective,
+and here it is:
+
+"Nevertheless, there was upon this brow covered with cold drops, upon
+these stammering lips, in these bewildered eyes, in the clasp of these
+arms something extreme, something vague and lugubrious which seemed to
+Léon to glide between them in some subtle fashion, as if to separate
+them."
+
+In the office they did not read that. The Government Attorney just now
+did not notice it. He only saw this:
+
+"Then, with a single gesture, she allowed all her clothes to fall from
+her."
+
+And then he cries out: An outrage to public morals! Surely, it is too
+easy to accuse with a system like this. God forbid that the authors of
+dictionaries fall under the Government Attorney's hand! Who could escape
+condemnation if, by means of cutting, not of phrases, but of words, one
+is to be informed of a list he has made that might offend morals or
+religion?
+
+My client's first thought, which unfortunately met with resistance, was
+this: "There is only one thing to do: print the book immediately, not
+with parts cut out, but the work entire as it left my hands, restoring
+to it the scene in the cab." I was of his opinion, believing that the
+best defense of my client would be a complete imprint of the work with
+special indication of some points to which we would beg to draw the
+Court's attention. I myself gave the title to this publication: _Memoir
+of Gustave Flaubert for the prevention of outrage to religious morals
+brought against him_. I had written on it with my hand: Civil Court,
+Sixth Chamber, with the signature of the President and the Public
+Minister. There was a preface in which was written:
+
+"They have indicted me with phrases taken here and there from my book; I
+can only defend myself with the whole book."
+
+To ask the judges to read an entire romance would be asking much; but we
+are before judges who love truth, who desire the truth, and who to learn
+it would not shrink from any fatigue. We are before judges who desire
+justice and desire it energetically, and who will read, without any kind
+of hesitation, what we beg them to read. I said to M. Flaubert: "Send
+this immediately to the printers, and put my name at the bottom beside
+yours: SENARD, _Counsel_." They had begun the printing; arrangements
+were made for a hundred copies for our own use; the work went on with
+extreme rapidity, they were working day and night on it, when the order
+came to us to discontinue the printing, not of a book, but of a pamphlet
+in which was the incriminated work together with explanatory notes. We
+appealed to the office of the Attorney-General--who informed us that the
+prohibition was absolute and could not be removed.
+
+Well, so be it! We should have published the book with our notes and
+observation's; but now I ask you, gentlemen, if your first reading has
+left you in doubt, to give it a second reading. You will willingly do
+this, as you desire the truth; and you could not be among those who,
+when two lines of a man's writing is brought to them, are sure to make
+it fit any condition that may be. You do not wish a man to be judged
+upon a few cuttings more or less skilfully made. You would not allow
+that; you would not deprive him of the ordinary means of defense. Well,
+you have the book, and although it may be less easy than you might wish,
+you will make your own divisions, observations, and meanings, because
+you desire the truth, because truth is necessary for the basis of your
+judgment, and truth will come from a serious examination of the book.
+
+However, I cannot stop here. The Public Minister has attacked the book,
+and it is necessary for me to defend it, to complete the quotations he
+has made, and show the nothingness of the accusation against each
+incriminated passage; that will be all my defense.
+
+I shall not attempt, assuredly, to place myself in opposition to the
+exalted, animated, pathetic appreciation with which the Public Attorney
+has surrounded all that he said, by striving for appreciation of the
+same kind; the defense would have no right to make use of such a manner
+of procedure; it must content itself with citing the text, such as it
+is.
+
+And in the first place, I declare that nothing is more false than what
+has just been said about lascivious colour. Lascivious colour! Where can
+you find it? My client has depicted in _Madame Bovary_ what sort of
+woman? My God! it is sad to say, and yet it is true, a young girl,
+born, as they nearly all are, honest; at least the greater number are
+honest, but very fragile, when education, instead of fortifying them,
+softens them and turns them into bad paths. He has depicted a young
+girl. Is she of perverse nature? No, but of an impressionable nature,
+susceptible of exaltation.
+
+The Government Attorney has said: "This young girl has constantly been
+presented in a lascivious light." No! she is represented as born in the
+country, born on a farm, where she is occupied with all her father's
+labor, and where no kind of lasciviousness can find a way to her mind or
+heart. Then she is represented, in the place of following the destiny
+which would be hers naturally, instead of being brought up for the farm
+or in some analogous place in which she ought to live, she is
+represented as under the short-sighted authority of a father who thinks
+he must have his daughter educated in a convent, this girl born on a
+farm, who should marry a farmer, or a man of the country. She is then
+taken to a convent, outside her sphere. As there is nothing that does
+not have weight in the Public Attorney's speech, we must leave nothing
+without a response. Ah! you spoke of her little sins, and in quoting
+from the first number, you said:
+
+"When she went to confession, she invented little sins, in order that
+she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow ... beneath the
+whisperings of the priest." You have gravely deceived yourself in regard
+to my client's meaning. He has not committed the fault with which you
+reproach him; the error is wholly on your side, in the first place upon
+the age of the girl. As she entered the convent at thirteen, it is
+evident that she must have been fourteen when she went to
+confession. She was not then a child of ten years, as it has pleased you
+to say, and you were materially deceived on that point. But I am not so
+sure of the unlikelihood of a child of ten years liking to remain at the
+confessional "under the whisperings of the priest."
+
+All that I desire is that you read the lines which precede, and that is
+not easy, I agree. And here appears the inconvenience of not having a
+pamphlet memoir at hand; with such an aid, we should not have to search
+through six volumes!
+
+I have called your attention to this passage in order to recall it to
+_Madame Bovary_ and her true character. Will you permit me to say, what
+seems to me very important, that M. Flaubert has fully comprehended this
+point and put it in bold relief. There is a kind of religion which is
+generally spoken of to young girls, which is the worst of all
+religion. There may be in this regard a difference of opinion. As for
+me, I declare clearly that I know nothing more beautiful, or useful, or
+necessary to sustain, not only women in the ways of life but men
+themselves, who sometimes have the most difficult trials to overcome, I
+know nothing so useful, so necessary, as the religious sentiment, but a
+serious religious sentiment, and permit me to add, severe.
+
+I wish my children to believe in one God, not a God in the abstractness
+of pantheism, but in a Supreme Being with whom they have relationship,
+to whom they are accustomed to pray, and who at once awes and fortifies
+them. This thought, you see, it is your belief as well as mine, is our
+strength in evil days, is our strength against what we call the world;
+the refuge; or better still, the strength of the weak. It is this
+thought which gives women that stability which makes them resigned to a
+thousand little things in life, which makes them carry all their
+suffering to God, and ask of Him grace to fulfill their duty. That
+religion, gentlemen, is the Christian religion, and it is that which
+establishes a relationship between God and man. Christianity, in placing
+a sort of intermediary power between God and ourselves, renders God more
+accessible, and communication with Him easier. That the Mother of Him
+who has made Himself the Saviour should receive the prayers of women,
+cannot affect, so far as I can see, purity, religious sanctity, or
+religious sentiment itself. But here is where the change begins. In
+order to accommodate a religion to all natures, all sorts of petty,
+miserable, paltry things are introduced. The pomp of the ceremonies,
+instead of being a true pomp which lays hold on the soul, often
+degenerates into a commerce in relics, medals, of little saints and
+Virgins. To what, gentlemen, do the minds of children, curious, ardent,
+and tender, lend themselves, especially the minds of young girls? To all
+these enfeebled, attenuated, miserable images of the religious
+spirit. They then take upon themselves little religious duties to put in
+practice, little devotions of tenderness, of love, and in the place of
+having in their soul the sentiment of God, the sentiment of duty, they
+abandon themselves to reveries, to little devices, to little
+devotions. And then comes the poesy, and then comes, it is very
+necessary to say it, a thousand thoughts of charity, of tenderness, of
+mystic love, a thousand forms which deceive young girls and sensualize
+religion. These poor children, naturally credulous and weak, take to all
+this poesy and reverie instead of attaching themselves to something more
+reasonable and severe. Whence it happens that you have very many strong
+devotees among women who are not religious at all. And when the wind
+blows them from the path where they ought to walk, in place of finding
+strength to combat it, they find only a kind of sensuality which
+bewilders them.
+
+Ah! you have accused me of having confounded the religious element with
+sensualism, in the picture of modern society! Accuse rather the society
+in the midst of which we live, but do not accuse the man who cries with
+Bossuet: "Awake and be on thy guard against peril!" And say to the
+fathers of families: Take care! These are not good customs for your
+daughters; there is in all these mixtures of mysticism something which
+sensualises religion; say that, and you will speak the truth. It is for
+this that you accuse Flaubert; it is for this that I exalt his conduct.
+Yes, he has given very good warning of the whole family of dangers
+arising from exaltation among young persons, who take upon themselves
+petty devotions instead of attaching themselves to a strong and severe
+religion which would sustain them in a day of weakness. And now you
+shall see whence comes the invention of the little sins "under the
+whisperings of the priest." Read page 30:
+
+"She had read 'Paul and Virginia,' and she had dreamed of the little
+bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidèle, but above all the
+sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for
+you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand,
+bringing you a bird's nest."
+
+Is this lascivious, gentlemen? Let us continue.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I did not say that passage was lascivious.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+I ask your pardon, but it is precisely in this passage that you found a
+lascivious phrase, and it was only by isolating it from what preceded
+and what followed that you could make it seem lascivious.
+
+"Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with
+their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred
+heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the
+cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a
+whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill."
+
+Do not forget this; when one invents little sins to confess and seeks
+some vow to fulfill, as you will find in the preceding line, evidently
+one has got ideas that are a little false from somewhere. And now I ask
+you if I have to discuss your passage! I continue:
+
+"In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the
+study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the
+Lectures of the Abbé Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the
+'Génie du Christianism,' as a recreation. How she listened at first to
+the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies re-echoing
+through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the
+shop-parlor of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her
+heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us
+only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well;
+she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the plow. Accustomed to calm
+aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of
+excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the
+green fields only when broken up by ruins. She wished to get some
+personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did
+not contribute to the immediate desire of her heart, being of a
+temperament, more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions not
+landscapes."
+
+You shall see with what delicate precaution the author has introduced a
+saintly old maid, and how, with a purport of teaching religion, there is
+allowed to slip into the convent a new element, through the introduction
+of romance brought in by a stranger. Do not forget this when the subject
+of religious morals is under consideration.
+
+"At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to
+mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an
+ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution, she dined in the
+refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit
+of chat with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped
+out from the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love-songs
+of the last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched
+away. She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on
+the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the
+pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long
+chapters in the intervals of her work."
+
+This is nothing but marvellous, speaking from a literary point of view,
+and absolution can but be granted a man who has written these admirable
+passages as a warning against all perils of education of this kind, as
+an indication to young women of the stumbling-blocks in the life in
+which they will be placed. Let us continue:
+
+"They were all love, lovers, sweet-hearts, persecuted ladies fainting in
+lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to
+death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and
+kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves,
+'gentlemen' brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever
+was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains. For six months,
+then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books
+from old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later, she fell in love
+with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guardrooms and
+minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like
+those long-waisted châtelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,
+spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier
+with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant
+fields. At this time, she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic
+veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc, Héloïse, Agnès
+Sorel, the beautiful Ferronnière, and Clémence Isaure stood out to her
+like comets in the dark immensity of heaven, where also were seen, lost
+in shadow, and all unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying
+Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI., a little of St. Bartholomew's, the
+plume of the Béarnais, and always the remembrance of the plates painted
+in honor of Louis XIV.
+
+"In the music-class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but
+little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes, gondoliers;--mild
+compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse athwart the obscurity
+of style and the weakness of the music of the attractive phantasmagoria
+of sentimental realities."
+
+Now, you have not remembered this, when that poor country girl, having
+returned to the farm and married a village physician, is invited to an
+evening party at the Castle, to which you have sought to call the
+attention of the judges to show that there was something lascivious in a
+waltz she took part in. You have not called to mind this education when
+this poor woman is charmed that an invitation comes to take her from her
+husband's common fireside and lead her to the Castle, where she sees
+fine gentlemen, beautiful ladies, and the old duke, who, they said, had
+had great fortune at Court! The Government Attorney has shown some fine
+emotions _à propos_ of Queen Marie-Antoinette! Assuredly there is not
+one of us who would not share his thought; like him, we have trembled at
+the name of this victim of the Revolution, but it is not with
+Marie-Antoinette that we are concerned here, it is with the Castle
+Vaubyessard.
+
+There was an old duke there who had had, they said, relations with the
+queen, and towards whom all eyes were turned. And when this young woman
+found herself thus transported into the midst of the world, thus
+realizing all the fantastic dreams of her youth, can you wonder at the
+intoxication of it? And you accuse her of being lascivious! Better
+accuse the waltz itself; that dance of our great modern balls where,
+said a late author writing about it, the woman "leans her head upon the
+shoulder of her partner whose limbs embrace her." You find Madame Bovary
+lascivious in Flaubert's description, but there is not a man, and I will
+not except you, who, having taken part in a ball like that and seen that
+sort of waltz, has not had in mind the wish that his wife or his
+daughter refrain from this pleasure which has in it so much of the
+untamed. If, counting upon the chastity which enveloped this young
+woman, we allow her sometimes to give herself up to this pleasure which
+the world sanctions, it is necessary to count very much upon that
+envelope of chastity and, however much one may count upon it, it is not
+unheard of to express the impressions which M. Flaubert has expressed in
+the name of morals and chastity.
+
+Here she is at the Castle Vaubyessard, observed by the old duke, noticed
+favorably by all, and you cry out: What details! What does it mean?
+Details are everywhere, although we cite but a single passage.
+
+"Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in
+their glasses.
+
+"But at the upper end of the table, alone among all those women, bent
+over his full plate, with his napkin tied round his neck like a child,
+an old man sat eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His
+eyes were bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with a black
+ribbon. He was the Marquis's father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdiére,
+once on a time favorite of the Count d'Artois, in the days of the
+Vaudreuil hunting-parties at the Marquis de Conflans', and had been, it
+was said, the lover of Queen Mari-Antoinette between Monsieur de Coigny
+and Monsieur de Lauzun."
+
+Defend the queen, defend her especially before the scaffold, say that
+because of her title she had the right of respect, but suppress your
+accusations when one contents himself with saying that he had been, it
+was said, the lover of the queen. Can that be so serious that you
+reproach us with having insulted the memory of that unfortunate woman?
+
+"He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements;
+he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family. A servant
+behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the dishes that he
+pointed to, stammering, and constantly Emma's eyes turned involuntarily
+to this old man with hanging lips, as to something extraordinary. He had
+lived at court and slept in the bed of queens!
+
+"Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it
+cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted
+pine-apples."
+
+You see that these descriptions are charming, incontestably, and that it
+is not difficult to take a line here and there for the purpose of
+creating a kind of colour, against which my conscience protests. It is
+not a lascivious colour, it is only lifelike; it is the literary element
+and at the same time the moral element.
+
+Here we have a young girl, whose education you are acquainted with,
+become a woman. The Government Attorney has asked: Did she even try to
+love her husband? He has not read the book; if he had read it, he would
+not have made the objection.
+
+We have, gentlemen, this poor woman dreaming at first. On page 34 you
+will find her dreams. And there is something more here, something of
+which the Government Attorney did not speak, and which I must tell you,
+and these are her impressions when her mother died; you will see if they
+are lascivious soon enough! Have the goodness to turn to page 33 and
+follow me:
+
+"When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had a
+funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter
+sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be
+buried some day in the same grave. The good man thought she must be ill,
+and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a
+first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre
+hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened
+to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of
+the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the
+Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it, would not
+confess it, continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel
+herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her
+brow."
+
+I wish to make answer to the Government Attorney's reproach that she
+made no effort to love her husband.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I did not reproach her for that, I said that she did not succeed in
+loving him.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+If I have been mistaken, if you made no reproach, that is the best
+response that could be given. I believed that I understood you to make
+one; let us see how I may be deceived. Moreover, here is what I read at
+the end of page 36:
+
+"And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she desired to
+make herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited
+all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him
+many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after this as
+before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.
+
+"When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without
+getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not
+experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in
+conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that
+Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became
+regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among
+other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony
+of dinner."
+
+On page 37 we find a group of similar things. Now, here is where the
+peril begins. You know how she has been brought up; and I beg you not to
+forget this for an instant.
+
+There is not a man who, having read this, would not say that M. Flaubert
+is not only a great artist but a man of heart, for having in the last
+six pages turned all the horror and scorn upon the woman and all the
+interest towards the husband. He is a great artist, as has been said,
+because he has left the husband as he was, he has not transformed him,
+and to the end he is the same good man, commonplace, mediocre, full of
+the duties of his profession, loving his wife well, but destitute of
+education or elevation of thought. He is the same at the death-bed of
+his wife. And nevertheless, there is not an individual to whom the
+memory returns with more interest.
+
+Why? Because he has kept to the end his simplicity and uprightness of
+heart; because to the end he has fulfilled his duty while his wife was
+led astray. His death is as beautiful and as touching as the death of
+his wife is hideous. On the dead body of the woman the author has shown
+the spots made by the vomiting of poison; they soil the white shroud in
+which she goes to her burial, and he has made her, as he desired, an
+object of disgust; but there is a man there who is sublime--the husband
+standing beside the grave. There is a man who is grand, sublime, whose
+death is admirable--the husband, who, finding himself broken-hearted by
+the death of his wife, sees afterwards all the illusions of the heart
+that remained to him embraced in the thought of his wife in the tomb.
+Keep that, I beg you, in your remembrance. The author has gone beyond
+what was necessary--as Lamartine has said--in rendering the death of the
+woman hideous and her punishment most terrible. The author has
+concentrated all the interest upon the man who did not deviate from the
+line of duty, who preserved his mediocre character, to be sure (for the
+author could not change his character) but who preserved also all his
+generosity of heart, while upon the wife who deceived him, ruined him,
+gave him into the hands of usurers, put into circulation forged notes
+and finally arrived at suicide, was heaped all the accumulated
+horrors. We shall see that it is natural--the death of this woman who,
+if she had not come to her end by poison, would have been broken by the
+excess of misfortune with which she was surrounded. The author has seen
+this. His book would not be read if he had done otherwise, if, in order
+to show where an education as perilous as that of Madame Bovary can
+lead, he had not been prodigal with the fascinating images and the
+powerful tableaux for which he is reproached.
+
+M. Flaubert constantly sets forth the superiority of the husband over
+the wife, and what superiority, if you please? that of simple duty
+fulfilled, while the wife was straying from hers. Here she is, fixed by
+the bent of this bad education; here she is, gone out after the scene of
+the ball, with the young boy, Léon, as inexperienced as herself. She
+coquets with him but does not dare to go further; nothing happens. Then
+comes Rodolphe who takes the woman to himself. After looking at her for
+a moment, he said: This woman is all right. She will be easy prey,
+because she is light-minded and inexperienced. As to the fall, will you
+re-read pages 42, 43 and 44. I have only a word to say about this scene
+and that is: there are no details, no descriptions, no image that can
+trouble the senses; a single word indicates the fall: "She abandoned
+herself." I pray you to have the goodness to read again the details of
+the fall of Clarissa Harlowe, which I have not heard decried as a bad
+book. M. Flaubert has substituted Rodolphe for Lovelace, and Emma for
+Clarissa. If you will compare the two authors and the two books you will
+appreciate the situation.
+
+But I will return here to the indignation of the Government Attorney.
+He is shocked that remorse does not immediately follow the fall, and
+that in the place of expressing bitterness, she said with satisfaction:
+"I have a lover!" But the author would not be true, if he made the
+enchanting draught seem bitter while it still touched the lips. He who
+wrote as the Attorney understands might be moral, but he would be saying
+what is not in nature. No, it is not at the first moment of a fault
+that the sentiment of fault is awakened; otherwise, it would not be
+committed. No, it is not at the moment when she is under a delusion that
+intoxicates her that a woman can be averted from this intoxication even
+by the immensity of the fault she has committed. She feels only the
+intoxication; she goes back to her home happy, sparkling, and singing in
+her heart: "I have a lover!" But can this last long? You have read pages
+424 and 425. On both pages, and if you please, to page 428, the
+sentiment of disgust with her lover is not yet manifest; but she is
+already under the impression of fear and uneasiness. She thinks, weighs
+the question, and believes that she does not wish to abandon Rodolphe:
+
+"Something stronger than herself forced her to him; so much so, that one
+day, seeing her come unexpectedly he frowned as one put out.
+
+"'What is the matter with you?' she said, 'Are you ill? Tell me!'
+
+"At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming
+imprudent--that she was compromising herself.
+
+"Gradually Rodolphe's fears took possession of her. At first, love had
+intoxicated her, and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he
+was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or
+even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house, she
+looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the
+horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She
+listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped
+short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying
+overhead."
+
+You see unmistakably that she was not deceived; she felt clearly that
+there was something about it of which she had not dreamed. Let us take
+pages 433 and 434 and you will be still further convinced:
+
+"When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room,
+between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen
+candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down
+there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the
+whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not
+refrain from making jokes about Charles which rather embarrassed Emma.
+She would have liked to see him more serious and even on occasions more
+dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of
+approaching steps in the alley.
+
+"'Some one is coming!' she said
+
+"He blew out the light.
+
+"'Have you your pistols?'
+
+"'Why?'
+
+"'Why, to defend yourself,' replied Emma.
+
+"'From your husband? Oh, poor devil!'"
+
+And Rodolphe finished his phrase with a gesture which signified: I could
+crush him with a fillip.
+
+She was amazed at his bravery, although she felt that there was a sort
+of indelicacy and naïve grossness about it that was scandalizing.
+
+"Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had
+spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for
+he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called
+devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had treated him to a
+lecture, which he did not think in the best taste.
+
+"Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on
+exchanging miniatures; they had cut handfuls of hair, and now she was
+asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She
+often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then
+she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his!
+
+"Finally she wearied him."
+
+Then, on page 453:
+
+"He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry,
+nor passionate caresses that made her mad; so that their great love,
+which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of
+a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it. She
+would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe
+concealed his indifference less and less.
+
+"She did not know whether she regretted yielding to him, or whether, she
+did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation of
+feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their
+voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual
+seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him."
+
+And you are afraid, Mr. Government Attorney, that young women might read
+this! I am less frightened, less timid than you. On my own personal
+account, I can admirably understand a father of a family saying to his
+daughter: Young lady, if your heart, your conscience, if religious
+sentiment and the voice of duty are not sufficient to make you walk in
+the right path, look, my child, look well at the weariness, the
+suffering, the grief and desolation attending the woman who seeks
+happiness outside her home! This language would not wound you in the
+mouth of a father, would it? M. Flaubert has said nothing but this; he
+has made a painting most true, and most powerful, of what the woman who
+dreams of finding happiness outside her house immediately discovers.
+
+But let us go on and we shall come to all the adventures of the
+disillusion. You show me the caresses of Léon on page 60. Alas! she
+will soon pay the ransom of adultery, and that ransom you will find
+terrible, in some pages farther on in the book you condemn. She sought
+happiness in adultery, poor unfortunate one! And she found, besides the
+disgust and fatigue that the monotony of marriage can bring to the woman
+who does not walk in the path of duty, the disillusion and the scorn of
+the man to whom she has given herself. Was any of this scorn lacking in
+the book? Oh, no! and you cannot deny it, for the book is under your
+eyes. Rodolphe, who has shown himself so vile, gives to her a last proof
+of egoism and cowardice. She has said to him: "Take me! Carry me away!
+I am stifling; I can no longer breathe in my husband's house, to which I
+have brought shame and misfortune." He hesitates; she insists. Finally,
+he promises, and the next day she receives a terrible letter under which
+she falls crushed and annihilated. She is taken ill and is dying. The
+number you are consulting shows you all the convulsions of a soul at war
+with itself, which perhaps could be led back to duty by an excess of
+suffering, but unfortunately she meets a boy with whom she had played
+when she was inexperienced. This is the movement of the romance, and
+then comes the expiation.
+
+But the Government Attorney stops me and asks: Although it may be true
+that the purpose of the book is good from one end to the other, could
+you allow such obscene details as those that have been brought forward?
+
+Very certainly I could not allow such details, but where have I allowed
+them? Where are they? I now arrive at the passages most condemned. I
+will say no more of the adventure in the cab. This Court has heard
+enough with regard to that; I come to the passages that you have pointed
+out as contrary to public morals and which form a certain number of
+pages in the December number. And, in order to pull away all the
+scaffolding of your accusation, there is only one thing to be done: to
+restore what precedes and what follows your quotations, in a word, to
+substitute the text complete as opposed to your cutting.
+
+At the bottom of page 72, Léon, after making an agreement with Homais,
+the chemist, goes to the Hôtel de Boulogne; the chemist goes there to
+find him.
+
+"Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She
+detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an
+insult.
+
+"Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had no doubt
+calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates
+us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt
+sticks to our fingers."
+
+Great heavens! And it is for such lines as I have been reading to you
+that we are dragged before you. Listen now:
+
+"They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their
+love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers,
+verses, the moon and the stars, naïve resources of a waning passion
+striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly
+promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then she
+confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This
+disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him
+more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off
+the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding
+snake. She went on tip-toe, barefooted, to see once more that the door
+was closed; then, pale, serious, and without speaking, with one movement
+she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder." You have
+stopped here, Mr. Attorney; permit me to continue:
+
+"Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those
+quivering lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms,
+something vague and dreary that seemed to Léon to glide between them
+subtly as if to separate them."
+
+You call this lascivious colour, you say that this gives a taste for
+adultery, you say that these pages excite and arouse the senses,--that
+they are lascivious pages! But death is in these pages! You did not
+think of that, Mr. Attorney, and were simply frightened to find such
+words as _corset, clothing which falls off_, etc.; and you attach
+yourself to these three or four words, such as corset and falling
+clothing. Do you wish me to show you that corsets can appear in a
+classic book, a very classic book? I shall give myself the pleasure of
+so doing, presently.
+
+"She undressed herself ..." [ah! Mr. Government Attorney, how badly you
+have understood this passage!] "she undressed hastily [poor thing],
+tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips
+like a gliding snake; then pale, serious, and without speaking, with one
+movement she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder.... There
+was upon that brow covered with cold drops ... in the strain of those
+arms something vague and dreary...."
+
+We must ask here where the lascivious colour is? and where is the severe
+colour? and ask if the senses of the young girl into whose hands this
+book might fall, could be aroused, excited--as she might by reading a
+classic of classics, which I shall cite presently, and which has been
+reprinted a thousand times without any prosecution, public or royal,
+following it. Is there anything analogous in what I am going to read
+you? Is there not, on the contrary, a horror of vice that this
+"something dreary glides in between them to separate them?" Let us
+continue, I pray:
+
+"He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must
+have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of
+pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides,
+he rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked by her
+personality. He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove
+not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he
+turned coward, like drunkards at the sight of strong drinks."
+
+What is lascivious there?
+
+And then, take the last paragraph:
+
+"One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along
+the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a
+form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she
+longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure
+to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in
+the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed
+before her eyes. And Léon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the
+others.
+
+"'Yet I love him,' she said to herself."
+
+Do not forget this, Mr. Attorney, when you judge the thought of the
+author, when you wish to find absolutely lascivious colour where I can
+only find an excellent book.
+
+"She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency
+of life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she
+leant?"
+
+Is that lascivious?
+
+"But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant
+nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in
+angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac
+epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how
+impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it;
+everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a
+curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips
+only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.
+
+"A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard
+from the convent-clock. Four o'clock! And it seemed to her that she had
+been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of passions may be
+contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space."
+
+It is not necessary to look at the end of the book to find what is in it
+from one end to the other. I have read the incriminated passage without
+adding a word, to defend a work which defends itself through itself. Let
+us continue leading from this same incriminated passage, looking at it
+from a moral point of view:
+
+"Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all day
+long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish
+pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop. In order
+not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of
+manoeuvering, she at least succeeded in banishing him to the second
+floor, while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures
+of orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried
+out, and Charles hurried to her.
+
+"'Oh, go away!' she would say.
+
+"Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame
+to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw
+open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her
+masses of hair, too heavy, and gazing upon the stars, longed for some
+princely love. She thought of him, of Léon. She would then have given
+anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her.
+
+"Those were her gala days. She wished them to be sumptuous, and when he
+alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally,
+which happened almost every time. He tried to make her understand that
+they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel,
+but she always found some objection."
+
+You see all this is very simple when one reads the whole; but in
+cuttings like those of the Government Attorney, the smallest word
+becomes a mountain.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I did not quote any of those phrases last mentioned; but since you wish
+to quote what I have not incriminated, it would be well not to pass over
+the foot of the page adjoining page 50.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+I pass over nothing, but I insist upon citing the incriminated passages
+in the quotations. We are quoting from pages 77 and 78.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I refer to the quotations made to the audience, and thought you imputed
+me with having cited the lines you are about to read.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+Mr. Attorney, I have quoted all the passages by whose aid you have
+attempted to constitute a misdemeanor--which accusation is now
+shattered. You developed before the audience what seemed to you
+convincing, and have had a fair opportunity. Happily we had the book and
+the defense knew the book; if he had not known it, his position, allow
+me to tell you, would have been very awkward. I am called upon to
+explain such and such passages to myself and to add others for the
+benefit of the audience. If I had not possessed the book, as I do, the
+defense had been difficult. Now, I can show you, through a faithful
+analysis of the romance, that far from being considered a lascivious
+work, it should be considered, on the contrary, eminently moral. After
+doing this, I took the passages that have been the motive for police
+correction, and after I followed the cuttings with what preceded and
+what succeeded, the accusation became so weak that you are in revolt the
+moment I have finished reading them! These same passages that you
+stamped as recriminating, I have used an equal right to quote myself,
+for the purpose of showing you the folly of the accusation.
+
+I continue my quotation where I stopped at the bottom of page 78.
+
+"He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his
+heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music,
+dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted.
+
+"They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of
+possession, that increase its joys a hundredfold. She was as sick of
+him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the
+platitudes of marriage."
+
+_Platitudes of marriage_! He who did the cutting here has said: Now,
+here is a man who says that in marriage there are only platitudes! It is
+an attack on marriage, it is an outrage to morals! You will agree,
+Mr. Attorney, that with cuttings artistically made, one can go far in
+the way of incriminating. What is it that the author called the
+platitudes of marriage? That monotony which Emma had dreaded, which she
+had wished to escape from but had found continually in adultery, which
+was precisely the disillusion. You now see clearly that when, in the
+place of cutting off the members of certain phrases and cutting out some
+words, we read what precedes and what follows, nothing remains for
+incrimination; and you can well comprehend that my client, who knew what
+he wished to say, must be a little in revolt at seeing it thus
+travestied. Let us continue:
+
+"She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in
+adultery all the platitudes of marriage.
+
+"But how to get rid of him? Then, though she might feel humiliated at
+the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to it from habit or from
+corruption, and each day she hungered after them the more, exhausting
+all felicity in wishing for too much of it. She accused Léon of her
+baffled hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some
+catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she had not
+the courage to make up her mind to it herself.
+
+"She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the
+notion that a woman must write to her lover.
+
+"But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned
+out of her most ardent memories. [This is certainly not incriminating.]
+
+"Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love
+wearied her more than great debauchery.
+
+"She now felt constant ache all over her. Often she even received a
+summons, stamped paper that she barely looked at. She would have liked
+not to be alive, or to be always asleep."
+
+I call that an excitation of virtue through a horror of vice, as the
+author himself calls it, and which the reader, no longer perplexed,
+cannot fail to see, unless influenced by ill-will.
+
+And now, something more to make you perceive what kind of man you are
+about to judge. And in order to show you, not what kind of justification
+I may expect, but whether M. Flaubert has made use of lascivious colour,
+and whence he got his inspiration, let me put upon your desk this book
+used by him, in whose passages he found himself inspired to paint this
+concupiscence, the entanglements of this woman who sought happiness in
+illicit pleasures, but could not find it there, who sought again and
+again and never found it. Whence has Flaubert derived his inspiration,
+gentlemen? It was from this book; listen:
+
+ILLUSION OF THE SENSES.
+
+"Whoever, then, attaches himself to the senses, must necessarily wander
+from object to object and deceive himself, so to speak, by a change of
+place, as concupiscence,--that is to say, love of pleasure,--is always
+changing, because its ardour languishes and dies in continuity, and it
+is only change that makes it revive. Again, what is that other
+characteristic of a life of the senses, that alternate movement of
+appetite and disgust, of disgust and appetite, the soul floating ever
+uncertain between ardour which abates and ardour which is renewed?
+_Inconstantia concupiscentia_. That is what a life of the senses
+is. However, in this perpetual movement, one must not allow himself to
+be deceived by the image of wandering liberty."
+
+This is what a life of the senses is. Who has said that? Who has
+written these words which you are about to hear upon these excitements
+and excessive ardor? What is the book which M. Flaubert perused day and
+night, and which has inspired the passages that the Government Attorney
+condemns? It is by Bossuet! What I shall read to you is a fragment of
+Bossuet's discourse upon _Illicit Pleasures_. I shall bring you to see
+that all these incriminated passages are--not plagiarized; the man who
+appropriates an idea is not a plagiarist--but imitations of Bossuet. Do
+you wish for another example? Here it is:
+
+UPON SIN.
+
+"And do not ask me, Christians, in what way this great change of
+pleasure into punishment will come about. The thing is proved by the
+Scriptures. It is Truth who has said it, it is the All-Powerful who has
+made it so. And sometimes, if you will look at the nature of the
+passions to which you abandon your heart, you will easily comprehend
+that they may become an intolerable punishment. They all have in
+themselves cruel pain, disgust and bitterness. They all have an infinity
+which is angered by not being able to be satisfied. There are transports
+of rage mingled in all of them which degenerates into a kind of fury not
+less painful than unreasonable. Love, if I may be permitted so to name
+it in this guise, has its uncertainties, its violent agitations, its
+irresolute resolutions and an abyss of jealousies."
+
+And further:
+
+"Ah! What, then, is easier than making of our passions an insupportable
+pain or sin, when, if we cut out, as is very just, the little sweetness
+through which they lead us, there is left of them only the cruel
+disquiet and bitterness with which they abound? Our sins are against us,
+our sins are upon us, our sins are in the midst of us; like an arrow
+piercing our body, an insupportable weight upon our head, a poison
+devouring our entrails."
+
+Is not all that you have just listened to designed to show you the
+bitterness of passion? I leave you this book, lined and thumb-marked by
+the studious man who has found his thought there. And that man, who has
+been inspired from a source of this kind, who has written of adultery in
+the terms you have listened to, is prosecuted for outrage of public and
+religious morals!
+
+A few lines still upon the _woman sinner_, and you will see how
+M. Flaubert, having decided to paint this ardour, understood taking
+inspiration from this model:
+
+"But, punished for our error, without being deceived by it, we seek in
+change the remedy for our scorn; we wander from object to object, and
+if, finally there is some one who holds us, it is not because we are
+content with our choice, but because we are bound by our inconstancy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"All appeared to her empty, false, disgusting in these creatures: far
+from finding there those first charms which her heart had had so much
+difficulty in defending, she saw in them now only frivolity, danger and
+vanity."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I will not speak of an entanglement of passion; what fears there are
+that the mystery of it cannot dispel! what measures to keep on the side
+of well-being and pride! what eyes to shun! what watchers to deceive!
+what returns to fear from those whom one chooses for their aids and
+confidants in their passion! what indignities to suffer from him,
+perhaps, for whom one has sacrificed honour and liberty, and of whom one
+dare not complain! To all this, add those cruel moments when passion,
+less lively, leaves us to choose between falling back upon ourselves and
+feeling all the humility of our position, and those moments where the
+heart, born for more solid pleasures, leaves us with our own idols and
+finds its punishment in its own disgust and inconstancy. Profane world!
+if there is in you that felicity that is so much vaunted, favor your
+adorers with it nor punish them for the faith they have added so lightly
+to your promises."
+
+Let me say to you here: when a man in the silence of the night,
+meditates upon the causes of enticement for woman, when he finds them in
+her education and, putting aside personal observation, for the sake of
+expressing his thoughts, matures them at the sources I have indicated,
+not allowing himself to use his pen except from inspiration of Bossuet
+and Massillon, permit me to ask you if there is a word to express my
+surprise, my grief, on seeing this man dragged into Court--on account of
+some passages in his book, and precisely for the truest and most
+elevated ideas that he was able to bring together! And I pray you not to
+forget this in relation to the charge of outrage against religious
+morals! And then, if you will permit me, I will put in opposition to all
+this, under your very eyes, what I myself call attacking the moral, that
+is to say, satisfaction of the senses without bitterness, without those
+large drops of cold sweat which fall from the brow of those who give
+themselves over to it; and I will not quote to you from licentious books
+in which the authors have sought to arouse the senses; I will quote from
+only one book--which is given as a prize in colleges, but whose author's
+name I ask leave to withhold until after I have read you a passage from
+it. Here is the passage: I will ask you to pass the volume. It is a copy
+that was given to a college student as a prize. I prefer you to take
+this copy rather than M. Flaubert's:
+
+"The next day I was received into her apartment. There I felt all that
+voluptuousness carries with it. The room was filled with the most
+agreeable perfumes. She lay upon a bed which was enclosed in garlands
+of flowers. She appeared to be lying there languishingly. She extended
+her hand to me and made me sit beside her. In all, even in the veil
+which covered her face, there was a charm. I could see the form of her
+beautiful body. A simple cloth which moved as she moved allowed me at
+one time to see, and at another to lose sight of, her ravishing beauty."
+
+A simple cloth when it was extended over a dead body appeared to you a
+lascivious image; here it is extended over a living woman:
+
+"She noticed that my eyes were occupied, and when she saw them inflamed,
+the cloth seemed to open itself away from her; I saw all the treasures
+of a divine beauty. At this moment she took my hand; my eyes were
+wandering. There is only my dear Ardasire, I cry out, who can be as
+beautiful; but I swear to the gods that my fidelity.... She threw
+herself on my neck and drew me into her arms. Suddenly the room became
+darkened; her veil opened and she gave me a kiss. I was beside myself; a
+flame started suddenly through my veins and aroused all my senses. The
+idea of Ardasire was far from me. She remained to me only as a
+memory ... there appeared to me but one thought.... I was going.... I
+was going to prefer this one even to her. Already my hands had wandered
+to her breasts; they ran rapidly everywhere; love showed itself only in
+its fury; it hurried on to victory; a moment more and Ardasire could not
+defend herself."
+
+Who, now, has written that? It is not the author of _The New Héloise_,
+it is the President, Montesquieu! Here is no bitterness, no disgust, but
+all is sacrificed to literary beauty, and they give it as a prize to
+pupils in rhetoric, without doubt to serve as a model in the
+amplifications and descriptions that they are required to
+write. Montesquieu described in his Persian Letters a scene which could
+not even be read. It concerns a woman placed between two men who dispute
+over her. This woman, placed between two men, has dreams--which appear
+to the author very agreeable.
+
+Shall we sum up, Mr. Attorney? Or is it necessary for me to quote you
+Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his _Confessions_, and some others? No, I will
+only say to the judges that if, on account of his description of the
+carriage in _The Double Misunderstanding_, M. Mérimée had been
+prosecuted, he would have been acquitted immediately. One sees in his
+book only a work of art of great literary beauty. One would no more
+condemn it than he would condemn paintings or statuary, which is not
+content with representing all the beauties of the body, but wishes to
+add ardour and passion. I will follow it no farther; I ask you to
+recognise the fact that M. Flaubert has not weighted his images and has
+done only one thing: he has touched with a firm hand the scene of
+degradation. At each line of his book he has brought out the
+disillusion, and instead of ending it with something charming, he has
+undertaken to show us that this woman, after meeting scorn, abandonment,
+and ruin of her house, comes to a frightful death. In a word, I can only
+repeat what I said at the beginning of this plea, that M. Flaubert is
+the author of a good book, a book which aims at the excitation of virtue
+by arousing a horror of vice.
+
+I will now look into his outrage against religion. An outrage against
+religion committed by M. Flaubert! And in what respect, if you please?
+The Government Attorney has thought he found in him a sceptic. I can
+assure the Government Attorney that he is deceived. I am not here to
+make a profession of faith, I am here only to defend a book, and for
+that reason I shall limit myself to a simple word. Now as to the book, I
+defy the Government Attorney to find in it anything that resembles an
+outrage against religion. You have seen how religion was introduced in
+Emma's education, and how this religion, false in a thousand ways, could
+not hold Emma from the bent that carried her astray. Would you know in
+what kind of language M. Flaubert speaks of religion? Listen to some
+lines that I take from the first number, pages 231, 232 and 233:
+
+"One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been
+watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard
+the Angelus ringing.
+
+"It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a
+warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like
+women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fêtes. Through the bars
+of the arbour and away beyond, the river could be seen in the fields,
+meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapors
+rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet
+tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart
+their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps
+nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the
+air, kept up its peaceful lamentation.
+
+"With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost
+themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered
+the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the
+altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked
+to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here
+and there by the stiff black hoods of the good sisters bending over
+their prie-Dieu."
+
+This is the language in which his religious sentiment is expressed. And
+yet we have understood from the Government Attorney that scepticism
+reigned in M. Flaubert's book from one end to the other. Where, I pray
+you, have you found this scepticism?
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I have not said that there was any of it in its inner meaning.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+If not in its inner meaning, where then, is it? In your cuttings,
+evidently. But here is the work entire, as the Court will judge it, and
+it can see that the religious sentiment is so forcefully imprinted there
+that the accusation of scepticism is pure slander. And now, the
+Government Attorney will permit me to say to him that it was not for the
+purpose of accusing the author of scepticism that all this trouble has
+been made. Let us proceed:
+
+"At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the
+Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved;
+she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird
+whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards
+the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was
+absorbed and all existence lost in it."
+
+This, gentlemen, is the first appeal of religion to hold Emma from the
+trend of her passions. She has fallen, poor woman, and then been
+repelled by the foot of the man to whom she abandoned herself. She is
+nearly dead, but raises herself and becomes reanimated; and you shall
+see now what is written in the 15th of November number, 1856, page 548:
+
+"One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself
+dying, and had asked for the communion; and while they were making the
+preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the
+night-table, covered with sirups, into an altar, and while Félicité was
+strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over
+her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all
+feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was
+beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would
+be annihilated in that love like a burning insense that melts into
+vapour. [You see that this is the language in which M. Flaubert speaks
+of religious things]. The bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water,
+the priest drew from the holy pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting
+with a celestial joy that she put out her lips to accept the body of the
+Saviour presented to her."
+
+I ask the pardon of the Government Attorney, I ask the Court's pardon
+for interrupting this passage; but I must needs say that it is the
+author who is speaking, and bring to your notice in what terms he
+expresses the mystery of the communion. Before going on with the
+reading, I must needs impress the literary value of this picture upon
+the Court and insist that they seize upon these expressions which are
+the author's own:
+
+"The curtains of the alcove floated gently round her like clouds, and
+the rays of the two tapers burning on the night-table seemed to shine
+like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back, fancying she heard
+in space the music of seraphic harps, and perceived in an azure sky, on
+a golden throne in the midst of saints holding green palms, God the
+Father, resplendent with majesty, who with a sign sent to earth angels
+with wings of fire to carry her away in their arms."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing
+that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her
+sensation, that still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion
+and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by pride, at length
+found rest in Christian humility, and, tasting the joy of weakness, she
+saw within herself the destruction of her will, that must have left a
+wide entrance for the inroads of heavenly grace. There existed, then, in
+the place of happiness, still greater joys,--another love beyond all
+loves, without pause and without end, one that would grow eternally! She
+saw amid the illusions of her hope a state of purity floating above the
+earth mingling with heaven, to which she aspired. She wanted to become a
+saint. She bought chaplets and wore amulets; she wished to have in her
+room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might
+kiss it every evening."
+
+Here are some of his religious sentiments! And if you wish to pause a
+moment to consider the author's thought, I will ask you to turn the page
+and read the first three lines of the second paragraph:
+
+"She grew provoked at the doctrines of religion; the arrogance of the
+polemic writings displeased her by their inveteracy in attacking people
+she did not know; and the secular stories, relieved with religion,
+seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world, that they
+insensibly estranged her from the truths for whose proof she was
+looking."
+
+This is the language of M. Flaubert. Now, if you please, we come to
+another scene, that of the extreme unction. Oh! Mr. Government
+Attorney, how you have deceived yourself when, stopping at the first
+words, you accuse my client of mingling the sacred with the profane;
+when he has been content to translate the beautiful formulas of extreme
+unction, at the moment when the priest touches the organs of sense, at
+the moment where, according to the ritual, he says: _Per istam
+unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus
+quid-quid deliquisti_!
+
+You said it was not necessary to touch upon holy things. With what right
+do you misinterpret these holy words:
+
+"May God, in His holy pity, pardon you for all the sins that you have
+committed through sight, taste, hearing, etc.?"
+
+Wait, I am going to read the condemned passage, and that will be all my
+vengeance. I dare say vengeance, because the author has need of being
+avenged! Yes, it is necessary for M. Flaubert to go out of here not
+only acquitted, but avenged! You will see from what kind of reading he
+has been nourished. The condemned passage is on page 271 of the
+December 15th number, and runs thus:
+
+"Pale as a statue, and with eyes red as fire, Charles, not weeping,
+stood opposite her at the foot of the bed, while the priest bending one
+knee, was muttering words in a low voice."
+
+This whole picture is magnificent, and the wording of it
+irresistible. But be quiet, and I will not prolong it beyond
+measure. Now here is the condemnation!
+
+"She turned her face slowly, and seemed filled with joy on seeing
+suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of a
+temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first
+mystical transports, with the visions of eternal beatitude that were
+beginning.
+
+"The priest rose to take the crucifix: then she stretched forward her
+neck as one who is athirst, and gluing her lips to the body of the
+Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest
+kiss of love that she had ever given."
+
+The extreme unction has not yet begun; but we are reproached for this
+kiss. I am not going to search in the history of Saint Theresa whom you
+perhaps know, but the memory of whom is too far away, I am not going to
+seek in Fénelon for the mysticism of Madame Guyon, nor in more modern
+mysticisms, in which I find much reason. I only wish to ask of those
+schools which you designate as belonging to sensual Christianity, the
+explanation of this kiss; it is Bossuet, Bossuet himself, of whom I
+would ask it:
+
+"Obey, and strive finally to enter into the disposition of Jesus in
+communing, which is the disposition of harmony, joy and love; the whole
+gospel proclaims it. Jesus wishes that we may be with Him; He wishes to
+rejoice and He wishes us to rejoice with Him: He has given Himself...."
+etc.
+
+I continue the reading of the condemned passage:
+
+"Then he recited the _Misereatur_ and the _Indulgentiam_, dipped his
+right thumb in the oil and began to give extreme unction. First upon the
+eyes, that had so coveted all worldly pomp; then upon the nostrils,
+greedy for warm breezes and amorous perfumes; then upon the mouth, that
+had uttered lies, that curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then
+upon the hands, that had delighted in sensual touches, and finally upon
+the soles of feet, so swift of yore when she was running to satisfy her
+desires, and that now would walk no more.
+
+"The curé wiped his fingers, threw the bit of cotton dipped in oil into
+the fire, and came and sat down by the dying woman, to tell her that she
+must now blend her sufferings with those of Jesus Christ, and abandon
+herself to the Divine mercy.
+
+"Finishing his exhortations, he tried to place in her hand a blessed
+candle, symbol of the celestial glory with which she was soon to be
+surrounded. Emma, too weak, could not close her fingers, and the taper,
+but for Monsieur Bournisien, would have fallen to the ground.
+
+"However, she was not quite so pale, and her face had an expression of
+serenity as if the sacrament had cured her.
+
+"The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary
+that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it
+meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near
+death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to
+despair, he thought."
+
+Now, when a woman dies and the priest goes to give her extreme unction,
+if one portrays that mystic scene and translates for us the sacramental
+words with scrupulous fidelity, they say that he has touched upon holy
+things; that he has put a rash hand on sacred matters; because to the
+_deliquisti per oculos, per os, per aurem, per manus et per pedes_ he
+has added the sin which each of the organs has committed. But we are not
+the first to walk in this path. M. Sainte-Beuve, in a book which you
+know, has also a scene of extreme unction, and here is how he expresses
+it:
+
+"Oh! yes, upon the eyes first, as the most noble and most alive of the
+senses; upon those eyes for what they have seen and regarded too
+tenderly, or that which was too perfidious in others' eyes, or too
+mortal; for what they have read and re-read of endearment that was too
+dear; for what they have poured out in vain tears over fragile goods and
+faithless creatures; for the sleep which they have too often forgotten,
+thinking only of the evening!
+
+"Upon the ears also for what they have heard and allowed themselves to
+hear that was too sweet, too flattering and intoxicating; for that sound
+which the ear steals from deceptive words; for what it drinks in from
+stolen honey!
+
+"Then the smell, for the too subtle and voluptuous perfumes of evening
+and the springtime in the depth of the woods, for flowers received in
+the morning and all through the day, and breathed in with so much
+pleasure!
+
+"Upon the lips, for what they have pronounced that was too confused or
+too open; for what they did not reply at certain moments or what they
+have not revealed to certain persons; for what they have sung in
+solitude that was too melodious and too full of tears; for their
+inarticulate murmur and for their silence!
+
+"Upon the neck, in the place of on the breast, for the ardor of desire
+according to the consecrated expression (_propter ardorem libidinis_);
+yes, for the grief in affection and the rivalry, for too much anguish in
+human tenderness, for the tears which are suffocated in a voiceless
+throat, for all that goes to wound the heart and break it!
+
+"Upon the hands also, for having seized a hand which was not bound to
+holiness; for having received too burning tears; perhaps for having
+begun to write and for finishing a response not lawful!
+
+"Upon the feet, for not having fled, for not having been satisfied with
+long, solitary walks, for not having been weary soon enough in the midst
+of temptations which were ever beginning anew!"
+
+You did not prosecute that. Here are two men who, each in his own
+sphere, has taken the same thing and who have, according to his own
+idea, added the sin, the fault. Can it be that you make an indictment
+for simply translating the formula of the ritual: _Quidquid deliquisti
+per oculos, per aurem_, etc.?
+
+M. Flaubert has done just what M. Sainte-Beuve did, without
+plagiarizing. He has made use of a right which belongs to any writer,
+to add to what another has said and complete the subject. The last
+scene of the romance of _Madame Bovary_ has been made a complete study
+of this kind from religious documents. M. Flaubert has taken the scene
+of the extreme unction from a book which a venerable ecclesiastic, one
+of his friends, lent to him; this same friend has read the scene and
+been moved to tears, not imagining that the majesty of religion was in
+any way offended. The book is entitled: _An historic, dogmatic, moral,
+liturgical and canonical explanation of the catechism, with an answer to
+the objections drawn from science against religion, by the Abbé Ambroise
+Guillois, curate of Nôtre-Dame-du-Pré, 6th edition, etc_., a work
+approved by His Eminence the Cardinal Gousset, N.N.S.S. the Bishops and
+Archbishops of Mans, of Tours, of Bordeaux, of Cologne, etc., vol. III.,
+printed at Mans, by Charles Monnoyer, 1851. Now, you shall see in this
+book, as you saw just now in Bossuet's, the principles, and, in a
+certain way, the text of the passages which the Government has
+condemned. It is no longer M. Sainte-Beuve, an artist, a literary
+rhapsodist, whom I am quoting; we now listen to the Church itself:
+
+"Extreme unction can give back health to the body if it be useful to the
+glory of God" ... and the priest says that this often happens. Now, here
+is the extreme unction:
+
+"The priest addresses the sick with a short exhortation, if he is in a
+state to hear it, in order to dispose him worthily to receive the
+sacrament which is to be administered to him.
+
+"The priest then passes the unction upon the sick person with the
+stiletto or the extremity of his right thumb, which he dips each time in
+the oil. This unction should be made especially upon the five parts of
+the body which nature has given to man as the organs of sensation,
+namely: the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the mouth and the hands."
+
+"As the priest makes the unctions [we have followed from point to point
+the ritual which we have copied], he pronounces the words which
+correspond to them.
+
+"_To the eyes, upon the closed eyeball_: Through this holy unction and
+His divine pity, may God pardon all the sins that you have committed
+through sight. The sick person should at this moment have a new hatred
+of all the sins committed through sight: such as indiscreet looks,
+criminal curiosity, and reading what has caused to be born in him a host
+of thoughts contrary to faith or morals."
+
+What has M. Flaubert done? He has put in the mouth of the priest, by
+uniting the two parts, what should be in his thoughts and also those of
+the sick person. He has copied purely and simply.
+
+"_To the ears_: Through this holy unction and through His divine pity,
+may God pardon all the sins that you have committed through the sense of
+hearing. The sick person should, at this moment, detest anew all the
+errors of which he is guilty from listening with pleasure to slander,
+calumny, proposed dishonesty and obscene songs.
+
+"_To the nostrils_: Through this holy unction and His divine pity, may
+the Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed through the sense
+of smell. At this moment the sick person should detest anew all the
+sins that he has committed through the sense of smell, his refined and
+voluptuous search for perfumes, all his sensibilities, all that he has
+breathed in of iniquitous odors.
+
+"_To the mouth, upon the lips_: Through this holy unction and through
+His great pity, may the Lord pardon you all the sins that you have
+committed by the sense of taste and words. The sick man at this moment
+should detest anew all the sins that he has committed in oaths and
+blaspheming ... in eating and drinking to excess....
+
+"_Upon the hands_: Through this holy unction and through His great pity,
+may the Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed through the
+sense of touch. The sick man ought to detest at this moment all the
+larcenies, the injustice of which he has been guilty, all the liberties,
+more or less criminal, which he has allowed himself. The priest receives
+the unction on his hands from without because he has already received it
+from within at the time of his ordination, and the sick person receives
+it within.
+
+"_Upon the feet_: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may God
+pardon all the sins that you have committed in your walks. The sick man
+ought, at this moment, to detest anew all the steps that he has taken in
+the path of iniquity, such as scandalous walks, and criminal
+interviews.... The unction of the feet is made upon the top or on the
+sole, according to the convenience of the sick person, and according to
+the custom of the diocese where it takes place. The most common practice
+seems to be to make it on the soles of the feet.
+
+"And finally upon the breast. [M. Sainte-Beuve has copied this; we have
+not, because it was concerned with the breast of a woman.] _Propter
+ardorem libidinis,_ etc.
+
+"_On the breast_: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may the
+Lord pardon all the sins which have been committed from the ardour of
+the passions. The sick man ought, at this moment, to detest anew all the
+bad thoughts to which he has abandoned himself, all sentiments of
+hatred, or vengeance that he has nourished in his heart."
+
+And following the ritual, we could have spoken of something more than
+the breast, but God knows what holy anger would have been aroused in the
+Public Attorney's office, if we had spoken of the loins!
+
+"_To the loins_: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may the
+Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed by irregular impulses
+of the flesh."
+
+If we had said that, what a thunderbolt you would have had with which to
+attempt to crush us, Mr. Attorney! and nevertheless, the ritual adds:
+"The sick man ought, at this moment, to detest anew all illicit
+pleasures, carnal delights, etc...."
+
+This is the ritual; and you have seen the condemned article. It has
+nothing of raillery in it, but is serious and earnest. And I repeat to
+you that he who lent my client this book, and saw my client make the use
+of it that he has, has taken him by the hand with tears in his eyes. You
+see, then, Mr. Government Attorney, how rash--not to use an expression
+which in order to be exact is not too severe--is your accusation of our
+touching upon holy things. You see now that we have not mingled the
+profane with the sacred when, at each sense we indicated the sin
+committed by that sense, since it is the language of the Church itself.
+
+I insist now upon mentioning the other details of the charge of outrage
+against religion. The Public Minister said to me: "It is no longer
+religion but the morals of all time that you have outraged; you have
+insulted death!" How have we insulted death? Because at the moment when
+this woman dies, there passes in the street a man whom she had met more
+than once, to whom she had given alms from her carriage as she was going
+to her adulterous meetings; a blind man whom she was accustomed to see,
+who sang his song walking along slowly by the side of her carriage, to
+whom she threw a piece of money, but whose countenance made her shiver?
+This man was passing in the street; and at the moment when Divine pity
+pardoned, or promised pardon, to the unfortunate woman who was expiating
+the faults of her life by a frightful death, human raillery appeared to
+her in the form of the song under her window. Great Heavens! you find
+an outrage in this! But M. Flaubert has only done what Shakespeare and
+Goethe have done, who, at the supreme moment of death, have not failed
+to make heard some chant, or perhaps plaint, or it might be raillery,
+which recalls to him who is passing to eternity some pleasure which he
+will never more enjoy, or some fault to be atoned. Let us read:
+
+"In fact, she looked around her slowly, as one awakening from a dream;
+then in a distinct voice she asked for her looking-glass, and remained
+some time bending over it, until the big tears fell from her eyes. Then
+she turned away her head with a sigh and fell back upon the pillows."
+
+I could not read it, I am like Lamartine: "The punishment seems to me to
+go beyond truth...." I should not consider that I was doing a bad deed,
+Mr. Attorney, in reading these pages to my married daughters, honest
+girls who have had a good example and good teaching, and who would
+never, never go away from the straight path for indiscretion, or away
+from things that could and ought to be understood.... It is impossible
+for me to continue this reading and I shall hold myself rigorously to
+the condemned passages:
+
+"As the death-rattle became stronger [Charles was by her side, the man
+whom you did not see but who is admirable] the priest prayed faster; his
+prayers mingled with Bovary's stifled sobs, and sometimes all seemed
+lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled like a
+passing bell.
+
+"Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs, and the
+clattering of a stick; and a voice, a raucous voice, sang:
+
+"'Maids in the warmth of a summer day,
+Dream of love and of love alway;
+The wind is strong this summer day,
+Her petticoat is blown away.'"
+
+Emma raised herself like a galvanized corpse, her hair undone, her eyes
+fixed, staring.
+
+"Where the sickle blades have been,
+  Nannette, gathering ears of corn,
+Passes bending down, my queen,
+  To the earth where they were born."
+
+"'The blind man!" she cries.
+
+"And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh,
+thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch that stood out
+against the eternal night like a menace.
+
+"She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew
+near. She was dead."
+
+You see, gentlemen, in this supreme moment, a recalling of her sin, and
+with it remorse and all that goes with it of poignancy and fear. It is
+not alone the whim of an artist wishing only to make a contrast without
+a purpose or a moral; she hears the blind man in the street singing the
+frightful song he had sung when she was returning all in a perspiration
+and hideous from an adulterous meeting; it is the same blind man whom
+she saw at each of those meetings; the blind man who pursued her with
+his song and his importunity; it is he who comes now to personify human
+rage at the instant when Divine pity comes to her and follows her to the
+supreme moment of death! And this is called an outrage against public
+morals! But I say, on the contrary, that it is an homage to public
+morals, that there is nothing more moral than this; I say that in this
+book the vice of education is awake, that it is taken from the true,
+from the living flesh of our society, and that at each stroke the author
+places before us this question: "Have you done what you ought for the
+education of your daughters? Is the religion you have given them such as
+will sustain them in the tempests of life, or is it only a mass of
+carnal superstitions which leaves them without support when the storm
+rages? Have you taught them that life is not the realization of
+chimerical dreams, that it is something prosaic to which it is necessary
+to accommodate oneself? Have you taught them that? Have you done what
+you ought for their happiness? Have you said to them: Poor children,
+outside the route I have pointed out to you, in the pleasures you may
+pursue, only disgust awaits you, trouble, disorder, dilapidation,
+convulsions, and execution...." And you will see that if anything were
+lacking in the picture, the sheriff's officer is there; there, too, is
+the Jew who has seized and sold her furniture to satisfy the caprices of
+this woman; and the husband is still ignorant of this. Nothing remains
+for the unfortunate woman, except death!
+
+But, said the Public Minister, her death is voluntary; this woman died
+in her own time.
+
+But how could she live? Was she not condemned? Had she not drunk to the
+last dregs her shame and baseness?
+
+Yes, upon our stage we show women who have strayed (and I cannot say
+what they have done) as happy, charming and smiling. _Questam corpore
+facerant_. I limit myself to this remark: When they show them to us
+happy, charming, enveloped in muslin, presenting a gracious hand to
+counts, marquises and dukes, often responding themselves to the name of
+countess or duchess, you call that respecting public morals. But the man
+who depicts the adulterous woman dying a shameful death, commits an
+outrage against public morals!
+
+Now, I do not wish to say it is not your opinion that you have
+expressed, since you have expressed it, but you have yielded to a
+prejudice. No, it cannot be you, the husband, the father of a family,
+the man who is there, it is not you, that is not possible; without the
+prejudice of the speech of the prosecution and a preconceived idea, you
+would never say that M. Flaubert was the author of a bad book! Surely,
+left to your inspirations, your appreciation would be the same as
+mine. I do not speak from a literary point of view; but from a moral and
+religious standard, as you understand it and I understand it, you and I
+could not differ.
+
+They have said, furthermore, that we have brought upon the scene a
+materialistic curate. We took the curate as we took the husband. He is
+not an eminent ecclesiastic, but an ordinary priest, a country
+curate. And as we have insulted no one, expressed no thought or
+sentiment that could be injurious to a husband, so we have insulted no
+ecclesiastic. I have only a word to say beyond this. Do you wish to
+read books in which ecclesiastics play a deplorable rôle? Take _Gil
+Blas_, _The Canon_ (of Balzac), _Nôtre-Dame de Paris_ of Victor Hugo. If
+you wish to read of priests who are the shame of the clergy, seek them
+elsewhere, for you will not find them in _Madame Bovary_. What have we
+shown? A country curate, who in his function of country curate is, like
+M. Bovary, an ordinary man. Have I represented him as a gourmand, a
+libertine, or a drunkard? I have not said a word of that kind. I have
+represented him fulfilling his ministry, not with elevated intelligence,
+but as his nature allowed him to fulfill it. I have put in contact with
+him, and in an almost continual state of discussion, a type which
+lives--as the creatures of M. Prudhomme live--as all other creations of
+our time will live who are taken from truth and which it is not possible
+for one to forget, and that is the country pharmacist, the Voltairean,
+the sceptic, the incredulous man, who is in a perpetual quarrel with the
+curate. But in these quarrels, who is it that is beaten, buffeted, and
+ridiculed? It is Homais; to him is the most comic rôle given, because he
+is the most true, because he best paints our sceptical epoch, a fury
+whom we call a priest-hater. Permit me still to read to you page 206. It
+is the good woman of the inn who offers something to her curate:
+
+"'What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curé?' asked the landlady, as she
+reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with
+their candles in a row. 'Will you take something? A thimbleful of
+_cassis_? A glass of wine?'
+
+"The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that
+he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking
+Madame Lefrançois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the
+evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.
+
+"When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the
+square, he thought the priest's behavior just now very unbecoming. This
+refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy;
+all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days
+of the tithe.
+
+"The landlady took up the defense of her curé.
+
+"'Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year
+he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six
+trusses at once, he is so strong.'
+
+"'Bravo!' said the chemist. 'Now just send your daughters to confess to
+fellows with such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I'd have
+the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrançois, every month--a
+good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals.'
+
+"'Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you've no religion.'
+
+"The chemist answered: 'I have a religion, my religion, and I even have
+more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling. I
+adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a
+Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below
+to fulfill our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't
+need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my
+pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one
+can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the
+eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates,
+of Franklin, of Voltaire, and Béranger! I am for the profession of faith
+of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't
+admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane
+in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies
+uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd
+in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws,
+Which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in
+torpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.'
+
+"He ceased looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the
+chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town
+council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a
+distant rolling."
+
+What is this? A dialogue, a scene such as occurred each time that Homais
+had occasion to speak of priests.
+
+There is something better in the last passage of page 271:
+
+"Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur
+Bournisien, who was going across the market with the holy oil.
+
+"Homais, as we due to his principles, compared priests to ravens
+attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was
+personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the
+shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other."
+
+Our old friend, he who lent us the catechism, was very happy over this
+phrase; he said to us: "It is a true hit; it is indeed the portrait of a
+_priestophobe_ whom the cassock makes think of a shroud, and who holds
+one in execration from a little fear of the other." He was impious, and
+he profaned the cassock a little through impiety, perhaps, but much more
+because he was made to think of a shroud.
+
+Permit me to make a _résumé_ of all this. I am defending a man who, if
+he had met a literary criticism upon the form of his book, or upon
+certain expressions, or on too much detail, upon one point or another,
+would have accepted that literary criticism with the best heart in the
+world. But to find himself accused of an outrage against morals and
+religion! M. Flaubert has not recovered from it; and he protests here
+before you with all the astonishment and all the energy of which he is
+capable against such an accusation.
+
+You are not of the sort to condemn books upon certain lines, you are of
+the sort to judge after reflection, to judge of the way of putting a
+work, and you will put this question with which I began my plea and with
+which I shall end it: Does the reading of such a book give a love of
+vice, or inspire a horror of it? Does not a punishment so terrible drive
+one to virtue and encourage it? The reading of this book cannot produce
+upon you an impression other than it has produced upon us, namely: that
+the work is excellent as a whole, and that the details in it are
+irreproachable. All classic literature authorizes the painting of
+scenes like these we are passing upon.
+
+With this understanding, we might have taken one for a model, which we
+have not done; we have imposed upon ourselves a sobriety which we ask
+you to take into account. If, as is possible, M. Flaubert has
+overstepped the bound he placed for himself, in one word or another, I
+have only to remind you that this is a first work, but I should then
+have to tell you that his error was simply one of self-deception, and
+was without damage to public morals. And in making him come into
+Court--him, whom you know a little now by his book, him whom you already
+love a little and will love more, I am sure, when you know him
+better--is enough of a punishment, a punishment already too cruel. And
+now it is for you to decide. You have already judged the book as a whole
+and in its details; it is not possible for you to hesitate!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE DECISION
+
+
+The Court has given audience for a part of the last week to the debate
+of the suit brought against MM. Léon Laurent-Pichat and Auguste-Alexis
+Pillet, the first the director, the second the printer of a periodical
+publication called the _Revue de Paris_, and M. Gustave Flaubert, a man
+of letters, all three implicated: 1st, Laurent-Pichat, for having, in
+1856, published in the numbers of the 1st and the 15th of December of
+the _Revue de Paris_, some fragments of a romance entitled, _Madame
+Bovary_ and, notably, divers fragments contained in pages 73, 77, 78,
+272, 273, has committed the misdemeanor of outraging public and
+religious morals and established customs; 2nd, Pillet and Flaubert are
+similarly guilty; Pillet in printing them, for they were published, and
+Flaubert for writing and sending to Laurent-Pichat for publication, the
+fragments of the romance entitled, _Madame Bovary_ as above designated,
+for aiding and abetting, with knowledge, Laurent-Pichat in the facts
+which have been prepared, in facilitating and consummating the
+above-mentioned misdemeanor, and of thus rendering themselves
+accomplices in the misdeameanor provided for by articles 1 and 8 of the
+law of May 17, 1819, and 59 and 60 of the Penal Code.
+
+M. PINARD, substitute, has sustained the prosecution.
+
+The COURT, after hearing the defense, presented by M. SENARD for
+M. FLAUBERT, M. DEMAREST for PICHAT, and M. FAVÉRIE for the PRINTER,
+has set for audience this day (Feb. 7) for pronouncing judgment, which
+is rendered in the following terms:
+
+"_Be it known_, that Laurent-Pichat, Gustave Flaubert and Pillet are
+charged with having committed the misdemeanor of an outrage against
+public and religious morals and established customs; the first as
+author, in publishing in the periodical publication entitled the _Revue
+de Paris_ of which he is the manager-proprietor, and in the numbers of
+the 1st and 15th of October, the 1st and 15th of November and the 1st
+and 15th of December, 1856, a romance entitled _Madame Bovary_, Gustave
+Flaubert and Pillet as accomplices, the one for furnishing the
+manuscript, and the other for printing the said romance;
+
+"_Be it known_, that the particularly marked passages of the romance
+with which we have to do, which include nearly 300 pages, are contained,
+according to the terms of the ordinance of dismissal before the Court of
+Correction, in pages 73, 77 and 78 (of the number of the 1st of
+December), and 271, 272, 273 (of the 15th of December number, 1856);
+
+"_Be it known_, that the incriminated passages, viewed abstractively and
+isolatedly, present effectively either expressions, or images, or
+pictures which good taste reproves and which are of a nature to make an
+attack upon legitimate and honorable susceptibilities;
+
+"_Be it known_, that the same observations can justly be applied to
+other passages not defined by the ordinance of dismissal, and which, in
+the first place seem to present an exposition of theories which would at
+least be contrary to the good customs and institutions which are the
+basis of our society, as well as to a respect for the most august
+ceremonies of divine worship;
+
+"_Be it known_, that, from these diverse titles, the work brought before
+the Court merits severe blame, since the mission of literature should be
+to ornament and recreate the mind by raising the intelligence and
+purifying manners, rather than by showing the disgust of vice in
+offering a picture of disorder which may exist in our society;
+
+"_Be it known_, that the defendants, and particularly Gustave Flaubert,
+energetically denied the charge brought against them, setting forth that
+the romance submitted to the judgment of the Court had an eminently
+moral aim; that the author had principally in view the exposing of
+dangers which result from an education not appropriate to the sphere in
+which one lives, and that, pursuant to this idea, he has shown the
+woman, the principal personage in the romance, aspiring towards the
+world and a society for which she was not made, unhappy in her modest
+condition where she was placed by fate, forgetting first her duties as a
+mother, afterward lacking in her duties as a wife, introducing
+successively into her house adultery and ruin, and ending miserably by
+suicide, after passing through all degrees of the most complete
+degradation, having even descended to theft;
+
+"_Be it known_, that this data, moral without doubt in principle, must
+be completed in its development by a certain severity of language and by
+a reserve directed especially towards that which touches the exposition
+of the pictures and situations which the author has employed in placing
+it before the eyes of the public;
+
+"_Be it known_, that it is not allowed, under pretext of painting
+character or local colour, to reproduce the facts, words, and gestures
+of the digressions of the personages which a writer gives himself the
+mission to paint; that a like system, applied to works of the mind as
+well as to productions of the fine arts, would lead to a realism which
+would be the reverse of the beautiful and the good, and which, bringing
+forth works equally offensive to the eye and to the mind, would commit a
+continual outrage against public morals and good manners;
+
+"_Be it known_, that there are limits which literature, even the
+lightest, should not pass, and of which Gustave Flaubert and the
+co-indicted have not taken sufficient account;
+
+"_Be it known_, that the work of which Flaubert is the author, is a work
+which appears to be long and seriously elaborated, from a literary point
+of view and as a study of character; that the passages coming under the
+ordinance for dismissal, as reprehensible as they may be, are few in
+number as compared with the extent of the work; that these passages,
+either in the ideas they expose, or in the situations they represent,
+bring out as a whole the characters which the author wished to paint,
+although exaggerated and impregnated with a vulgar realism often
+shocking;
+
+"_Be it known_, that Gustave Flaubert affirms his respect for good
+manners, and all that attaches itself to religious morals; that it does
+not appear that his book has been written like certain other books, with
+the sole aim of giving satisfaction to the sensual passions, to a spirit
+of license and debauch, or of ridiculing things which should be held in
+the respect of all;
+
+"That he has done wrong only in losing sight of the rules which every
+writer who respects himself ought never to lose sight of, or forget:
+that literature, like art, in order to accomplish the good which it is
+expected to produce ought only to be chaste and pure in its form and
+expression;
+
+"In the circumstances, _be it known_, that it is not sufficiently proven
+that Pichat, Gustave Flaubert and Pillet are guilty of the misdemeanor
+with which they are charged;
+
+"The Court acquits them of the indictment brought against them, and
+decrees a dismissal without costs."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert, by Various
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert, by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: January 10, 2004 [EBook #10666]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PUBLIC VS. M. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Juliet Sutherland, Rosanna Yuen and PG Distributed
+Proofreaders
+
+
+
+
+
+THE PUBLIC _vs_. M. GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
+
+
+The folios referred to in the trial are the folios either of the _Revue
+de Paris_ or of the first edition of the book.--EDITOR.
+
+
+
+_Speech of the Prosecuting Attorney_,
+
+
+M. ERNEST PINARD
+
+
+Gentlemen, in entering upon this debate, the Public Attorney is in the
+presence of a difficulty which he cannot ignore. It cannot be put even
+in the nature of a condemnation, since offenses to public morals and to
+religion are somewhat vague and elastic expressions which it would be
+necessary to define precisely. Nevertheless, when we speak to
+right-minded, practical men we are sure of being sufficiently understood
+to distinguish whether a certain page of a book carries an attack
+against religion and morals or not. The difficulty is not in arousing a
+prejudice, it is far more in explaining the work of which you are to
+judge. It deals entirely with romance. If it were a newspaper article
+which we were bringing before you, it could be seen at once where the
+fault began and where it ended; it would simply be read by the ministry
+and submitted to you for judgment. Here we are not concerned with a
+newspaper article, but entirely with a romance, which begins the first
+of October, finishes the fifteenth of December, and is composed of six
+numbers, in the _Revue de Paris_, 1856. What is to be done in such a
+case? What is the duty of the Public Ministry? To read the whole
+romance? That is impossible. On the other hand, to read only the
+incriminating texts would expose us to deep reproach. They could say to
+us: If you do not show the case in all its parts, if you pass over that
+which precedes and that which follows the incriminating passages, it is
+evident that you wish to suppress the debate by restricting the ground
+of discussion. In order to avoid this twofold difficulty, there is but
+one course to follow, and that is, to relate to you the whole story of
+the romance without reading any of it, or pointing out any incriminating
+passage; then to cite incriminating texts, and finally to answer the
+objections that may arise against the general method of indictment.
+
+What is the title of the romance? _Madame Bovary_. This title in itself
+explains nothing. There is a second in parentheses: _Provincial Morals
+and Customs_. This is also a title which does not explain the thought of
+the author but which gives some intimation of it. The author does not
+endeavour to follow such or such a system of philosophy, true or false;
+he endeavours to produce certain pictures, and you shall see what kind
+of pictures! Without doubt, it is the husband who begins and who
+terminates the book; but the most serious portrait of the work, the one
+that illumines the other paintings, is that of Madame Bovary.
+
+Here I relate, I do not cite. It takes the husband first at college, and
+it must be stated that the boy already gave evidence of the kind of
+husband he would make. He is excessively heavy and timid, so timid that
+when he arrives at the college and is asked his name, he responds:
+"_Charbovari_" He is so dull that he works continually without
+advancing. He is never the first, nor is he the last in his class; he
+is the type, if not of the cipher at least of the laughing-stock of the
+college. After finishing his studies here, he goes to study medicine at
+Rouen, in a fourth-story room overlooking the Seine, which his mother
+rented for him, in the house of a dyer of her acquaintance. Here he
+studies his medical books, and arrives little by little, not at the
+degree of doctor of medicine, but that of health officer. He frequented
+the inns, failed in his studies, but as for the rest, he had no other
+passion than that of playing dominoes. This is M. Bovary.
+
+The time comes for him to marry. His mother finds him a wife in the
+widow of a sheriff's officer of Dieppe; she is virtuous and plain, is
+forty-five years old, and has six thousand a year income. Only, the
+lawyer who had her capital to invest set out one fine morning for
+America, and the younger Madame Bovary was so much affected, so struck
+down by this unexpected blow that she died of it. Here we have the first
+marriage and the first scene.
+
+M. Bovary, now being a widower, begins to think of marrying again. He
+questions his memory; there is no need of going far; there immediately
+comes to his mind the daughter of a neighboring farmer, Mile. Emma
+Rouault, who had strangely aroused Madame Bovary's suspicions. Farmer
+Rouault had but one daughter, and she had been brought up by the
+Ursuline sisters at Rouen. She was little interested in matters of the
+farm; her father was anxious for her to marry. The health officer
+presented himself, there was no difficulty about the _dot_, and you
+understand that with such a disposition on both sides, these things are
+quickly settled. The marriage takes place. M. Bovary is at his wife's
+knees, is the happiest of men and the blindest of husbands. His sole
+occupation is anticipating his wife's wishes.
+
+Here the role of M. Bovary ends; that of Madame Bovary becomes the
+serious work of the book.
+
+Gentlemen, does Madame Bovary love her husband, or try to love him? No;
+and from the beginning there has been what we might call the scene of
+initiation. From the moment of her marriage, another horizon stretched
+itself out before her, a new life appeared to her. The proprietor of
+Vaubyessard Castle gave a grand entertainment. He invited the health
+officer and his wife, and this was for her an initiation into all the
+ardour of voluptuousness! There she discovered the Duke of Laverdiere
+who had had some success at Court; she waltzed with a viscount and
+experienced an unusual disturbance of mind. From this moment she lived
+a new life; her husband and all her surroundings became insupportable to
+her. One day, in looking over some furniture, she hit a piece of wire
+which tore her finger; it was the wire from her wedding bouquet.
+
+To try to dispel the _ennui_ that was consuming her, M. Bovary
+sacrificed his office and established himself at Yonville. Here was the
+scene of the first fall. We are now in the second number. Madame
+arrived at Yonville, and there, the first person she met upon whom she
+could fix her attention was--not the notary of the place, but the only
+clerk of that notary, Leon Dupuis. This is a young man who is making
+his own way and is about to set out for the capital. Any other than
+M. Bovary would have been disquieted by the visits of the young clerk,
+but M. Bovary is so ingenuous that he believes in his wife's
+virtue. Leon, wholly inexperienced, has the same idea. He goes away, and
+the occasion is lost; but occasions are easily found again.
+
+There was in the neighborhood of Yonville one Rodolphe Boulanger (you
+understand that I am narrating). He was a man of thirty-four years old
+and of a brutal temperament; he had had much success and many easy
+conquests; he then had an actress for a mistress. He saw Madame Bovary;
+she was young and charming; he resolved to make her his mistress. The
+thing was easy; three meetings were sufficient to bring it about. The
+first time he came to an agricultural meeting, the second time he paid
+her a visit, the third time he accompanied her on a horseback ride which
+her husband judged necessary to her health; it was then, in a first
+visit to the forest, that the fall took place. Their meetings
+multiplied after this, at Rodolphe's chateau and in the health officer's
+garden. The lovers reached the extreme limits of voluptuousness! Madame
+Bovary wished to elope with Rodolphe, but while Rodolphe dared not say
+no, he wrote a letter in which he tried to show her that for many
+reasons, he could not elope. Stricken down by the reception of this
+letter, Madame Bovary had a brain fever, following which typhoid fever
+declared itself. The fever killed the love, but the malady
+remained. This is the second scene.
+
+We come now to the third scene. The fall with Rodolphe was followed by a
+religious reaction, but it was short; Madame Bovary was about to fall
+anew. The husband thought the theatre useful in the convalescence of his
+wife and took her to Rouen. In a box opposite that occupied by M. and
+Madame Bovary, was Leon Dupuis, the notary's young clerk, who had made
+his way to Paris, and who had now become strangely experienced and
+knowing. He went to see Madame Bovary and proposed a _rendezvous_.
+Madame Bovary suggested the cathedral. On coming out of the cathedral,
+Leon proposed that they take a cab. She resisted at first, but Leon told
+her that this was done in Paris, and there was no further obstacle. The
+fall takes place in the cab! Meetings follow for Leon, as for Rodolphe,
+at the health officer's house, and then at a room which they rented in
+Rouen. Finally, she became weary of the second love, and here begins the
+scene of distress; it is the last of the romance.
+
+Madame Bovary was prodigal, having lavished gifts upon Rodolphe and
+Leon; she had led a life of luxury and, in order to meet such expense
+had put her name to a number of promissory notes. She had obtained a
+power of attorney from her husband in the management of their common
+patrimony, fell in with a usurer who discounted the notes which, not
+being paid at the expiration of the time, were renewed under the name of
+a boon companion. Then came the stamped paper, the protests, judgments
+and executions, and, finally, the posting for sale of the furniture of
+Monsieur Bovary, who knew nothing of all this. Reduced to the most
+cruel extremities, Madame Bovary asked money from everybody, but got
+none. Leon had nothing, and recoiled frightened at the idea of a crime
+that was suggested to him for procuring funds. Having gone through every
+degree of humiliation, Madame Bovary turned to Rodolphe; she was not
+successful; Rodolphe did not have 3000 francs. There remained to her but
+one course: to beg her husband's pardon? No. To explain the matter to
+him? No, for this husband would be generous enough to pardon her, and
+that was a humiliation which she could not accept: she must poison
+herself.
+
+We come now to grievous scenes. The husband is there beside his wife's
+icy body. He has her night robe brought, orders her wrapped in it and
+her remains placed in a triple coffin.
+
+One day he opens a secretary and there finds Rodolphe's picture, his
+letters and Leon's. Do you think his love is then shattered? No, no! on
+the contrary, he is excited and extols this woman whom others have
+possessed, as proved by these souvenirs of voluptuousness which she had
+left to him; and from that moment he neglects his office, his family,
+lets go to the winds the last vestige of his patrimony, and is found
+dead one day in the arbor in his garden, holding in his hand a long lock
+of black hair. This is the romance. I have related it to you,
+suppressing no scene in it. It is called _Madame Bovary_. You could
+with justice give it another title and call it. _Story of the Adulteries
+of a Provincial Woman_.
+
+Gentlemen, the first part of my task is fulfilled. I have related, I
+shall now cite, and after the citations come the indictments which are
+brought upon two counts: offense against public morals and offense
+against religious morals. The offense against public morals lies in the
+lascivious pictures which I have brought before your eyes; the offense
+against religious morals consists in mingling voluptuous images with
+sacred things. I now come to the citations. I will be brief, for you
+will read the entire romance. I shall limit myself to citing four
+scenes, or rather four tableaux. The first will be that of the fall with
+Rodolphe; the second, the religious reaction between the two adulteries;
+the third, the fall with Leon, which is the second adultery, and finally
+the fourth, the death of Madame Bovary.
+
+Before raising the curtain on these four pictures, permit me to inquire
+what colour, what stroke of the brush M. Flaubert employs--for this
+romance is a picture, and it is necessary to know to what school he
+belongs--what colour he uses and what sort of portrait he makes of his
+heroine.
+
+The general colour of the author, allow me to tell you, is a lascivious
+colour, before, during, and after the falls! When she is a child ten or
+twelve years of age, she is at the Ursuline convent. At this age, when
+the young girl is not formed, when the woman cannot feel those emotions
+which reveal to her a new world, she goes to confession:
+
+"When she went to confession, she invented little sins in order that she
+might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow, her hands joined, her
+face against the grating beneath the whispering of the priest. The
+comparisons of betrothed, husband, celestial lover, and eternal
+marriage, that recur in sermons, stirred within her soul depths of
+unexpected sweetness."
+
+Is it natural for a little girl to invent small sins, since we know that
+for a child the smallest sins are confessed with the greatest
+difficulty? And again, at this age, when a little girl is not formed,
+does it not make what I have called a lascivious picture to show her
+inventing little sins in the shadow, under the whisperings of the
+priest, recalling comparisons she has heard about the affianced, the
+celestial lover and eternal marriage which gave her a shiver of
+voluptuousness?
+
+Would you see Madame Bovary in her lesser acts, in a free state, without
+a lover and without sin? I pass over those words, "the next day," and
+that bride who left nothing to be discovered which could be divined or
+found out, as the phrase in itself is more than equivocal; but we shall
+see how it was with the husband:
+
+The husband of the next day, "whom one would have taken for an old
+maid," the bridegroom of this bride who "left nothing to be discovered
+that could be divined," arose and went out, "his heart full of the
+felicities of the night, with mind tranquil and flesh content," going
+about "ruminating upon his happiness like one who is still enjoying
+after dinner the taste of the truffles he is digesting."
+
+It now remains, gentlemen, to determine upon the literary stamp of M.
+Flaubert and upon the strokes of his brush. Now, at the Castle
+Vaubyessard do you know what most attracted this young woman, what
+struck her most forcibly? It is always the same thing--the Duke of
+Laverdiere, as a lover--"as they say, of Marie-Antoinette, between the
+Messrs. de Coigny and de Lauzun." "Emma's eyes turned upon him of their
+own accord, as upon something extraordinary and august; he had lived at
+Court and slept in the bed of queens!" Can it be said that this is only
+an historic parenthesis? Sad and useless parenthesis! History can
+authorise suspicions, but has not the right to establish them as
+fact. History has spoken of the necklace in all romances; history has
+spoken of a thousand things; but these are only suspicions and, I
+repeat, I know not by what authority these suspicions should be
+established as facts. And, since Marie-Antoinette died with the dignity
+of a sovereign and the calmness of a Christian, her life-blood should
+efface faults of which there are the strongest suspicions. M. Flaubert
+was in need of a striking example in the painting of his heroine, but
+Heaven knows why he has taken this one to express, all at once, the
+perverse instincts and the ambition of Madame Bovary!
+
+Madame Bovary dances very well, and here she is waltzing:
+
+"They began slowly, then went more rapidly. They turned; all around them
+was turning--the lamps, the furniture, the wainscoting, the floor, like
+a disc on a pivot. On passing near the doors the bottom of Emma's dress
+caught against his trousers. Their legs commingled; he looked down at
+her; she raised her eyes to his. A torpor seized her; she stopped. They
+started again, and with a more rapid movement; the Viscount, dragging
+her along, disappeared with her to the end of the gallery, where,
+panting, she almost fell, and for a moment rested her head upon his
+breast. And then, still turning, but more slowly, he guided her back to
+her seat. She leant back against the wall and covered her eyes with her
+hands."
+
+I know well that the waltz is more or less like this, but that makes it
+no more moral!
+
+Take Madame Bovary in her most simple acts, and we have always the same
+stroke of the brush, on every page. Even Justin, the neighbouring
+chemist's boy, undergoes some astonishment when he is initiated into the
+secrets of this woman's toilette. He carries his voluptuous admiration
+as far as the kitchen.
+
+"With his elbows on the long board on which she was ironing, he greedily
+watched all these women's clothes spread out about him, the dimity
+petticoats, the fichus, the collars, and the drawers with
+running-strings, wide at the hips and growing narrower below.
+
+"What is that for?" asked the young fellow, passing his hand over the
+crinoline or the hooks and eyes.
+
+"'Why, haven't you ever seen anything?' Felicite answered laughing. 'As
+if your mistress, Madame Homais, didn't wear the same.'"
+
+The husband also asks, in the presence of this fresh-smelling woman,
+whether the odour comes from the skin or from the chemise.
+
+"Every evening he found a blazing fire, his dinner ready, easy-chairs,
+and a well-dressed woman, charming with an odour of freshness, though no
+one could say whence the perfume came, or if it were not her skin that
+made odourous her chemise."
+
+Enough of quotations in detail! You know now the physiognomy of Madame
+Bovary in repose, when she is inciting no one, when she does not sin,
+when she is still completely innocent, and when, on her return from a
+rendezvous, she is by the side of her husband, whom she detests; you
+know now the general colour of the picture, the general physiognomy of
+Madame Bovary. The author has taken the greatest care, employed all the
+prestige of his style in painting the portrait of this woman. Has he
+tried to show her on the side of intelligence? Never. From the side of
+the heart? Not at all. On the part of mind? No. From the side of
+physical beauty? Not even that. Oh! I know very well that the portrait
+of Madame Bovary after the adultery is most brilliant; but the picture
+is above all lascivious, the post is voluptuous, the beauty a beauty of
+provocation.
+
+I come now to the four important quotations; I shall make but four; I
+hold to my outline: I have said that the first would be the love for
+Rodolphe, the second the religious reaction, the third the love for
+Leon, the fourth her death.
+
+Here is the first. Madame Bovary is near her fall, nearly ready to
+succumb.
+
+"Domestic mediocrity drove her to lewd fancies, marriage tendernesses to
+adulterous desires. She would have liked Charles to beat her, that she
+might have a better right to hate him, to revenge herself upon him."
+
+What was it that seduced Rodolphe and prepared him? The opening of
+Madame Bovary's dress which had burst in places along the seams of the
+corsage. Rodolphe took his servant to Bovary's house, to bleed him. The
+servant was very ill, and Madame Bovary held the basin.
+
+"Madame Bovary took the basin to put it under the table. With the
+movement she made in bending down, her skirt (it was a summer frock with
+four flounces, yellow, long in the waist and wide in the skirt) spread
+out around her on the flags of the room; and as Emma, stooping,
+staggered a little as she stretched out her arms, the stuff here and
+there gave with the inflections of her bust."
+
+Here is Rodolphe's reflection: "He again saw Emma in her room, dressed
+as he had seen her, and he undressed her."
+
+It is the first day they had spoken to each other. "They looked at one
+another. A supreme desire made their dry lips tremble, and softly,
+without an effort, their fingers intertwined."
+
+These are the preliminaries of the fall. It is necessary to read the
+fall itself.
+
+"When the habit was ready, Charles wrote to Monsieur Boulanger that his
+wife was at his command, and that they counted on his good-nature.
+
+"The next day at noon, Rodolphe appeared at Charles's door with two
+saddle-horses. One had pink rosettes at his ears and a deerskin
+side-saddle.
+
+"Rodolphe had put on high soft boots, saying to himself that no doubt
+she had never seen anything like them. In fact, Emma was charmed with
+his appearance as he stood on the landing in his great velvet coat and
+white corduroy breeches."
+
+"As soon as he felt the ground, Emma's horse set off at a
+gallop. Rodolphe galloped by her side."
+
+Here they are in the forest.
+
+"He drew her farther on to a small pool where duckweeds made a greenness
+on the water. Faded waterlilies lay motionless between the reeds. At the
+noise of their steps in the grass, frogs jumped away to hide themselves.
+
+"'I am wrong! I am wrong!' she said. 'I am mad to listen to you!'"
+
+"'Why? Emma! Emma!'"
+
+"'Oh, Rodolphe!' said the young woman slowly, leaning on his shoulder."
+
+"The cloth of her habit caught against the velvet of his coat. She threw
+back her white neck, swelling with a sigh, and faltering, in tears, with
+a long shudder and hiding her face, she gave herself up to him."
+
+Then she arose and, after shaking off the fatigue of voluptuousness,
+returned to the domestic hearth, to that hearth where she would find a
+husband who adored her. After this first fall, after this first
+adultery, this first fault, is it a sentiment of remorse that she feels,
+in the presence of this deceived husband who adores her? No! with a bold
+front, she enters, glorifying adultery.
+
+"But when she saw herself in the glass she wondered at her face. Never
+had her eyes been so large, so black, of so profound a depth. Something
+subtle about her being transfigured her. She repeated, 'I have a lover!
+a lover!' delighting at the idea as if a second puberty had come to
+her. So at last she was to know those joys of love, that fever of
+happiness of which she had despaired! She was entering upon marvels
+where all would be passion, ecstasy, delirium."
+
+Thus, from this first fault, this first fall, she glorified adultery,
+she sang the song of adultery, its poesy and its delights. This,
+gentlemen, to me is much more dangerous and immoral than the fall
+itself! Gentlemen, all pales before this glorification of adultery, even
+the rendezvous at night some time after:
+
+"To call her, Rodolphe threw a sprinkle of sand at the shutters. She
+jumped up with a start; but sometimes he had to wait, for Charles had a
+mania for chatting by the fireside, and he would not stop. She was wild
+with impatience; if her eyes could have done it, she would have hurled
+him out at the window. At last she would begin to undress, then take up
+a book, and go on reading very quietly as if the book amused her. But
+Charles, who was in bed, called to her to come too.
+
+"'Come, now, Emma,' he said, 'it is time.'
+
+"'Yes, I am coming,' she answered.
+
+"Then, as the candles dazzled him, he turned to the wall and fell
+asleep. She escaped, smiling, palpitating, undressed.
+
+"Rodolphe had a large cloak; he wrapped her in it, and putting his arm
+around her waist, he drew her without a word to the end of the garden."
+
+"It was in the arbour, on the same seat of old sticks where formerly
+Leon had looked at her so amorously on the summer evenings. She never
+thought of him now.
+
+"The cold of the nights made them clasp closer; the sighs of their lips
+seemed to them deeper; their eyes, that they could hardly see, larger;
+and in the midst of the silence low words were spoken that fell on their
+souls sonorous crystalline, and reverberating in multiplied vibrations."
+
+Gentlemen, do you know of language anywhere in the world more
+expressive? Have you ever seen a more lascivious picture? Listen
+further:
+
+"Never had Madame Bovary been so beautiful as at this period; she had
+that indefinable beauty that results from joy, from enthusiasm, from
+success, and that is only the harmony of temperament with
+circumstances. Her desires, her sorrows, the experience of pleasure and
+her ever-young illusions had, as soil and rain and winds and the sun
+make flowers grow, gradually developed her, and she at length blossomed
+forth in all the plentitude of her nature. Her eyelids seemed chiselled
+expressly for her long amorous looks in which the pupil disappeared,
+while a strong inspiration expanded her delicate nostrils and raised the
+fleshy corner of her lips, shaded in the light by a little black
+down. One would have thought that an artist apt in conception had
+arranged the curls of hair upon her neck; they fell in a thick mass,
+negligently and with the changing chances of their adultery that unbound
+them every day. Her voice now took more mellow inflections, her figure
+also; something subtle and penetrating escaped even from the folds of
+her gown and from the line of her foot. Charles, as when they were first
+married, thought her delicious and quite irresistible."
+
+Up to this time this woman's beauty had consisted of her grace, her
+elegance, and her clothes; finally she is shown to you without a veil
+and you can say whether adultery has embellished her or not.
+
+"'Take me away,' she cried, 'carry me off! Oh, I entreat you!'
+
+"And she threw herself upon his mouth, as if to seize there the
+unexpected consent it breathed forth in a kiss."
+
+Here is a portrait, gentlemen, which M. Flaubert knows well how to draw.
+How the eyes of this woman enlarge! Something ravishing expands around
+her, and then her fall! Her beauty has never been so brilliant as the
+next day after her fall and the days following. What the author shows
+you is the poetry of adultery, and I ask you again whether these
+lascivious pages do not express a profound immorality!
+
+I come now to the second situation, which is the religious
+reaction. Madame Bovary is very ill, is at death's door. She is brought
+back to life, and her convalescence is made remarkable by a little
+religious awakening.
+
+"It was at this hour that Monsieur Bournisien came to see her. He
+inquired after her health, gave her news, exhorted her to religion in a
+coaxing little gossip that was not without its charm. The mere thought
+of his cassock comforted her."
+
+Finally, she goes to communion. I do not like much to meet these holy
+things in a romance; but at least, when one speaks of them, he need not
+travesty them by his language. Is there in this adulterous woman going
+to communion anything of the repentant faith of a Magdalene? No, no; she
+is always the same passionate woman, seeking illusions and seeking them
+even among the most august and holy things.
+
+"One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself
+dying, and had asked for the communion; and, while they were making the
+preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the
+night-table covered with sirups into an altar, and while Felicite was
+strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over
+her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all
+feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was
+beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would
+be annihilated in that love like a burning incense that melts into
+vapour."
+
+In what tongue does one pray to God in language addressed to a lover in
+the outpourings of adultery? Without doubt they will tell us it is local
+colour, and excuse it on the ground that a vapourous, romantic woman
+does nothing, even in religion, like anybody else. There is no local
+colour which can excuse this mixture! Voluptuous one day, religious the
+next, there is no woman, even in other countries, under the sky of Spain
+or Italy, who murmurs to God the adulterous caresses which she gives her
+lover. You can appreciate this language, gentlemen, and you will not
+excuse adulterous words being introduced in any way into the sanctuary
+of the Divinity!
+
+This is the second situation. I now come to the third, which is a series
+of adulteries.
+
+After the religious transition, Madame Bovary is again ready to
+fall. She goes to the theatre at Rouen. The play is _Lucia di
+Lammermoor_. Emma returns to her old self.
+
+"Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the pollution of marriage
+and the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon
+some great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and
+duty blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness."
+
+Seeing Lagardy upon the stage, she had a desire to run into his arms, to
+take refuge in his strength, even as in the incarnation of love, and of
+saying to him: "Take me, take me away, let us go! thine, thine, with
+thee are all my ardour and all my dreams!"
+
+Leon was with the Bovarys.
+
+"He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall
+of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot
+breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair."
+
+You were spoken to just now of the pollution of marriage; then you are
+shown adultery in all its poesy, in its ineffable seductions. I have
+said that the expression should be modified to read: the disillusions of
+marriage and the pollution of adultery. Very often when one is married,
+in the place of happiness without clouds which one promises himself, he
+finds but sacrifice and bitterness. The word disillusion can then be
+used justifiably, that of pollution, never.
+
+Leon and Emma have a rendezvous at the cathedral. They look around or
+they do not, it makes no difference. They go out.
+
+"A lad was playing about the close.
+
+"'Go and get me a cab!'
+
+"The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quartre-Vents; then they
+were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed.
+
+"'Ah! Leon! Really--I don't know--if I ought,' she whispered. Then with
+a more serious air, 'Do you know, it is very improper?'
+
+"'How so?' replied the clerk. 'It is done at Paris.'
+
+"And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her."
+
+We know now, gentlemen, that the fall did not take place in the cab.
+Through a scruple which honors him, the editor of the _Revue de Paris_
+has suppressed the passage of the fall in the cab. But if the _Revue_
+lowered the blinds of the cab, it does allow us to penetrate into the
+room where they found a rendezvous.
+
+Emma wished to leave it, because she had given her word that she would
+return that evening.
+
+"Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her heart she felt already that
+cowardly docility that is for some women at once the chastisement and
+atonement of adultery."
+
+Once upon the sidewalk, Leon continued to walk; she followed him as far
+as the hotel; he mounted the stairs, opened the door and entered. What
+an embrace! Words followed each other quickly after the kisses. They
+told the disappointments of the week, their presentiments, their fears
+about the letters; but now all was forgotten, and they were face to
+face, with their laugh of voluptuousness and terms of endearment.
+
+"The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat. The curtains
+were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too
+much towards the bell-shaped bed-side; and nothing in the world was so
+lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple
+colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms,
+hiding her face in her hands.
+
+"The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its
+calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion."
+
+We are told what happened in that room. Here is still a passage, very
+important as a piece of lascivious painting:
+
+"How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite of its rather
+faded splendour! They always found the furniture in the same place, and
+sometimes hairpins that she had forgotten the Thursday before under the
+pedestal of the clock. They lunched by the fireside on a little round
+table, inlaid with rosewood. Emma carved, put bits on his plate with
+all sorts of coquettish ways, and she laughed with a sonorous and
+libertine laugh when the froth of the champagne ran over from the glass
+to the rings on her fingers. They were so completely lost in the
+possession of each other that they thought themselves in their own
+house, and that they would live there till death, like two spouses
+eternally young. They said 'our room,' 'our carpet,' she even said 'my
+slippers,' a gift of Leon's, a whim she had had. They were pink satin,
+bordered with swansdown. When she sat on his knees, her leg, then too
+short, hung in the air, and the dainty shoe, that had no back to it, was
+held on only by the toes to her bare foot.
+
+"He for the first time enjoyed the inexpressible delicacy of feminine
+refinements. He had never met this grace of language, this reserve of
+clothing, these poses of the weary dove. He admired the exaltation of
+her soul and the lace on her petticoat. Besides, was she not 'a lady'
+and a married woman--a real mistress, in fine?"
+
+This, gentlemen, is a description which leaves nothing to be desired, I
+hope, from the point of view of conviction. Here is another, or rather
+here is the continuation of the same scene:
+
+"She used some words which inflamed him, with some kisses which drew
+forth his soul. Where had she learned these caresses almost immaterial,
+so profound and evasive were they?"
+
+Oh! I well understand, gentlemen, the disgust inspired in her by that
+husband who wished to embrace her upon her return; I comprehend
+admirably that after a rendezvous of this kind, she felt with horror at
+night, "that man against her flesh stretched out asleep."
+
+That is not all, for according to the last tableau that I cannot omit,
+she came to be weary of her voluptuousness.
+
+"She was constantly promising herself a profound felicity on her next
+journey. Then she confessed to herself that she felt nothing
+extraordinary. This disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and
+Emma returned to him more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed
+hastily, tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around
+her hips like a gliding snake. She went on tip-toe, barefooted, to see
+once more that the door was closed; then, pale, serious, and without
+speaking, with one movement she threw herself upon his breast with a
+long shudder."
+
+I notice here two things, gentlemen, an admirable picture, the product
+of a talented hand, but an execrable picture from a moral point of
+view. Yes, M. Flaubert knows how to embellish his paintings with all
+the resources of art, but without the discretion of art. With him there
+is no gauze, no veils, it is nature in all her nudity, in all her
+crudity!
+
+Still another quotation:
+
+"They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of possession
+that increase its joys a hundred-fold. She was as sick of him as he was
+weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the platitudes of
+marriage."
+
+The platitudes of marriage and the poetry of adultery! Sometimes it is
+the pollution of marriage, sometimes the platitudes, but always the
+poetry of adultery. These, gentlemen, are the situations which
+M. Flaubert loves to paint, and which, unfortunately, he paints only too
+well.
+
+I have related three scenes: the scene with Rodolphe, and you have seen
+the fall in the forest, the glorification of adultery, and this woman
+whose beauty became greater with this poesy. I have spoken of the
+religious transition, and you saw there a prayer imprinted with
+adulterous language. I have spoken of the second fall, I have unrolled
+before you the scenes which took place with Leon. I have shown you the
+scene of the cab--suppressed--and I have shown you the picture of the
+room and the bed. Now that we believe your convictions are formed, we
+come to the last scene,--that of the punishment.
+
+Numerous excisions have been made, it would appear, by the _Revue de
+Paris_. Here are the terms in which M. Flaubert complains of it:
+
+"Some consideration which I do not appreciate has led the _Revue de
+Paris_ to suppress the number of December 1st. Its scruples being
+revived on the occasion of the present number, it has seen fit to cut
+out still more passages. In consequence, I wish to deny all
+responsibility in the lines which follow; the reader is informed that he
+sees only fragments and not the complete work."
+
+Let us pass, then, over these fragments and come to the death. She
+poisons herself. She poisons herself, why? Ah! it is a very little
+thing, is death, she thinks; I am going to fall asleep and all will be
+finished. Then, without remorse, without an avowal, without a tear of
+repentance over this suicide which is brought about by adulteries in the
+night watches, she goes to receive the sacrament for the dying. Why the
+sacrament, since in her last thought she is going to annihilation? Why,
+when there is not a tear, not a sigh of the Magdalene over her crime of
+infidelity, her suicide, or her adulteries?
+
+After this scene comes that of extreme unction. These are holy and
+sacred words for all. It is with these words that our ancestors have
+fallen asleep, our fathers and our relatives, and it is with them that
+one day our children will see us sleep. When one wishes to make use of
+them, it should be done with exactness; it is not necessary, at least to
+accompany them with the voluptuous image of a past life.
+
+You know how the priest makes the holy unctions upon the forehead, the
+ears, upon the mouth, the feet, pronouncing at the same time the
+liturgical phrases: _quidquam per pedes, per auras, per pectus_, etc.,
+always following with the words _misericordia_ ... sin on one side and
+pity on the other. These holy, sacred words should be reproduced
+exactly; and if they cannot be reproduced exactly, at least nothing
+voluptuous should be put with them.
+
+"She turned her face slowly and seemed filled with joy on seeing
+suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of a
+temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first
+mystical transports, with the visions of eternal beatitude that were
+beginning.
+
+"The priest rose to take the crucifix; then she stretched forward her
+neck as one who is athirst, and gluing her lips to the body of the
+Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest
+kiss of love that she had ever given. Then he recited the _Misereatur_
+and the _Indulgentiam_, dipped his right thumb in the oil and began to
+give extreme unction. First, upon the eyes, that had so coveted all
+worldly pomp; then upon the nostrils, that had been greedy of the warm
+breeze and amorous odours; then upon the mouth that had uttered lies,
+that had been curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then upon the
+hands, that had delighted in sensual touches; and finally upon the soles
+of the feet, so swift of yore, when she was running to satisfy her
+desires, and that would now walk no more."
+
+Now, in the prayers for the dying which the priest recites, at the end
+or at the close of each verse occur these words: "Christian soul, go out
+to a higher region." They are murmured at the moment when the last
+breath of the dying escapes from his lips. The priest recites, etc.
+
+"As the death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his
+prayers mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all
+seemed lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled
+like a passing-bell."
+
+After the fashion of alternating these words, the author has tried to
+make for them a sort of reply. He puts upon the sidewalk a blind man who
+intones a song of which the profane words are a kind of response to the
+prayers for the dying.
+
+"Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs and the
+clattering of a stick; and a voice rose--a raucous voice--that sang--
+
+"'Maids in the warmth of a summer day
+Dream of love and of love alway.
+The wind is strong this summer day,
+Her petticoat has flown away.'"
+
+This is the moment when Madame Bovary dies.
+
+Thus we have here the picture: on one side the priest reciting the
+prayers for the dying; on the other the hand-organ player who excites
+from the dying woman
+
+"an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous
+face of the poor wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a
+menace.... She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all
+drew near. She was dead."
+
+And then later, when the body is cold, above all should the cadaver,
+which the soul has just left, be respected. When the husband is there
+on his knees, weeping for his wife, when he extends the shroud over her,
+any other would have stopped, but M. Flaubert makes a final stroke with
+his brush:
+
+"The sheet sank in from her breast to her knees, and then rose at the
+tips of her toes."
+
+This the scene of death. I have abridged it and have grouped it after a
+fashion. It is now for you to judge and determine whether there is a
+mixture of the sacred and the profane in it, or rather, a mixture of the
+sacred and the voluptuous.
+
+I have related the romance, I have brought a charge against it and,
+permit me to say, against the kind of art that M. Flaubert cultivates,
+the kind that is realistic but not discreet. You shall see to what
+limits he has gone. A copy of the _Artiste_ lately came to my hand; it
+is not for us to make accusations against the _Artiste_, but to learn to
+what school M. Flaubert belongs, and I ask your permission to read you
+some lines, which have nothing to do with M. Flaubert's prosecuted book,
+only to show to what a degree he excels in this kind of painting. He
+loves to paint temptations, especially the temptations to which Madame
+Bovary succumbed. Well, I find a model of its kind in the lines to
+follow, from the _Artiste_, for the month of January, signed _Gustave
+Flaubert_, upon the temptation of Saint Anthony. Heaven knows it is a
+subject upon which many things might be said, but I do not believe it
+possible to give more vivacity to the image, stronger lines to the
+picture. Apollonius says to Saint Anthony:--
+
+"What is knowledge? What is glory? Wouldst thou refresh thine eyes
+under the humid jasmines? Wouldst thou feel thy body sink itself, as in
+a wave, in the sweet flesh of swooning women?"
+
+Ah! well! here is the same colour, the same strength of the brush, the
+same vivacity of expression!
+
+To resume. I have analyzed the book, I have related the story without
+forgetting a page, I have then made the charge, which was the second
+part of my task. I have exhibited some of the portraits, I have shown
+Madame Bovary in repose, by the side of her husband, in contact with
+those whom she could not tempt, and I have pointed out to you the
+lascivious colour of that portrait! Then I have analyzed some of the
+great scenes: the fall with Rodolphe, the religious transition, the
+meetings with Leon, the death scene, and in all this I find the double
+count of offense against public morals and against religion.
+
+I had need of but two scenes: Do you not see the moral outrage in the
+fall with Rodolphe? Do you not see the glorification of adultery in it?
+And then, the religious outrage, which I find in the drawing of the
+confession, in the religious transition, and finally, the scene of
+death.
+
+You have before you, gentlemen, three guilty ones: M. Flaubert, the
+author of the book, M. Pichat who accepted it, and M. Pillet, who
+printed it. In this matter, there is no misdemeanor without publicity,
+and all those concerned in the publicity should be equally blamed. But
+we hasten to say that the manager of the _Revue_ and the printer are
+only in the second rank. The principal offender is the author,
+M. Flaubert; M. Flaubert who admonished by a note from the editor,
+protested against the suppression which had been made in his work. After
+him comes M. Laurent Pichat, from whom you will demand a reason, not
+for the suppression which he has made, but of that which he should have
+made; and finally comes the printer, who is a sentinel at the door of
+scandal. M. Pillet, besides, is an honourable man against whom I have
+nothing to say. We ask but one thing of you, which is to apply the law
+to him. Printers should read; when they do not read or have read what
+they print, it is at their own risk and peril. Printers are not
+machines; they have a privilege, they take an oath, they are in a
+special situation and they are responsible. Again, they are, if you
+will permit the expression, like an advanced guard; if they allow a
+misdemeanor to pass, it is like allowing the enemy to pass. Make the
+penalty as mild as you will for Pillet, be as indulgent as you like with
+the manager of the _Revue_; but as for Flaubert, the principal culprit,
+it is for him you should reserve your severities!
+
+My task is accomplished; we await the objections on the part of the
+defense. The general objection will be: But after all the romance is
+moral on the whole, for is not adultery punished?
+
+To this objection there are two replies: I believe that in a
+hypothetically moral work, a moral conclusion cannot be reached by the
+presentation of the lascivious details we find here. And again I say:
+that the work is not moral at the foundation.
+
+I say, gentlemen, that lascivious details cannot be covered by a moral
+conclusion, otherwise one could relate all the orgies imaginable,
+describe all the turpitude of a public woman, making her die in a
+charity bed of a hospital. It would be allowable to study and depict
+all the poses of lasciviousness. It would be going against all the
+rules of good sense. It would place the poison at the door of all, the
+remedy at the doors of few, if there were any remedy. Who are the ones
+to read M. Flaubert's romance? Are they men who are interested in
+political or social economy? No! The light pages of Madame Bovary fall
+into hands still lighter, into the hands of young girls, sometimes of
+married women. Well, when the imagination has been seduced, when this
+seduction has fallen upon the heart, when the heart shall have told it
+to the senses, do you believe that cold reason would have much power
+against this seduction of sense and sentiment? And then, man should not
+clothe himself too much in his power and his virtue; man has low
+instincts and high ideas, and, with all, virtue is only the consequence
+of an effort ofttimes laborious. Lascivious pictures have generally more
+influence than cold reason. This is what I respond to that theory, that
+is, as a first response; but I have a second.
+
+I hold that the romance of _Madame Bovary_, from a philosophic point of
+view, is not moral. Without doubt Madame Bovary died of poison; she
+suffered much, it is true; but she died at her own time and in her own
+way, not because she had committed adultery but because she wished to;
+she died in all the prestige of her youth and beauty; she died after
+having two lovers, leaving a husband who loved her, who adored her, who
+found Rodolphe's portrait, his letters and Leon's, who read the letters
+of a woman twice an adulteress, and who, after that, loved her still
+more, even on the other side of the tomb. Who would condemn this woman
+in the book? No one. Such is the conclusion. There is not in the book a
+person who condemns her. If you can find one wise person, if you can
+find one single principal virtue by which the adulteress is condemned, I
+am wrong. But if in all the book there is not a person who makes her
+bow her head, there is not an idea, a line, by virtue of which the
+adulteress is scourged, it is I who am right, and the book is immoral!
+
+Should it be in the name of conjugal honor that the book be condemned?
+No, for conjugal honor is represented here by a devoted husband who,
+after the death of his wife, meets Rodolphe and seeks to find upon the
+face of the lover the features of the woman he loved. I ask you whether
+you could stigmatize this woman in the name of conjugal honor when there
+is not in the book a single word where the husband does not bow before
+the adulteress?
+
+Should it be in the name of public opinion? No, for public opinion is
+personified in a grotesque being, in the Homais apothecary surrounded by
+ridiculous persons whom this woman dominated.
+
+Will you condemn it in the name of religious sentiment? No, for this
+sentiment you see personified in the curate Bournisien, a priest as
+grotesque as the apothecary, believing only in physical suffering, never
+in moral, and little more than a materialist.
+
+Will you condemn it in the name of the author's conscience? I know not
+what the author thinks, but in chapter 10, the only philosophical one of
+his book, I read the following:
+
+"There is always after the death of any one a kind of stupefaction; so
+difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign
+ourselves to believe in it."
+
+This is not a cry of unbelief, but it is at least a cry of
+scepticism. Without doubt it is difficult to comprehend and believe it,
+but why this stupefaction which manifest's itself at death? Why?
+Because this surprise is something that is a mystery, because it is
+difficult to comprehend and judge, although one must resign himself to
+it. And as for me, I say that if death is the beginning of annihilation,
+that if the devoted husband feels his love increase on learning of the
+adulteries of his wife, that if opinion is represented by a grotesque
+being, that if religious sentiment is represented by a ridiculous
+priest, one person alone is right, and that is Emma Bovary,--Messalina
+was right against Juvenal.
+
+This is the conclusion of the book, drawn not by the author, but by a
+man who reflects and goes to the depths of things, by a man who has
+sought in this book for a person who could rule this woman. There is
+none there. The only person who ruled was Madame Bovary. It is
+necessary to seek elsewhere than in the book; we must look to Christian
+morals, which are the foundation of modern civilization. By this
+standard all explains itself, all becomes clear.
+
+In its name the adulteress is stigmatized, condemned, not because her
+act is an imprudence, exposing her to disillusions and regrets, but
+because it is a crime against the family. You stigmatize and condemn
+suicide, not because it is a foolish thing (the fool is not
+responsible), not because it is a cowardly act (for it sometimes
+requires a certain physical courage), but because it is a scorn of duty
+in the life we are living, and the cry of unbelief in the life to come.
+
+This code of morals stigmatizes realistic literature, not because it
+paints the passions: hatred, vengeance, love--the world sees but the
+surface and art should paint them--but not paint them without bridle,
+without limits. Art without rules is not art. It is like a woman who
+discards all clothing. To impose upon art the one rule of public decency
+is not to subject it, not to dishonor it. One grows great only by rule.
+These, gentlemen, are the principles which we profess, this the doctrine
+which we defend with conscience.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Plea for the Defense, by_
+
+
+M. SENARD
+
+
+Gentlemen, M. Gustave Flaubert has been accused before you of making a
+bad book; of having, in this book, outraged public morals and religion.
+M. Gustave Flaubert is beside me and affirms before you that he has made
+an honest book; he affirms before you that the thought in his book, from
+the first line to the last, is a moral thought; and that, if it were not
+perverted (and you have seen during the last hour how great a talent one
+may have for perverting a thought) it would be (and will become again
+presently) for you, as it has been already for the readers of the book,
+an eminently moral and religious thought capable of being translated
+into these words: the excitation of virtue through the horror of vice.
+
+I bring M. Gustave Flaubert's affirmation here to you, and I put it
+fearlessly in the light of the prosecuting attorney's speech, for this
+affirmation is grave; and it is through the personality of its maker,
+through the circumstances which have led to the writing of the book,
+that I am going to make it understood to you.
+
+The affirmation is grave on account of the personality that makes it:
+and, permit me to say to you that M. Gustave Flaubert is not to me an
+unknown man who has instructions to give me, and who has need of
+recommendations from me--I speak not only of his morality but of his
+position. I come here, into this precinct, fulfilling a duty of
+conscience after reading the book, after feeling myself exalted, by this
+reading, in all that is honest and profoundly religious. But, at the
+same time that I come fulfilling a duty of conscience, I come to fulfill
+a duty of friendship. I remember, and I can never forget, that his
+father was an old friend of mine. His father, by whose friendship I was
+long honoured, to the last day of his life, his father,--permit me to
+say his illustrious father,--was for thirty years surgeon-in-chief at
+the hospital at Rouen. He was in charge of the Dupuytren dissecting
+room, and in giving to science great instruction, he has endowed it with
+some great names; I will mention but one, that of Cloquet. He has not
+only left for himself a good name in science, he has left a grand
+memento in his immense service to humanity. And at the same time I am
+recalling my bond of friendship with him, I wish to tell you that his
+son, who has been dragged into Court for an outrage against morals and
+religion, this son is the friend of my children, as I was the friend of
+his father. I know his thought, I know his intentions, and the
+counsellor has the right here of placing himself as a personal guaranty
+of his client.
+
+Gentlemen, a great name and great memories have obligations. Children
+were not wanting to M. Flaubert. There were three of them, two sons, and
+a daughter who died at twenty-one. The eldest has been judged worthy to
+succeed his father; and he is to-day, as he has been for many years,
+carrying on the mission which his father conducted for thirty years. The
+younger son is here; he is at your bar. In leaving them a considerable
+fortune and a great name, their father has left upon them the obligation
+of being men of intelligence and of heart; that is to say, useful men.
+The brother of my client has been thrown into a career where each day
+brings its own service. This one has devoted his life to study and to
+letters, the work before you being his first work. This first work,
+gentlemen, which provokes the passions, as the Government Attorney has
+said, is the result of long study and much thought. M. Gustave Flaubert
+is a man of serious character, turning his attention, through his very
+nature, to serious subjects, to sad subjects. He is not the man whom the
+prosecuting attorney, in fifteen or twenty lines bitten out here and
+there, has presented to you as a maker of lascivious pictures. No; there
+is in his nature, I repeat, all that is gravest, most serious, and even
+the saddest that one could imagine. His book, by restoring a single
+phrase, by putting beside the quoted lines the lines which precede and
+follow, will take on its veritable colour, as soon as you understand the
+intentions of the author. And, of the too clever words to which you have
+listened, there will remain to you only the memory of a sentiment of
+profound admiration for a talent which can thus transform things.
+
+I have told you that M. Gustave Flaubert was a serious and grave man.
+His studies, conforming to his nature, have been serious and broad. They
+have embraced not only all branches of literature, but the right
+branches. M. Flaubert is not the man to be content with observations of
+even the best where he lived; he has sought out the best in other
+places; _Qui mores multorum vidit et urbes_.
+
+After his father's death and the completion of his studies at college,
+he visited Italy, and from 1848 to 1852 traveled through the countries
+of the Orient,--Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor--in which countries,
+doubtless, a man traveling through and bringing to his travels a fine
+intelligence, could acquire something exalted, something poetic, as well
+as the colour and prestige of style which the public minister has just
+pointed out, to make good the misdemeanor that he imputes. That prestige
+of style, those literary qualities pointed to with _eclat_ in this
+debate, are there, but after no fashion can they be brought up for
+indictment.
+
+Since his return, in 1852, M. Gustave Flaubert has written and sought to
+produce in a grand outline the result of his close and serious studies,
+the result of what he had gathered in his journeys.
+
+What is the outline he has chosen, the subject he has taken, and how has
+he treated it? My client belongs to any of the schools, whose names I
+have just learned in the Attorney's speech. Heaven knows he belongs to
+the realistic school, in that he occupies himself with the reality of
+things. He belongs to the psychological school, in the sense that it is
+not material things which engage him, but human sentiment and the
+development of the passions wherever the human being is placed. He
+belongs to the romantic school less perhaps than to any other, because,
+if romanticism appears in his book, as does realism, it appears only in
+some ironical expressions here and there, which the public attorney has
+taken seriously. What M. Flaubert especially wished was to take a
+subject of study from real life, creating from it some true types of the
+middle class, arriving finally at some useful result. Yes, what has most
+occupied my client in the studies to which he has devoted himself, is
+precisely this useful aim, followed out in putting upon the scene three
+or four personages from actual society, living in the conditions of real
+life, and presenting them to the eyes of the reader in a true picture of
+what is met with very often in the world.
+
+The Prosecuting Attorney, summing up his opinion of _Madame Bovary_, has
+said:
+
+"The second title of this work might be: _The Story of the Adulteries of
+a Provincial Woman_."
+
+I protest vigorously against this title. This alone, had I not listened
+to your speech from beginning to end, would prove to me the prejudice in
+which you are firmly bound. No! the second title of this work is not:
+_The Story of the Adulteries of a Provincial Woman_; it is, if it is
+absolutely necessary to have a second title: the story of the education
+too often met with in the provinces; the story of the perils to which
+such an education leads; the story of degradation, of dishonesty, of
+suicide, considered as a consequence of a first fault, and a fault led
+up to through wrong-doing, by which a young woman is often carried
+away. It is the story of an education, and the deplorable life of which
+such an education is often the preface. This is what M. Flaubert
+desired to paint, and not the adulteries of a woman of the provinces.
+You will see this at once on reading the incriminated book.
+
+Now, the prosecuting attorney perceives in all this, and through it all,
+a lascivious colour. If it were possible to take the number of lines of
+the book which he has cut out, and put parallel to them other lines that
+he has left, we should have a total proportion of about one to five
+hundred; and you would see that this proportion of one to five hundred
+was in no way of a lascivious colour; it exists only under the
+conditions of being cut out and commented upon.
+
+Now, what has M. Flaubert desired to paint? First, education given to a
+woman which is above the conditions to which she was born--something
+that too often happens among us, it must be confessed. Then, the mixture
+of discordant elements that are thus produced in the intelligence of the
+woman; and then when marriage comes, especially if the marriage is not
+in accordance with the education, but rather with the conditions under
+which the woman was born, the author explains all these facts which
+occur in the situation that he depicts.
+
+What has he shown? He shows a woman entering upon vice because of a
+disappointing match; then vice in its last degree, degradation and
+wretchedness. Presently, when through the reading of several passages,
+I shall have made you acquainted with the book as a whole, I shall
+demand of this tribunal the privilege of their accepting the question on
+these terms: Would this book, put into the hands of a young woman, have
+the effect of leading her towards easy pleasures, towards adultery, or,
+on the contrary, would it show her the danger of the first step, and
+bring upon her a shiver of horror? The question thus put, your
+conscience would soon decide.
+
+I have here stated that M. Flaubert wished to paint a woman who, instead
+of trying to adapt herself to the conditions in which she was placed, to
+her position and her birth, instead of seeking to make herself a part of
+the life to which she belonged, was occupied with a thousand foreign
+aspirations drawn from an education too far above her; instead of
+accommodating herself to the duties of her position, of being the
+tranquil wife of a country doctor with whom she should pass her days, in
+place of seeking her happiness in her house and in her marriage, sought
+it in interminable fancies; and then, meeting a young man upon the way
+who coquetted with her, she played the same game with him (Heaven knows
+they were both inexperienced enough!) urging herself on by degrees, and
+frightened when she turned to the religion of her early years and found
+it insufficient. We shall see presently why this was so. At first, the
+young man's ignorance and her own preserves her from danger. But she
+soon meets a man, of the kind of which there are too many in the world,
+who takes possession of her--this poor woman, already perverted and
+ready to stray. Here is the main point; now it is necessary to see what
+the book makes of it.
+
+The Public Minister becomes incensed, and I believe wrongly so from the
+standard of conscience and the human heart, over that first scene, where
+Madame Bovary finds a sort of pleasure, of joy, in having broken her
+prison, and returns to her home saying: "I have a lover." Do you believe
+that this is not the first cry of the human heart! The proof is between
+you and me. But we must look a little further, and then we shall see
+that, if the first moment, the first instant of the fall, excites in
+this woman a sort of transport of joy, of delirium, in some lines
+farther on the deception makes itself manifest and, following the
+expression of the author, she seems humiliated in her own eyes.
+
+Yes, deception, grief, and remorse come to her at the same time. The man
+in whom she has confided, to whom she has given herself up, has only
+made use of her for the moment, as he would a plaything; remorse and
+regret now rend her heart. It has shocked you to hear this called the
+disillusion of adultery; you would have preferred _pollution_ at the
+hand of a writer who placed before you a woman who, not having
+comprehended marriage, felt herself _polluted_ by contact with her
+husband, and who, having sought her ideal elsewhere, found the
+_disillusions_ of adultery. This word has shocked you; in the place of
+_disillusions_, you would have wished _pollution_ of adultery. This
+tribunal shall be the judge. As for me, if I had depicted the same
+personage I would have said to her: Poor woman! if you believe that your
+husband's kisses are monotonous and wearisome, if you have found only
+platitudes--this word has been especially brought to our notice--the
+platitudes of marriage--if you seem to see pollution in a union where
+love does not preside, take care, for your dreams are an illusion, and
+you will one day be cruelly deceived. But this man, gentlemen, who knows
+how to speak strongly, makes use of the word pollution to express what
+we would have called disillusion, and he has used the true word,
+although vague to him who can bring to it no intelligence. I would have
+liked better his not speaking so strongly, his not pronouncing the word
+_pollution_, but rather averting the woman from deception, from
+disillusion, and saying to her: Where you believe you will find love,
+you will find only libertinism; where you think you will find happiness,
+there is only bitterness. A husband who goes tranquilly about his
+affairs, who kisses you, puts on his house cap and eats his soup with
+you, is a prosaic husband revolting to you; you aspire to a man who will
+love you, idolize you; poor child! that man will be a libertine who will
+have taken you for a minute for the sake of playing with you. There will
+be some illusion about it the first time, perhaps the second; you may
+come back home joyous, singing the song of adultery. "I have a lover!"
+but the third time you will not wish to go to him, for the disillusion
+will have come. The man you have dreamed of will have lost all his
+prestige; you will have found again in love the platitudes of marriage,
+and this time with scorn, disdain, disgust and poignant remorse.
+
+This, gentlemen, is what M. Flaubert has said, what he has painted, what
+is in each line of his book; and this is what distinguishes his work
+from all other works of the kind. Under his hand, the great
+irregularities of society figure on each page, and adultery walks abroad
+full of disgust and shame. He has brought into the common relations of
+life the most powerful teaching that can be given to a young woman. And
+Heaven knows that to those of our young women who do not find in lofty,
+honest principle and stern religion enough to keep them steady in the
+accomplishment of their duties as mothers, or who do not find it in that
+resignation and practical science of life which bids us accommodate
+ourselves to what we have, but who carry their dreams to the outside
+(and the most honest, the most pure of our young women, in the prosaic
+life of their households, are sometimes tormented by that which is going
+on outside), a book like this would bring but one reflection. Of that
+you may be sure. And this is what M. Flaubert has intended.
+
+And notice carefully one thing: M. Flaubert is not the man who has
+painted a charming adultery for you, in order to arrive later with the
+_Deus ex machina_; no, you are carried too quickly on to the last
+page. Adultery with him is only a series of torments, remorse and
+regret; and then he arrives at the final, frightful expiation. It is
+excessive. If M. Flaubert sins, it is through excess; and I will show
+you presently what is meant by this. The expiation is not allowed to
+wait, and it is that which makes the book eminently moral and useful. It
+does not promise the young woman some beautiful years at the end of
+which she can say: after this, one is willing to die. No! from the
+second day there is bitterness and disillusion. The conclusion for
+morality is found in each line of the book.
+
+This book is written with a power of observation to which the Government
+Attorney has rendered justice. And it is here that I would call your
+attention to it, because if the accusation is without foundation, it
+must fall. This book is written with a power truly remarkable for
+observing the smallest details. An article in the _Artiste_, signed
+Flaubert, has served as yet another text for the accusation. Let the
+Government Attorney note, first that this article is foreign to the
+indictment; then, that we will hold him innocent and moral in the eyes
+of this tribunal on one condition, which is, that he will have the
+goodness to read the entire article from the place of the cutting.
+
+The most noticeable thing in M. Flaubert's book is what some accounts
+have called a fidelity wholly Daguerreian in the reproduction of the
+type of things, and in the intimate nature of the thought of the human
+heart;--and this reproduction becomes more powerful still by the magic
+of his style. Now notice, that if he had applied this fidelity only to
+the scenes of degradation, you could say with reason: the author has
+been pleased to paint the scenes of degradation with that power of
+description which is peculiarly his own. From the first to the last page
+of his book, he keeps close to all the facts in Emma's life, without any
+kind of reserve, from her infancy in her father's house, to her
+education in the convent, sparing nothing. And those of us who have read
+the book from beginning to end can say--and this is a notable point
+which should put him in a favorable light with you, not only bringing
+him acquittal, but removing from him every kind of misunderstanding--that
+when he comes to the difficult parts, precisely at the time of
+degradation, in place of doing as some classic authors have done, (as
+the Public Attorney knows full well, but whom he forgot when he wrote
+his address) a few pages of whose writings I have with me here, (not to
+read to you but for you to run through in Court--and I might quote a few
+lines here presently), in place of doing as our great classic authors,
+our great masters have done, who never hesitate at description when they
+have come to the scene of a union of the senses between man and woman,
+M. Flaubert contents himself with a word. All his descriptive power
+disappears, because his thought is chaste; because where he might write
+in his own manner and with the magic of his style, he feels that there
+are some things that should not be described or even touched upon. The
+Public Attorney finds that he has still said too much. When I have shown
+him some men who, in great philosophical works, have delighted in
+descriptions of these things, and when in the light of this fact I have
+shown that this man, who possesses the descriptive faculty to so high a
+degree and who, far from using it, desists and abstains from it, I shall
+indeed have the right to ask why this accusation has been brought?
+
+Nevertheless, gentlemen, just as he has described to us the pleasant
+cradle of Emma's infancy, with its foliage, its rose-colored and white
+flowers which gladdened her with their blossoms and their perfume, so he
+has described her when she went out from there into other paths, into
+paths where she found mire, where her feet became soiled from its
+contact, when the mire rose higher than herself and--he need not have
+told it! But that would be to suppress the book completely, and I am
+going far enough to say would suppress its moral element under a pretext
+of defending it; for if a fault cannot be shown, if it cannot be pointed
+out, if in a picture of real life which aims to show, through thought,
+peril, fall and punishment, you would debar painting such as this, it is
+evident you would cut out of the book its whole purpose.
+
+This book was not a matter of a few hours' amusement for my client. It
+represents two or three years of incessant study. And now I am going to
+tell you something more: M. Flaubert who, after so many years of labor,
+so many of study, so many journeys, so many notes culled from authors he
+had read,--and Heaven grant you may see the fountain-head from which he
+has drawn, for this strange fact will take upon itself his
+justification--M. Flaubert (and his lascivious colour)--you will find
+impregnated wholly with Bossuet and Massillon. It is in the study of
+these authors that we shall presently find him seeking, not to
+plagiarize, but to reproduce in his descriptions the thoughts and
+colours employed by them. And can you believe, after all that, having
+done this work with so much love for it, and with a decided purpose,
+that, full of confidence in himself, and after so much study and
+meditation, he would wish to throw himself immediately into the arena?
+He would have done it, no doubt, had he been an unknown man, if his name
+had belonged to himself in sole ownership, had he believed himself able
+to dispose of it and use it as it seemed good to him; but, I repeat, he
+is one of those upon whom rests the obligation of rank. His name is
+Flaubert, he is the second son of M. Flaubert, and he has desired to
+make a place for himself in literature, profoundly respecting the moral
+and religious phases of it,--not through the notoriety of a lawsuit, for
+such a purpose could not enter his thoughts--but through personal
+dignity, not wishing his name to be at the head of a publication that
+did not seem to some persons and to those in whom he had faith, worthy
+of being published. M. Flaubert read in fragments, and even in
+totality, to friends holding high places in the world of letters, the
+pages which he hoped some day to print, and I assure you that not one of
+them has been offended by what has just now excited such lively severity
+on the part of the Government Attorney. No one even thought of it. They
+simply examined and studied the literary value of the book. As to the
+moral purpose, it is so evident, so written in every line in terms so
+unequivocal that there was no need of raising the question.
+
+Reassured upon the value of the book, encouraged, furthermore, by the
+most eminent men of the press, M. Flaubert thought only of printing it
+and giving it to the public. I repeat: everyone was unanimous in
+rendering homage to its literary merit, to its style, and at the same
+time to the excellent thought that pervaded it, from the first line to
+the last. And when this action was brought it was not he alone who was
+surprised and profoundly troubled, but, permit me to say, we, who cannot
+understand the action, and I myself most of all, who had read the book
+with a very lively interest as soon as it was published. But we are his
+intimate friends. Heaven knows that there are some shades of meaning
+that might escape us in our easy-going habits which never could escape
+women of great intelligence, of great purity and unquestioned
+chastity. These are not names which can be pronounced in this audience,
+but if I could tell you what has been said to Flaubert, what has been
+said to me, even, by mothers of families who have read this book, if I
+could tell you their astonishment, after receiving from that reading an
+impression so good that they believed they should thank the author for
+it, if I could tell you their astonishment, their grief, when they
+learned that this book was thought to oppose public morals and religious
+faith, the faith of their whole life, God knows there would be in the
+sum of this appreciation sufficient to fortify me, had I need of being
+fortified for this combat with the Public Attorney.
+
+However, in the midst of all the appreciative voices of contemporaneous
+literature there is one which I wish to mention to you. There is one who
+is not only respected by reason of a grand and beautiful character, who,
+in the midst of adversity, of suffering even, has struggled courageously
+each day; who is not only great by virtue of many deeds useless to
+recall here, but great through his literary works which must be recalled
+because here he is an authority; great especially through the purity
+which exists in all his works, through the chastity of all his writings:
+Lamartine.
+
+Lamartine did not know my client; he did not know that he
+existed. Lamartine, at his home in the country, read _Madame Bovary_ in
+each number of the _Revue de Paris_, and Lamartine found there such
+power that it recurred to him again and again, as I am going to tell
+you.
+
+After some days, Lamartine returned to Paris, and the next day informed
+himself where M. Gustave Flaubert lived. He sent to the _Revue_ to learn
+where M. Gustave Flaubert lived, who had published in the magazine some
+articles under the title of _Madame Bovary_. He then directed his
+secretary to go and present his compliments to M. Flaubert, to express
+for him the satisfaction he had found in reading his book, and also his
+desire to see the new author who revealed himself in an essay of that
+order.
+
+My client went to Lamartine's house; and he found in him not only a man
+who encouraged him, but who said to him:
+
+"You have made the best book I have read in twenty years."
+
+In a word, his praise was such that, in his modesty, my client scarcely
+liked to repeat it to me. Lamartine proved to him that he had read each
+number, proving it most graciously by repeating entire pages from
+them. Lamartine only added:
+
+"While I have read even to the last page without reserve, I did blame
+the last pages. You have hurt me, you have literally made me suffer! The
+punishment is beyond all proportion to the crime; you have created a
+pitiably frightful death! Assuredly the woman who defiles the marriage
+bed should expect punishment, but this is horrible; it is a punishment
+such as I have never seen. You have gone too far; you have done mischief
+to my nerves. That power of description which you have applied to the
+last moment of death has left upon me an indelible suffering!"
+
+And when Gustave Flaubert said to him:
+
+"But, Monsieur de Lamartine, do you know that I have been indicted and
+summoned to a court of correction for an offense against public morals
+and religion for having made a book like that?"
+
+Lamartine answered:
+
+"I believe that I have been all my life a man who, in literary works as
+well as others, comprehends fully what makes for public and religious
+morals; my dear child, it is not possible to find in France a tribunal
+that will convict you."
+
+This is what passed between Lamartine and Flaubert yesterday, and I have
+the right to say to you that this approval is among those which are
+worthy to be well weighed.
+
+This well understood, let us see how my conscience could tell me that
+_Madame Bovary_ was a good book, a good deed. And I ask your permission
+to add that I do not take to these things easily, this facility is not
+my habit. Some literary works I take up which, although emanating from
+our great writers, do not remain two minutes before my eyes. I will pass
+to you in the council chamber some lines that I took no delight in
+reading, and I will ask your permission to say to you that when I came
+to the end of M. Flaubert's work, I was convinced that a cutting made by
+the _Revue de Paris_ was the cause of all this. I shall ask you further
+to add my appreciation to this highest and most distinguished
+appreciation which I am about to mention.
+
+Here, gentlemen, is a portfolio filled with the opinions of all the
+literary men of our time upon the work with which we are engaged, among
+whom are some of the most distinguished, expressing their astonishment
+upon reading this new work, at once so moral and so useful!
+
+Now, how has it come about that a work like this can incur a process of
+law? If you will permit me, I will tell you. The _Revue de Paris_, whose
+reading committee had read the work in its entirety, for the manuscript
+was sent long before it was published, evidently found nothing to
+criticise. When it came time to print the copy of December 1st, 1856,
+one of the directors of the _Revue_ became affrighted at the scene in
+the cab. He said: "This is not conventional, we must suppress it."
+Flaubert was offended by the suppression. He was not willing that it
+should be made unless a note to that effect were placed at the bottom of
+the page. It was he who exacted the note. It is he who, on account of
+his self-respect as an author, neither wishing to have his work
+mutilated nor, on the other hand wishing to make trouble for the
+_Revue_, said: "You may suppress it if it seems best to you, but you
+will state that you have suppressed something." And they agreed upon
+the following note:
+
+"The directors have seen the necessity of suppressing a passage here
+which did not seem fitting to the _Revue de Paris_; we give notice of it
+to the author."
+
+Here is the suppressed passage which I am going to read to you. We have
+only a proof, which we had great difficulty in procuring. The first part
+has not a single correction; one word is corrected in the second part.
+
+"'Where to, sir?' asked the coachman.
+
+"'Where you like,' said Leon, forcing Emma into the cab.
+
+"And the lumbering machine set out. It went down the Rue Grand-Pont,
+crossed the Place des Arts, the Quai Napoleon, the Pont Neuf, and
+stopped short before the statue of Pierre Corneille.
+
+"'Go on,' cried a voice that came from within.
+
+"The cab went on again, and as soon as it reached the Carrefour
+Lafayette, set off down-hill, and entered the station at a gallop.
+
+"'No, straight on!' cried the same voice.
+
+"The cab came out by the gate, and soon having reached the Cours,
+trotted quietly beneath the elm-trees. The coachman wiped his brow, put
+his leather hat between his knees, and drove his carriage beyond the
+side alley by the meadow to the margin of the waters.
+
+"It went along by the river, along the towing-path paved with sharp
+pebbles, and for a long while in the direction of Oyssel, beyond the
+isles.
+
+"But suddenly it turned with a dash across Quatre-mares, Sotteville, La
+Grande-Chaussee, the Rue d'Elbeuf, and made its third halt in front of
+the Jardin des Plantes.
+
+"'Get on, will you?' cried the voice more furiously.
+
+"And at once resuming its course, it passed by Saint-Sever, by the Quai
+des Curandiers, the Quai aux Meules, once more over the bridge, by the
+Place du Champ de Mars, and behind the hospital gardens, where old men
+in black coats were walking in the sun along the terrace all green with
+ivy. It went up the Boulevard Bouvreuil, along the Boulevard Cauchoise,
+then the whole of Mont-Riboudet to the Deville hills.
+
+"It came back; and then, without any fixed plan or direction, wandered
+about at hazard. The cab was seen at Saint-Pol, at Lescure, at Mont
+Gargan, at La Rouge-Marc and Place du Gaillardbois; in the Rue
+Maladrerie, Rue Dinanderie, before Saint-Romain, Saint-Vivien,
+Saint-Maclou, Saint-Nicaise--in front of the Customs, at the 'Vieille
+Tour,' the 'Trois Pipes,' and the Monumental Cemetery. From time to
+time, the coachman on his box cast despairing eyes at the
+public-houses. He could not understand what furious desire for
+locomotion urged these individuals never to wish to stop. He tried to
+now and then, and at once exclamations of anger burst forth behind
+him. Then he lashed his perspiring jades afresh, but indifferent to
+their jolting, running up against things here and there, not caring if
+he did, demoralised, and almost weeping with thirst, fatigue, and
+depression.
+
+"And on the harbour in the midst of the drays and casks and in the
+streets at the corners, the good folk opened large wonder-stricken eyes
+at this sight, so extraordinary in the provinces, a cab with blinds
+drawn, and which appeared thus constantly shut more closely than a tomb,
+and tossing about like a vessel.
+
+"Once, in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun
+beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed
+beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of
+paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off alighted like white
+butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom.
+
+"At about six o'clock, the carriage stopped in a back street of the
+Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down,
+and without turning her head.
+
+"On reaching the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the
+diligence. Hivert, who had waited for her fifty-three minutes, had at
+last started.
+
+"Nothing, however, could prevent her setting out; she had promised to
+return that evening. Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her heart
+she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at once
+the chastisement and atonement of adultery."
+
+M. Flaubert calls my attention to the fact that the Public Attorney
+condemned this last clause.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+No, I have pointed it out.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+It is certain that if he had made a reproach it would have fallen before
+these words: "at once the chastisement and atonement of adultery."
+Furthermore, that could be made a matter of reproach with as much
+foundation as the other quotations, for in all that you have condemned
+there is no point that can be seriously held.
+
+Now, gentlemen, this kind of fantastic journey having displeased the
+editors of the _Revue_, it was suppressed. This was certainly excess of
+reserve on the part of the _Revue_; and it is very certain that it is
+not an excess of reserve which could furnish material for a lawsuit. You
+shall see now what has furnished the material. What is not seen, what
+has been suppressed, comes thus to appear a very strange thing. People
+imagine many things, and often those which do not exist, as you have
+seen from the reading of the original passage. Heavens! Do you know what
+they imagined? Probably that there was in the suppressed passage
+something analogous to that which you will have the goodness to read in
+one of the most marvellous romances from the pen of an honorable member
+of the French Academy, M. Merimee.
+
+M. Merimee, in a romance entitled _The Double Mistake_, describes a
+scene which took place in a postchaise. It is not the locality where the
+carriage is that is of importance, it is, as here, in the detail of what
+is done in the interior. I do not wish to abuse the audience, and will
+pass the book to the Public Attorney and to the court. If we had
+written a half, or a quarter part of what M. Merimee wrote, I should
+find some embarrassment in the task that has been given me, or rather I
+should have to modify it; in place of saying what I have said, and what
+I affirm, that M. Flaubert has written a good book, an honest book,
+useful and moral, I should say: literature has its rights; M. Merimee
+has made a very remarkable literary work, and it is not necessary to
+show ourselves too particular about details when the whole is
+irreproachable. I take my stand there; I should acquit, and you will
+acquit. Great Heavens! It is not by omission that an author can sin in
+a matter of this kind. And besides, you will have the detail of that
+which took place in the cab. But as my client himself was content to
+make a journey, revealing what passed in the interior of the carriage
+only by a bare hand which appeared under the yellow silk curtains and
+threw out bits of torn paper which were scattered by the wind and
+settled down afar off like white butterflies upon a field of red clover
+all in flower, as my client was content with that, no one knew anything
+about it and everyone supposed--from the suppression itself--that he had
+at least said as much as the member of the French Academy. You have
+seen that there was nothing in it.
+
+Ah, well! this unfortunate suppression has caused the lawsuit! That is
+to say, when, in the offices where they have charge, and with infinite
+reason, of inspecting all writings which could offend public morals,
+they saw this cut, they took warning. I am obliged to declare, and,
+gentlemen of the _Revue_, allow me to state that they started the work
+of their scissors two words too far off; they should have begun before
+they got into the cab. To cut after that was more difficult. This
+cutting was indeed most unfortunate; but if you have committed the
+error, gentlemen of the _Revue_, assuredly you will atone for it to-day.
+
+They said in the inspecting office: Take heed of what is to follow, and
+when the following number appeared, they made war on it to the syllable.
+The people in the office are not obliged to read all; and when they saw
+that some one had written about a woman removing all her clothing, they
+were startled enough without going further. It is true that, differing
+from our great masters, Flaubert has not taken the trouble to describe
+the alabaster of her bare arms, throat, etc. He has not said, as did a
+poet whom we love:
+
+I see her alabaster limbs ardent and pure,
+Smooth as ebony, like the lily, coral, roses, veins of azure,
+Such indeed, as in former times thou showedst to me
+Of nudity embellished and adorned;
+When nights slipped by, and pillows soft
+Saw thee from my kisses waking and sleeping oft.
+
+He has said nothing like this of Andre Chenier's. But he finally said:
+
+"She abandoned herself.... Her clothing fell from her."
+
+She abandoned herself! Why not? Is all description to be prohibited?
+But when one makes an incriminating charge, he should read the whole,
+and the Government Attorney has not read the whole. The passage he makes
+the charge against does not stop where he stopped; it has a corrective,
+and here it is:
+
+"Nevertheless, there was upon this brow covered with cold drops, upon
+these stammering lips, in these bewildered eyes, in the clasp of these
+arms something extreme, something vague and lugubrious which seemed to
+Leon to glide between them in some subtle fashion, as if to separate
+them."
+
+In the office they did not read that. The Government Attorney just now
+did not notice it. He only saw this:
+
+"Then, with a single gesture, she allowed all her clothes to fall from
+her."
+
+And then he cries out: An outrage to public morals! Surely, it is too
+easy to accuse with a system like this. God forbid that the authors of
+dictionaries fall under the Government Attorney's hand! Who could escape
+condemnation if, by means of cutting, not of phrases, but of words, one
+is to be informed of a list he has made that might offend morals or
+religion?
+
+My client's first thought, which unfortunately met with resistance, was
+this: "There is only one thing to do: print the book immediately, not
+with parts cut out, but the work entire as it left my hands, restoring
+to it the scene in the cab." I was of his opinion, believing that the
+best defense of my client would be a complete imprint of the work with
+special indication of some points to which we would beg to draw the
+Court's attention. I myself gave the title to this publication: _Memoir
+of Gustave Flaubert for the prevention of outrage to religious morals
+brought against him_. I had written on it with my hand: Civil Court,
+Sixth Chamber, with the signature of the President and the Public
+Minister. There was a preface in which was written:
+
+"They have indicted me with phrases taken here and there from my book; I
+can only defend myself with the whole book."
+
+To ask the judges to read an entire romance would be asking much; but we
+are before judges who love truth, who desire the truth, and who to learn
+it would not shrink from any fatigue. We are before judges who desire
+justice and desire it energetically, and who will read, without any kind
+of hesitation, what we beg them to read. I said to M. Flaubert: "Send
+this immediately to the printers, and put my name at the bottom beside
+yours: SENARD, _Counsel_." They had begun the printing; arrangements
+were made for a hundred copies for our own use; the work went on with
+extreme rapidity, they were working day and night on it, when the order
+came to us to discontinue the printing, not of a book, but of a pamphlet
+in which was the incriminated work together with explanatory notes. We
+appealed to the office of the Attorney-General--who informed us that the
+prohibition was absolute and could not be removed.
+
+Well, so be it! We should have published the book with our notes and
+observation's; but now I ask you, gentlemen, if your first reading has
+left you in doubt, to give it a second reading. You will willingly do
+this, as you desire the truth; and you could not be among those who,
+when two lines of a man's writing is brought to them, are sure to make
+it fit any condition that may be. You do not wish a man to be judged
+upon a few cuttings more or less skilfully made. You would not allow
+that; you would not deprive him of the ordinary means of defense. Well,
+you have the book, and although it may be less easy than you might wish,
+you will make your own divisions, observations, and meanings, because
+you desire the truth, because truth is necessary for the basis of your
+judgment, and truth will come from a serious examination of the book.
+
+However, I cannot stop here. The Public Minister has attacked the book,
+and it is necessary for me to defend it, to complete the quotations he
+has made, and show the nothingness of the accusation against each
+incriminated passage; that will be all my defense.
+
+I shall not attempt, assuredly, to place myself in opposition to the
+exalted, animated, pathetic appreciation with which the Public Attorney
+has surrounded all that he said, by striving for appreciation of the
+same kind; the defense would have no right to make use of such a manner
+of procedure; it must content itself with citing the text, such as it
+is.
+
+And in the first place, I declare that nothing is more false than what
+has just been said about lascivious colour. Lascivious colour! Where can
+you find it? My client has depicted in _Madame Bovary_ what sort of
+woman? My God! it is sad to say, and yet it is true, a young girl,
+born, as they nearly all are, honest; at least the greater number are
+honest, but very fragile, when education, instead of fortifying them,
+softens them and turns them into bad paths. He has depicted a young
+girl. Is she of perverse nature? No, but of an impressionable nature,
+susceptible of exaltation.
+
+The Government Attorney has said: "This young girl has constantly been
+presented in a lascivious light." No! she is represented as born in the
+country, born on a farm, where she is occupied with all her father's
+labor, and where no kind of lasciviousness can find a way to her mind or
+heart. Then she is represented, in the place of following the destiny
+which would be hers naturally, instead of being brought up for the farm
+or in some analogous place in which she ought to live, she is
+represented as under the short-sighted authority of a father who thinks
+he must have his daughter educated in a convent, this girl born on a
+farm, who should marry a farmer, or a man of the country. She is then
+taken to a convent, outside her sphere. As there is nothing that does
+not have weight in the Public Attorney's speech, we must leave nothing
+without a response. Ah! you spoke of her little sins, and in quoting
+from the first number, you said:
+
+"When she went to confession, she invented little sins, in order that
+she might stay there longer, kneeling in the shadow ... beneath the
+whisperings of the priest." You have gravely deceived yourself in regard
+to my client's meaning. He has not committed the fault with which you
+reproach him; the error is wholly on your side, in the first place upon
+the age of the girl. As she entered the convent at thirteen, it is
+evident that she must have been fourteen when she went to
+confession. She was not then a child of ten years, as it has pleased you
+to say, and you were materially deceived on that point. But I am not so
+sure of the unlikelihood of a child of ten years liking to remain at the
+confessional "under the whisperings of the priest."
+
+All that I desire is that you read the lines which precede, and that is
+not easy, I agree. And here appears the inconvenience of not having a
+pamphlet memoir at hand; with such an aid, we should not have to search
+through six volumes!
+
+I have called your attention to this passage in order to recall it to
+_Madame Bovary_ and her true character. Will you permit me to say, what
+seems to me very important, that M. Flaubert has fully comprehended this
+point and put it in bold relief. There is a kind of religion which is
+generally spoken of to young girls, which is the worst of all
+religion. There may be in this regard a difference of opinion. As for
+me, I declare clearly that I know nothing more beautiful, or useful, or
+necessary to sustain, not only women in the ways of life but men
+themselves, who sometimes have the most difficult trials to overcome, I
+know nothing so useful, so necessary, as the religious sentiment, but a
+serious religious sentiment, and permit me to add, severe.
+
+I wish my children to believe in one God, not a God in the abstractness
+of pantheism, but in a Supreme Being with whom they have relationship,
+to whom they are accustomed to pray, and who at once awes and fortifies
+them. This thought, you see, it is your belief as well as mine, is our
+strength in evil days, is our strength against what we call the world;
+the refuge; or better still, the strength of the weak. It is this
+thought which gives women that stability which makes them resigned to a
+thousand little things in life, which makes them carry all their
+suffering to God, and ask of Him grace to fulfill their duty. That
+religion, gentlemen, is the Christian religion, and it is that which
+establishes a relationship between God and man. Christianity, in placing
+a sort of intermediary power between God and ourselves, renders God more
+accessible, and communication with Him easier. That the Mother of Him
+who has made Himself the Saviour should receive the prayers of women,
+cannot affect, so far as I can see, purity, religious sanctity, or
+religious sentiment itself. But here is where the change begins. In
+order to accommodate a religion to all natures, all sorts of petty,
+miserable, paltry things are introduced. The pomp of the ceremonies,
+instead of being a true pomp which lays hold on the soul, often
+degenerates into a commerce in relics, medals, of little saints and
+Virgins. To what, gentlemen, do the minds of children, curious, ardent,
+and tender, lend themselves, especially the minds of young girls? To all
+these enfeebled, attenuated, miserable images of the religious
+spirit. They then take upon themselves little religious duties to put in
+practice, little devotions of tenderness, of love, and in the place of
+having in their soul the sentiment of God, the sentiment of duty, they
+abandon themselves to reveries, to little devices, to little
+devotions. And then comes the poesy, and then comes, it is very
+necessary to say it, a thousand thoughts of charity, of tenderness, of
+mystic love, a thousand forms which deceive young girls and sensualize
+religion. These poor children, naturally credulous and weak, take to all
+this poesy and reverie instead of attaching themselves to something more
+reasonable and severe. Whence it happens that you have very many strong
+devotees among women who are not religious at all. And when the wind
+blows them from the path where they ought to walk, in place of finding
+strength to combat it, they find only a kind of sensuality which
+bewilders them.
+
+Ah! you have accused me of having confounded the religious element with
+sensualism, in the picture of modern society! Accuse rather the society
+in the midst of which we live, but do not accuse the man who cries with
+Bossuet: "Awake and be on thy guard against peril!" And say to the
+fathers of families: Take care! These are not good customs for your
+daughters; there is in all these mixtures of mysticism something which
+sensualises religion; say that, and you will speak the truth. It is for
+this that you accuse Flaubert; it is for this that I exalt his conduct.
+Yes, he has given very good warning of the whole family of dangers
+arising from exaltation among young persons, who take upon themselves
+petty devotions instead of attaching themselves to a strong and severe
+religion which would sustain them in a day of weakness. And now you
+shall see whence comes the invention of the little sins "under the
+whisperings of the priest." Read page 30:
+
+"She had read 'Paul and Virginia,' and she had dreamed of the little
+bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all the
+sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for
+you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand,
+bringing you a bird's nest."
+
+Is this lascivious, gentlemen? Let us continue.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I did not say that passage was lascivious.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+I ask your pardon, but it is precisely in this passage that you found a
+lascivious phrase, and it was only by isolating it from what preceded
+and what followed that you could make it seem lascivious.
+
+"Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with
+their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred
+heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the
+cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a
+whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill."
+
+Do not forget this; when one invents little sins to confess and seeks
+some vow to fulfill, as you will find in the preceding line, evidently
+one has got ideas that are a little false from somewhere. And now I ask
+you if I have to discuss your passage! I continue:
+
+"In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the
+study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the
+Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the
+'Genie du Christianism,' as a recreation. How she listened at first to
+the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies re-echoing
+through the world and eternity! If her childhood had been spent in the
+shop-parlor of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her
+heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us
+only through translation in books. But she knew the country too well;
+she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the plow. Accustomed to calm
+aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of
+excitement. She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the
+green fields only when broken up by ruins. She wished to get some
+personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did
+not contribute to the immediate desire of her heart, being of a
+temperament, more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions not
+landscapes."
+
+You shall see with what delicate precaution the author has introduced a
+saintly old maid, and how, with a purport of teaching religion, there is
+allowed to slip into the convent a new element, through the introduction
+of romance brought in by a stranger. Do not forget this when the subject
+of religious morals is under consideration.
+
+"At the convent there was an old maid who came for a week each month to
+mend the linen. Patronized by the clergy, because she belonged to an
+ancient family of noblemen ruined by the Revolution, she dined in the
+refectory at the table of the good sisters, and after the meal had a bit
+of chat with them before going back to her work. The girls often slipped
+out from the study to go and see her. She knew by heart the love-songs
+of the last century, and sang them in a low voice as she stitched
+away. She told stories, gave them news, went errands in the town, and on
+the sly lent the big girls some novel, that she always carried in the
+pockets of her apron, and of which the good lady herself swallowed long
+chapters in the intervals of her work."
+
+This is nothing but marvellous, speaking from a literary point of view,
+and absolution can but be granted a man who has written these admirable
+passages as a warning against all perils of education of this kind, as
+an indication to young women of the stumbling-blocks in the life in
+which they will be placed. Let us continue:
+
+"They were all love, lovers, sweet-hearts, persecuted ladies fainting in
+lonely pavilions, postilions killed at every stage, horses ridden to
+death on every page, sombre forests, heartaches, vows, sobs, tears and
+kisses, little skiffs by moonlight, nightingales in shady groves,
+'gentlemen' brave as lions, gentle as lambs, virtuous as no one ever
+was, always well dressed, and weeping like fountains. For six months,
+then, Emma, at fifteen years of age, made her hands dirty with books
+from old lending libraries. With Walter Scott, later, she fell in love
+with historical events, dreamed of old chests, guardrooms and
+minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor-house, like
+those long-waisted chatelaines who, in the shade of pointed arches,
+spent their days leaning on the stone, chin in hand, watching a cavalier
+with white plume galloping on his black horse from the distant
+fields. At this time, she had a cult for Mary Stuart and enthusiastic
+veneration for illustrious or unhappy women. Joan of Arc, Heloise, Agnes
+Sorel, the beautiful Ferronniere, and Clemence Isaure stood out to her
+like comets in the dark immensity of heaven, where also were seen, lost
+in shadow, and all unconnected, St. Louis with his oak, the dying
+Bayard, some cruelties of Louis XI., a little of St. Bartholomew's, the
+plume of the Bearnais, and always the remembrance of the plates painted
+in honor of Louis XIV.
+
+"In the music-class, in the ballads she sang, there was nothing but
+little angels with golden wings, madonnas, lagunes, gondoliers;--mild
+compositions that allowed her to catch a glimpse athwart the obscurity
+of style and the weakness of the music of the attractive phantasmagoria
+of sentimental realities."
+
+Now, you have not remembered this, when that poor country girl, having
+returned to the farm and married a village physician, is invited to an
+evening party at the Castle, to which you have sought to call the
+attention of the judges to show that there was something lascivious in a
+waltz she took part in. You have not called to mind this education when
+this poor woman is charmed that an invitation comes to take her from her
+husband's common fireside and lead her to the Castle, where she sees
+fine gentlemen, beautiful ladies, and the old duke, who, they said, had
+had great fortune at Court! The Government Attorney has shown some fine
+emotions _a propos_ of Queen Marie-Antoinette! Assuredly there is not
+one of us who would not share his thought; like him, we have trembled at
+the name of this victim of the Revolution, but it is not with
+Marie-Antoinette that we are concerned here, it is with the Castle
+Vaubyessard.
+
+There was an old duke there who had had, they said, relations with the
+queen, and towards whom all eyes were turned. And when this young woman
+found herself thus transported into the midst of the world, thus
+realizing all the fantastic dreams of her youth, can you wonder at the
+intoxication of it? And you accuse her of being lascivious! Better
+accuse the waltz itself; that dance of our great modern balls where,
+said a late author writing about it, the woman "leans her head upon the
+shoulder of her partner whose limbs embrace her." You find Madame Bovary
+lascivious in Flaubert's description, but there is not a man, and I will
+not except you, who, having taken part in a ball like that and seen that
+sort of waltz, has not had in mind the wish that his wife or his
+daughter refrain from this pleasure which has in it so much of the
+untamed. If, counting upon the chastity which enveloped this young
+woman, we allow her sometimes to give herself up to this pleasure which
+the world sanctions, it is necessary to count very much upon that
+envelope of chastity and, however much one may count upon it, it is not
+unheard of to express the impressions which M. Flaubert has expressed in
+the name of morals and chastity.
+
+Here she is at the Castle Vaubyessard, observed by the old duke, noticed
+favorably by all, and you cry out: What details! What does it mean?
+Details are everywhere, although we cite but a single passage.
+
+"Madame Bovary noticed that many ladies had not put their gloves in
+their glasses.
+
+"But at the upper end of the table, alone among all those women, bent
+over his full plate, with his napkin tied round his neck like a child,
+an old man sat eating, letting drops of gravy drip from his mouth. His
+eyes were bloodshot, and he wore a little queue tied with a black
+ribbon. He was the Marquis's father-in-law, the old Duke de Laverdiere,
+once on a time favorite of the Count d'Artois, in the days of the
+Vaudreuil hunting-parties at the Marquis de Conflans', and had been, it
+was said, the lover of Queen Mari-Antoinette between Monsieur de Coigny
+and Monsieur de Lauzun."
+
+Defend the queen, defend her especially before the scaffold, say that
+because of her title she had the right of respect, but suppress your
+accusations when one contents himself with saying that he had been, it
+was said, the lover of the queen. Can that be so serious that you
+reproach us with having insulted the memory of that unfortunate woman?
+
+"He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements;
+he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family. A servant
+behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the dishes that he
+pointed to, stammering, and constantly Emma's eyes turned involuntarily
+to this old man with hanging lips, as to something extraordinary. He had
+lived at court and slept in the bed of queens!
+
+"Iced champagne was poured out. Emma shivered all over as she felt it
+cold in her mouth. She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted
+pine-apples."
+
+You see that these descriptions are charming, incontestably, and that it
+is not difficult to take a line here and there for the purpose of
+creating a kind of colour, against which my conscience protests. It is
+not a lascivious colour, it is only lifelike; it is the literary element
+and at the same time the moral element.
+
+Here we have a young girl, whose education you are acquainted with,
+become a woman. The Government Attorney has asked: Did she even try to
+love her husband? He has not read the book; if he had read it, he would
+not have made the objection.
+
+We have, gentlemen, this poor woman dreaming at first. On page 34 you
+will find her dreams. And there is something more here, something of
+which the Government Attorney did not speak, and which I must tell you,
+and these are her impressions when her mother died; you will see if they
+are lascivious soon enough! Have the goodness to turn to page 33 and
+follow me:
+
+"When her mother died she cried much the first few days. She had a
+funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter
+sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be
+buried some day in the same grave. The good man thought she must be ill,
+and came to see her. Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a
+first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre
+hearts. She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened
+to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of
+the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the
+Eternal discoursing down the valleys. She wearied of it, would not
+confess it, continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel
+herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her
+brow."
+
+I wish to make answer to the Government Attorney's reproach that she
+made no effort to love her husband.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I did not reproach her for that, I said that she did not succeed in
+loving him.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+If I have been mistaken, if you made no reproach, that is the best
+response that could be given. I believed that I understood you to make
+one; let us see how I may be deceived. Moreover, here is what I read at
+the end of page 36:
+
+"And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she desired to
+make herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited
+all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him
+many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after this as
+before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.
+
+"When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without
+getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not
+experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in
+conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that
+Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became
+regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among
+other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony
+of dinner."
+
+On page 37 we find a group of similar things. Now, here is where the
+peril begins. You know how she has been brought up; and I beg you not to
+forget this for an instant.
+
+There is not a man who, having read this, would not say that M. Flaubert
+is not only a great artist but a man of heart, for having in the last
+six pages turned all the horror and scorn upon the woman and all the
+interest towards the husband. He is a great artist, as has been said,
+because he has left the husband as he was, he has not transformed him,
+and to the end he is the same good man, commonplace, mediocre, full of
+the duties of his profession, loving his wife well, but destitute of
+education or elevation of thought. He is the same at the death-bed of
+his wife. And nevertheless, there is not an individual to whom the
+memory returns with more interest.
+
+Why? Because he has kept to the end his simplicity and uprightness of
+heart; because to the end he has fulfilled his duty while his wife was
+led astray. His death is as beautiful and as touching as the death of
+his wife is hideous. On the dead body of the woman the author has shown
+the spots made by the vomiting of poison; they soil the white shroud in
+which she goes to her burial, and he has made her, as he desired, an
+object of disgust; but there is a man there who is sublime--the husband
+standing beside the grave. There is a man who is grand, sublime, whose
+death is admirable--the husband, who, finding himself broken-hearted by
+the death of his wife, sees afterwards all the illusions of the heart
+that remained to him embraced in the thought of his wife in the tomb.
+Keep that, I beg you, in your remembrance. The author has gone beyond
+what was necessary--as Lamartine has said--in rendering the death of the
+woman hideous and her punishment most terrible. The author has
+concentrated all the interest upon the man who did not deviate from the
+line of duty, who preserved his mediocre character, to be sure (for the
+author could not change his character) but who preserved also all his
+generosity of heart, while upon the wife who deceived him, ruined him,
+gave him into the hands of usurers, put into circulation forged notes
+and finally arrived at suicide, was heaped all the accumulated
+horrors. We shall see that it is natural--the death of this woman who,
+if she had not come to her end by poison, would have been broken by the
+excess of misfortune with which she was surrounded. The author has seen
+this. His book would not be read if he had done otherwise, if, in order
+to show where an education as perilous as that of Madame Bovary can
+lead, he had not been prodigal with the fascinating images and the
+powerful tableaux for which he is reproached.
+
+M. Flaubert constantly sets forth the superiority of the husband over
+the wife, and what superiority, if you please? that of simple duty
+fulfilled, while the wife was straying from hers. Here she is, fixed by
+the bent of this bad education; here she is, gone out after the scene of
+the ball, with the young boy, Leon, as inexperienced as herself. She
+coquets with him but does not dare to go further; nothing happens. Then
+comes Rodolphe who takes the woman to himself. After looking at her for
+a moment, he said: This woman is all right. She will be easy prey,
+because she is light-minded and inexperienced. As to the fall, will you
+re-read pages 42, 43 and 44. I have only a word to say about this scene
+and that is: there are no details, no descriptions, no image that can
+trouble the senses; a single word indicates the fall: "She abandoned
+herself." I pray you to have the goodness to read again the details of
+the fall of Clarissa Harlowe, which I have not heard decried as a bad
+book. M. Flaubert has substituted Rodolphe for Lovelace, and Emma for
+Clarissa. If you will compare the two authors and the two books you will
+appreciate the situation.
+
+But I will return here to the indignation of the Government Attorney.
+He is shocked that remorse does not immediately follow the fall, and
+that in the place of expressing bitterness, she said with satisfaction:
+"I have a lover!" But the author would not be true, if he made the
+enchanting draught seem bitter while it still touched the lips. He who
+wrote as the Attorney understands might be moral, but he would be saying
+what is not in nature. No, it is not at the first moment of a fault
+that the sentiment of fault is awakened; otherwise, it would not be
+committed. No, it is not at the moment when she is under a delusion that
+intoxicates her that a woman can be averted from this intoxication even
+by the immensity of the fault she has committed. She feels only the
+intoxication; she goes back to her home happy, sparkling, and singing in
+her heart: "I have a lover!" But can this last long? You have read pages
+424 and 425. On both pages, and if you please, to page 428, the
+sentiment of disgust with her lover is not yet manifest; but she is
+already under the impression of fear and uneasiness. She thinks, weighs
+the question, and believes that she does not wish to abandon Rodolphe:
+
+"Something stronger than herself forced her to him; so much so, that one
+day, seeing her come unexpectedly he frowned as one put out.
+
+"'What is the matter with you?' she said, 'Are you ill? Tell me!'
+
+"At last he declared with a serious air that her visits were becoming
+imprudent--that she was compromising herself.
+
+"Gradually Rodolphe's fears took possession of her. At first, love had
+intoxicated her, and she had thought of nothing beyond. But now that he
+was indispensable to her life, she feared to lose anything of this, or
+even that it should be disturbed. When she came back from his house, she
+looked all about her, anxiously watching every form that passed in the
+horizon, and every village window from which she could be seen. She
+listened for steps, cries, the noise of the ploughs, and she stopped
+short, white, and trembling more than the aspen leaves swaying
+overhead."
+
+You see unmistakably that she was not deceived; she felt clearly that
+there was something about it of which she had not dreamed. Let us take
+pages 433 and 434 and you will be still further convinced:
+
+"When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room,
+between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen
+candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down
+there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the
+whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not
+refrain from making jokes about Charles which rather embarrassed Emma.
+She would have liked to see him more serious and even on occasions more
+dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of
+approaching steps in the alley.
+
+"'Some one is coming!' she said
+
+"He blew out the light.
+
+"'Have you your pistols?'
+
+"'Why?'
+
+"'Why, to defend yourself,' replied Emma.
+
+"'From your husband? Oh, poor devil!'"
+
+And Rodolphe finished his phrase with a gesture which signified: I could
+crush him with a fillip.
+
+She was amazed at his bravery, although she felt that there was a sort
+of indelicacy and naive grossness about it that was scandalizing.
+
+"Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had
+spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for
+he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called
+devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had treated him to a
+lecture, which he did not think in the best taste.
+
+"Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on
+exchanging miniatures; they had cut handfuls of hair, and now she was
+asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She
+often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then
+she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his!
+
+"Finally she wearied him."
+
+Then, on page 453:
+
+"He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry,
+nor passionate caresses that made her mad; so that their great love,
+which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of
+a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it. She
+would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe
+concealed his indifference less and less.
+
+"She did not know whether she regretted yielding to him, or whether, she
+did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation of
+feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their
+voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual
+seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him."
+
+And you are afraid, Mr. Government Attorney, that young women might read
+this! I am less frightened, less timid than you. On my own personal
+account, I can admirably understand a father of a family saying to his
+daughter: Young lady, if your heart, your conscience, if religious
+sentiment and the voice of duty are not sufficient to make you walk in
+the right path, look, my child, look well at the weariness, the
+suffering, the grief and desolation attending the woman who seeks
+happiness outside her home! This language would not wound you in the
+mouth of a father, would it? M. Flaubert has said nothing but this; he
+has made a painting most true, and most powerful, of what the woman who
+dreams of finding happiness outside her house immediately discovers.
+
+But let us go on and we shall come to all the adventures of the
+disillusion. You show me the caresses of Leon on page 60. Alas! she
+will soon pay the ransom of adultery, and that ransom you will find
+terrible, in some pages farther on in the book you condemn. She sought
+happiness in adultery, poor unfortunate one! And she found, besides the
+disgust and fatigue that the monotony of marriage can bring to the woman
+who does not walk in the path of duty, the disillusion and the scorn of
+the man to whom she has given herself. Was any of this scorn lacking in
+the book? Oh, no! and you cannot deny it, for the book is under your
+eyes. Rodolphe, who has shown himself so vile, gives to her a last proof
+of egoism and cowardice. She has said to him: "Take me! Carry me away!
+I am stifling; I can no longer breathe in my husband's house, to which I
+have brought shame and misfortune." He hesitates; she insists. Finally,
+he promises, and the next day she receives a terrible letter under which
+she falls crushed and annihilated. She is taken ill and is dying. The
+number you are consulting shows you all the convulsions of a soul at war
+with itself, which perhaps could be led back to duty by an excess of
+suffering, but unfortunately she meets a boy with whom she had played
+when she was inexperienced. This is the movement of the romance, and
+then comes the expiation.
+
+But the Government Attorney stops me and asks: Although it may be true
+that the purpose of the book is good from one end to the other, could
+you allow such obscene details as those that have been brought forward?
+
+Very certainly I could not allow such details, but where have I allowed
+them? Where are they? I now arrive at the passages most condemned. I
+will say no more of the adventure in the cab. This Court has heard
+enough with regard to that; I come to the passages that you have pointed
+out as contrary to public morals and which form a certain number of
+pages in the December number. And, in order to pull away all the
+scaffolding of your accusation, there is only one thing to be done: to
+restore what precedes and what follows your quotations, in a word, to
+substitute the text complete as opposed to your cutting.
+
+At the bottom of page 72, Leon, after making an agreement with Homais,
+the chemist, goes to the Hotel de Boulogne; the chemist goes there to
+find him.
+
+"Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She
+detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an
+insult.
+
+"Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had no doubt
+calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates
+us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt
+sticks to our fingers."
+
+Great heavens! And it is for such lines as I have been reading to you
+that we are dragged before you. Listen now:
+
+"They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their
+love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers,
+verses, the moon and the stars, naive resources of a waning passion
+striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly
+promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then she
+confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This
+disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him
+more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off
+the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding
+snake. She went on tip-toe, barefooted, to see once more that the door
+was closed; then, pale, serious, and without speaking, with one movement
+she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder." You have
+stopped here, Mr. Attorney; permit me to continue:
+
+"Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those
+quivering lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms,
+something vague and dreary that seemed to Leon to glide between them
+subtly as if to separate them."
+
+You call this lascivious colour, you say that this gives a taste for
+adultery, you say that these pages excite and arouse the senses,--that
+they are lascivious pages! But death is in these pages! You did not
+think of that, Mr. Attorney, and were simply frightened to find such
+words as _corset, clothing which falls off_, etc.; and you attach
+yourself to these three or four words, such as corset and falling
+clothing. Do you wish me to show you that corsets can appear in a
+classic book, a very classic book? I shall give myself the pleasure of
+so doing, presently.
+
+"She undressed herself ..." [ah! Mr. Government Attorney, how badly you
+have understood this passage!] "she undressed hastily [poor thing],
+tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips
+like a gliding snake; then pale, serious, and without speaking, with one
+movement she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder.... There
+was upon that brow covered with cold drops ... in the strain of those
+arms something vague and dreary...."
+
+We must ask here where the lascivious colour is? and where is the severe
+colour? and ask if the senses of the young girl into whose hands this
+book might fall, could be aroused, excited--as she might by reading a
+classic of classics, which I shall cite presently, and which has been
+reprinted a thousand times without any prosecution, public or royal,
+following it. Is there anything analogous in what I am going to read
+you? Is there not, on the contrary, a horror of vice that this
+"something dreary glides in between them to separate them?" Let us
+continue, I pray:
+
+"He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must
+have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of
+pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides,
+he rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked by her
+personality. He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove
+not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he
+turned coward, like drunkards at the sight of strong drinks."
+
+What is lascivious there?
+
+And then, take the last paragraph:
+
+"One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along
+the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a
+form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she
+longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure
+to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in
+the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed
+before her eyes. And Leon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the
+others.
+
+"'Yet I love him,' she said to herself."
+
+Do not forget this, Mr. Attorney, when you judge the thought of the
+author, when you wish to find absolutely lascivious colour where I can
+only find an excellent book.
+
+"She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency
+of life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she
+leant?"
+
+Is that lascivious?
+
+"But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant
+nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in
+angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac
+epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how
+impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it;
+everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a
+curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips
+only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.
+
+"A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard
+from the convent-clock. Four o'clock! And it seemed to her that she had
+been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of passions may be
+contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space."
+
+It is not necessary to look at the end of the book to find what is in it
+from one end to the other. I have read the incriminated passage without
+adding a word, to defend a work which defends itself through itself. Let
+us continue leading from this same incriminated passage, looking at it
+from a moral point of view:
+
+"Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all day
+long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish
+pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop. In order
+not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of
+manoeuvering, she at least succeeded in banishing him to the second
+floor, while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures
+of orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried
+out, and Charles hurried to her.
+
+"'Oh, go away!' she would say.
+
+"Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame
+to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw
+open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her
+masses of hair, too heavy, and gazing upon the stars, longed for some
+princely love. She thought of him, of Leon. She would then have given
+anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her.
+
+"Those were her gala days. She wished them to be sumptuous, and when he
+alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally,
+which happened almost every time. He tried to make her understand that
+they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel,
+but she always found some objection."
+
+You see all this is very simple when one reads the whole; but in
+cuttings like those of the Government Attorney, the smallest word
+becomes a mountain.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I did not quote any of those phrases last mentioned; but since you wish
+to quote what I have not incriminated, it would be well not to pass over
+the foot of the page adjoining page 50.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+I pass over nothing, but I insist upon citing the incriminated passages
+in the quotations. We are quoting from pages 77 and 78.
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I refer to the quotations made to the audience, and thought you imputed
+me with having cited the lines you are about to read.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+Mr. Attorney, I have quoted all the passages by whose aid you have
+attempted to constitute a misdemeanor--which accusation is now
+shattered. You developed before the audience what seemed to you
+convincing, and have had a fair opportunity. Happily we had the book and
+the defense knew the book; if he had not known it, his position, allow
+me to tell you, would have been very awkward. I am called upon to
+explain such and such passages to myself and to add others for the
+benefit of the audience. If I had not possessed the book, as I do, the
+defense had been difficult. Now, I can show you, through a faithful
+analysis of the romance, that far from being considered a lascivious
+work, it should be considered, on the contrary, eminently moral. After
+doing this, I took the passages that have been the motive for police
+correction, and after I followed the cuttings with what preceded and
+what succeeded, the accusation became so weak that you are in revolt the
+moment I have finished reading them! These same passages that you
+stamped as recriminating, I have used an equal right to quote myself,
+for the purpose of showing you the folly of the accusation.
+
+I continue my quotation where I stopped at the bottom of page 78.
+
+"He was bored now when Emma suddenly began to sob on his breast, and his
+heart, like the people who can only stand a certain amount of music,
+dozed to the sound of a love whose delicacies he no longer noted.
+
+"They knew one another too well for any of those surprises of
+possession, that increase its joys a hundredfold. She was as sick of
+him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in adultery all the
+platitudes of marriage."
+
+_Platitudes of marriage_! He who did the cutting here has said: Now,
+here is a man who says that in marriage there are only platitudes! It is
+an attack on marriage, it is an outrage to morals! You will agree,
+Mr. Attorney, that with cuttings artistically made, one can go far in
+the way of incriminating. What is it that the author called the
+platitudes of marriage? That monotony which Emma had dreaded, which she
+had wished to escape from but had found continually in adultery, which
+was precisely the disillusion. You now see clearly that when, in the
+place of cutting off the members of certain phrases and cutting out some
+words, we read what precedes and what follows, nothing remains for
+incrimination; and you can well comprehend that my client, who knew what
+he wished to say, must be a little in revolt at seeing it thus
+travestied. Let us continue:
+
+"She was as sick of him as he was weary of her. Emma found again in
+adultery all the platitudes of marriage.
+
+"But how to get rid of him? Then, though she might feel humiliated at
+the baseness of such enjoyment, she clung to it from habit or from
+corruption, and each day she hungered after them the more, exhausting
+all felicity in wishing for too much of it. She accused Leon of her
+baffled hopes, as if he had betrayed her; and she even longed for some
+catastrophe that would bring about their separation, since she had not
+the courage to make up her mind to it herself.
+
+"She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the
+notion that a woman must write to her lover.
+
+"But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned
+out of her most ardent memories. [This is certainly not incriminating.]
+
+"Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love
+wearied her more than great debauchery.
+
+"She now felt constant ache all over her. Often she even received a
+summons, stamped paper that she barely looked at. She would have liked
+not to be alive, or to be always asleep."
+
+I call that an excitation of virtue through a horror of vice, as the
+author himself calls it, and which the reader, no longer perplexed,
+cannot fail to see, unless influenced by ill-will.
+
+And now, something more to make you perceive what kind of man you are
+about to judge. And in order to show you, not what kind of justification
+I may expect, but whether M. Flaubert has made use of lascivious colour,
+and whence he got his inspiration, let me put upon your desk this book
+used by him, in whose passages he found himself inspired to paint this
+concupiscence, the entanglements of this woman who sought happiness in
+illicit pleasures, but could not find it there, who sought again and
+again and never found it. Whence has Flaubert derived his inspiration,
+gentlemen? It was from this book; listen:
+
+ILLUSION OF THE SENSES.
+
+"Whoever, then, attaches himself to the senses, must necessarily wander
+from object to object and deceive himself, so to speak, by a change of
+place, as concupiscence,--that is to say, love of pleasure,--is always
+changing, because its ardour languishes and dies in continuity, and it
+is only change that makes it revive. Again, what is that other
+characteristic of a life of the senses, that alternate movement of
+appetite and disgust, of disgust and appetite, the soul floating ever
+uncertain between ardour which abates and ardour which is renewed?
+_Inconstantia concupiscentia_. That is what a life of the senses
+is. However, in this perpetual movement, one must not allow himself to
+be deceived by the image of wandering liberty."
+
+This is what a life of the senses is. Who has said that? Who has
+written these words which you are about to hear upon these excitements
+and excessive ardor? What is the book which M. Flaubert perused day and
+night, and which has inspired the passages that the Government Attorney
+condemns? It is by Bossuet! What I shall read to you is a fragment of
+Bossuet's discourse upon _Illicit Pleasures_. I shall bring you to see
+that all these incriminated passages are--not plagiarized; the man who
+appropriates an idea is not a plagiarist--but imitations of Bossuet. Do
+you wish for another example? Here it is:
+
+UPON SIN.
+
+"And do not ask me, Christians, in what way this great change of
+pleasure into punishment will come about. The thing is proved by the
+Scriptures. It is Truth who has said it, it is the All-Powerful who has
+made it so. And sometimes, if you will look at the nature of the
+passions to which you abandon your heart, you will easily comprehend
+that they may become an intolerable punishment. They all have in
+themselves cruel pain, disgust and bitterness. They all have an infinity
+which is angered by not being able to be satisfied. There are transports
+of rage mingled in all of them which degenerates into a kind of fury not
+less painful than unreasonable. Love, if I may be permitted so to name
+it in this guise, has its uncertainties, its violent agitations, its
+irresolute resolutions and an abyss of jealousies."
+
+And further:
+
+"Ah! What, then, is easier than making of our passions an insupportable
+pain or sin, when, if we cut out, as is very just, the little sweetness
+through which they lead us, there is left of them only the cruel
+disquiet and bitterness with which they abound? Our sins are against us,
+our sins are upon us, our sins are in the midst of us; like an arrow
+piercing our body, an insupportable weight upon our head, a poison
+devouring our entrails."
+
+Is not all that you have just listened to designed to show you the
+bitterness of passion? I leave you this book, lined and thumb-marked by
+the studious man who has found his thought there. And that man, who has
+been inspired from a source of this kind, who has written of adultery in
+the terms you have listened to, is prosecuted for outrage of public and
+religious morals!
+
+A few lines still upon the _woman sinner_, and you will see how
+M. Flaubert, having decided to paint this ardour, understood taking
+inspiration from this model:
+
+"But, punished for our error, without being deceived by it, we seek in
+change the remedy for our scorn; we wander from object to object, and
+if, finally there is some one who holds us, it is not because we are
+content with our choice, but because we are bound by our inconstancy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"All appeared to her empty, false, disgusting in these creatures: far
+from finding there those first charms which her heart had had so much
+difficulty in defending, she saw in them now only frivolity, danger and
+vanity."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"I will not speak of an entanglement of passion; what fears there are
+that the mystery of it cannot dispel! what measures to keep on the side
+of well-being and pride! what eyes to shun! what watchers to deceive!
+what returns to fear from those whom one chooses for their aids and
+confidants in their passion! what indignities to suffer from him,
+perhaps, for whom one has sacrificed honour and liberty, and of whom one
+dare not complain! To all this, add those cruel moments when passion,
+less lively, leaves us to choose between falling back upon ourselves and
+feeling all the humility of our position, and those moments where the
+heart, born for more solid pleasures, leaves us with our own idols and
+finds its punishment in its own disgust and inconstancy. Profane world!
+if there is in you that felicity that is so much vaunted, favor your
+adorers with it nor punish them for the faith they have added so lightly
+to your promises."
+
+Let me say to you here: when a man in the silence of the night,
+meditates upon the causes of enticement for woman, when he finds them in
+her education and, putting aside personal observation, for the sake of
+expressing his thoughts, matures them at the sources I have indicated,
+not allowing himself to use his pen except from inspiration of Bossuet
+and Massillon, permit me to ask you if there is a word to express my
+surprise, my grief, on seeing this man dragged into Court--on account of
+some passages in his book, and precisely for the truest and most
+elevated ideas that he was able to bring together! And I pray you not to
+forget this in relation to the charge of outrage against religious
+morals! And then, if you will permit me, I will put in opposition to all
+this, under your very eyes, what I myself call attacking the moral, that
+is to say, satisfaction of the senses without bitterness, without those
+large drops of cold sweat which fall from the brow of those who give
+themselves over to it; and I will not quote to you from licentious books
+in which the authors have sought to arouse the senses; I will quote from
+only one book--which is given as a prize in colleges, but whose author's
+name I ask leave to withhold until after I have read you a passage from
+it. Here is the passage: I will ask you to pass the volume. It is a copy
+that was given to a college student as a prize. I prefer you to take
+this copy rather than M. Flaubert's:
+
+"The next day I was received into her apartment. There I felt all that
+voluptuousness carries with it. The room was filled with the most
+agreeable perfumes. She lay upon a bed which was enclosed in garlands
+of flowers. She appeared to be lying there languishingly. She extended
+her hand to me and made me sit beside her. In all, even in the veil
+which covered her face, there was a charm. I could see the form of her
+beautiful body. A simple cloth which moved as she moved allowed me at
+one time to see, and at another to lose sight of, her ravishing beauty."
+
+A simple cloth when it was extended over a dead body appeared to you a
+lascivious image; here it is extended over a living woman:
+
+"She noticed that my eyes were occupied, and when she saw them inflamed,
+the cloth seemed to open itself away from her; I saw all the treasures
+of a divine beauty. At this moment she took my hand; my eyes were
+wandering. There is only my dear Ardasire, I cry out, who can be as
+beautiful; but I swear to the gods that my fidelity.... She threw
+herself on my neck and drew me into her arms. Suddenly the room became
+darkened; her veil opened and she gave me a kiss. I was beside myself; a
+flame started suddenly through my veins and aroused all my senses. The
+idea of Ardasire was far from me. She remained to me only as a
+memory ... there appeared to me but one thought.... I was going.... I
+was going to prefer this one even to her. Already my hands had wandered
+to her breasts; they ran rapidly everywhere; love showed itself only in
+its fury; it hurried on to victory; a moment more and Ardasire could not
+defend herself."
+
+Who, now, has written that? It is not the author of _The New Heloise_,
+it is the President, Montesquieu! Here is no bitterness, no disgust, but
+all is sacrificed to literary beauty, and they give it as a prize to
+pupils in rhetoric, without doubt to serve as a model in the
+amplifications and descriptions that they are required to
+write. Montesquieu described in his Persian Letters a scene which could
+not even be read. It concerns a woman placed between two men who dispute
+over her. This woman, placed between two men, has dreams--which appear
+to the author very agreeable.
+
+Shall we sum up, Mr. Attorney? Or is it necessary for me to quote you
+Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his _Confessions_, and some others? No, I will
+only say to the judges that if, on account of his description of the
+carriage in _The Double Misunderstanding_, M. Merimee had been
+prosecuted, he would have been acquitted immediately. One sees in his
+book only a work of art of great literary beauty. One would no more
+condemn it than he would condemn paintings or statuary, which is not
+content with representing all the beauties of the body, but wishes to
+add ardour and passion. I will follow it no farther; I ask you to
+recognise the fact that M. Flaubert has not weighted his images and has
+done only one thing: he has touched with a firm hand the scene of
+degradation. At each line of his book he has brought out the
+disillusion, and instead of ending it with something charming, he has
+undertaken to show us that this woman, after meeting scorn, abandonment,
+and ruin of her house, comes to a frightful death. In a word, I can only
+repeat what I said at the beginning of this plea, that M. Flaubert is
+the author of a good book, a book which aims at the excitation of virtue
+by arousing a horror of vice.
+
+I will now look into his outrage against religion. An outrage against
+religion committed by M. Flaubert! And in what respect, if you please?
+The Government Attorney has thought he found in him a sceptic. I can
+assure the Government Attorney that he is deceived. I am not here to
+make a profession of faith, I am here only to defend a book, and for
+that reason I shall limit myself to a simple word. Now as to the book, I
+defy the Government Attorney to find in it anything that resembles an
+outrage against religion. You have seen how religion was introduced in
+Emma's education, and how this religion, false in a thousand ways, could
+not hold Emma from the bent that carried her astray. Would you know in
+what kind of language M. Flaubert speaks of religion? Listen to some
+lines that I take from the first number, pages 231, 232 and 233:
+
+"One evening when the window was open, and she, sitting by it, had been
+watching Lestiboudois, the beadle, trimming the box, she suddenly heard
+the Angelus ringing.
+
+"It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a
+warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like
+women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fetes. Through the bars
+of the arbour and away beyond, the river could be seen in the fields,
+meandering through the grass in wandering curves. The evening vapors
+rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet
+tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart
+their branches. In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps
+nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the
+air, kept up its peaceful lamentation.
+
+"With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost
+themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days. She remembered
+the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the
+altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns. She would have liked
+to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here
+and there by the stiff black hoods of the good sisters bending over
+their prie-Dieu."
+
+This is the language in which his religious sentiment is expressed. And
+yet we have understood from the Government Attorney that scepticism
+reigned in M. Flaubert's book from one end to the other. Where, I pray
+you, have you found this scepticism?
+
+
+
+THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:
+
+I have not said that there was any of it in its inner meaning.
+
+
+
+M. SENARD:
+
+If not in its inner meaning, where then, is it? In your cuttings,
+evidently. But here is the work entire, as the Court will judge it, and
+it can see that the religious sentiment is so forcefully imprinted there
+that the accusation of scepticism is pure slander. And now, the
+Government Attorney will permit me to say to him that it was not for the
+purpose of accusing the author of scepticism that all this trouble has
+been made. Let us proceed:
+
+"At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the
+Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved;
+she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird
+whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards
+the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was
+absorbed and all existence lost in it."
+
+This, gentlemen, is the first appeal of religion to hold Emma from the
+trend of her passions. She has fallen, poor woman, and then been
+repelled by the foot of the man to whom she abandoned herself. She is
+nearly dead, but raises herself and becomes reanimated; and you shall
+see now what is written in the 15th of November number, 1856, page 548:
+
+"One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself
+dying, and had asked for the communion; and while they were making the
+preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the
+night-table, covered with sirups, into an altar, and while Felicite was
+strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over
+her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all
+feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was
+beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would
+be annihilated in that love like a burning insense that melts into
+vapour. [You see that this is the language in which M. Flaubert speaks
+of religious things]. The bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water,
+the priest drew from the holy pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting
+with a celestial joy that she put out her lips to accept the body of the
+Saviour presented to her."
+
+I ask the pardon of the Government Attorney, I ask the Court's pardon
+for interrupting this passage; but I must needs say that it is the
+author who is speaking, and bring to your notice in what terms he
+expresses the mystery of the communion. Before going on with the
+reading, I must needs impress the literary value of this picture upon
+the Court and insist that they seize upon these expressions which are
+the author's own:
+
+"The curtains of the alcove floated gently round her like clouds, and
+the rays of the two tapers burning on the night-table seemed to shine
+like dazzling halos. Then she let her head fall back, fancying she heard
+in space the music of seraphic harps, and perceived in an azure sky, on
+a golden throne in the midst of saints holding green palms, God the
+Father, resplendent with majesty, who with a sign sent to earth angels
+with wings of fire to carry her away in their arms."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"This splendid vision dwelt in her memory as the most beautiful thing
+that it was possible to dream, so that now she strove to recall her
+sensation, that still lasted, however, but in a less exclusive fashion
+and with a deeper sweetness. Her soul, tortured by pride, at length
+found rest in Christian humility, and, tasting the joy of weakness, she
+saw within herself the destruction of her will, that must have left a
+wide entrance for the inroads of heavenly grace. There existed, then, in
+the place of happiness, still greater joys,--another love beyond all
+loves, without pause and without end, one that would grow eternally! She
+saw amid the illusions of her hope a state of purity floating above the
+earth mingling with heaven, to which she aspired. She wanted to become a
+saint. She bought chaplets and wore amulets; she wished to have in her
+room, by the side of her bed, a reliquary set in emeralds that she might
+kiss it every evening."
+
+Here are some of his religious sentiments! And if you wish to pause a
+moment to consider the author's thought, I will ask you to turn the page
+and read the first three lines of the second paragraph:
+
+"She grew provoked at the doctrines of religion; the arrogance of the
+polemic writings displeased her by their inveteracy in attacking people
+she did not know; and the secular stories, relieved with religion,
+seemed to her written in such ignorance of the world, that they
+insensibly estranged her from the truths for whose proof she was
+looking."
+
+This is the language of M. Flaubert. Now, if you please, we come to
+another scene, that of the extreme unction. Oh! Mr. Government
+Attorney, how you have deceived yourself when, stopping at the first
+words, you accuse my client of mingling the sacred with the profane;
+when he has been content to translate the beautiful formulas of extreme
+unction, at the moment when the priest touches the organs of sense, at
+the moment where, according to the ritual, he says: _Per istam
+unctionem, et suam piissimam misericordiam, indulgeat tibi Dominus
+quid-quid deliquisti_!
+
+You said it was not necessary to touch upon holy things. With what right
+do you misinterpret these holy words:
+
+"May God, in His holy pity, pardon you for all the sins that you have
+committed through sight, taste, hearing, etc.?"
+
+Wait, I am going to read the condemned passage, and that will be all my
+vengeance. I dare say vengeance, because the author has need of being
+avenged! Yes, it is necessary for M. Flaubert to go out of here not
+only acquitted, but avenged! You will see from what kind of reading he
+has been nourished. The condemned passage is on page 271 of the
+December 15th number, and runs thus:
+
+"Pale as a statue, and with eyes red as fire, Charles, not weeping,
+stood opposite her at the foot of the bed, while the priest bending one
+knee, was muttering words in a low voice."
+
+This whole picture is magnificent, and the wording of it
+irresistible. But be quiet, and I will not prolong it beyond
+measure. Now here is the condemnation!
+
+"She turned her face slowly, and seemed filled with joy on seeing
+suddenly the violet stole, no doubt finding again, in the midst of a
+temporary lull in her pain, the lost voluptuousness of her first
+mystical transports, with the visions of eternal beatitude that were
+beginning.
+
+"The priest rose to take the crucifix: then she stretched forward her
+neck as one who is athirst, and gluing her lips to the body of the
+Man-God, she pressed upon it with all her expiring strength the fullest
+kiss of love that she had ever given."
+
+The extreme unction has not yet begun; but we are reproached for this
+kiss. I am not going to search in the history of Saint Theresa whom you
+perhaps know, but the memory of whom is too far away, I am not going to
+seek in Fenelon for the mysticism of Madame Guyon, nor in more modern
+mysticisms, in which I find much reason. I only wish to ask of those
+schools which you designate as belonging to sensual Christianity, the
+explanation of this kiss; it is Bossuet, Bossuet himself, of whom I
+would ask it:
+
+"Obey, and strive finally to enter into the disposition of Jesus in
+communing, which is the disposition of harmony, joy and love; the whole
+gospel proclaims it. Jesus wishes that we may be with Him; He wishes to
+rejoice and He wishes us to rejoice with Him: He has given Himself...."
+etc.
+
+I continue the reading of the condemned passage:
+
+"Then he recited the _Misereatur_ and the _Indulgentiam_, dipped his
+right thumb in the oil and began to give extreme unction. First upon the
+eyes, that had so coveted all worldly pomp; then upon the nostrils,
+greedy for warm breezes and amorous perfumes; then upon the mouth, that
+had uttered lies, that curled with pride and cried out in lewdness; then
+upon the hands, that had delighted in sensual touches, and finally upon
+the soles of feet, so swift of yore when she was running to satisfy her
+desires, and that now would walk no more.
+
+"The cure wiped his fingers, threw the bit of cotton dipped in oil into
+the fire, and came and sat down by the dying woman, to tell her that she
+must now blend her sufferings with those of Jesus Christ, and abandon
+herself to the Divine mercy.
+
+"Finishing his exhortations, he tried to place in her hand a blessed
+candle, symbol of the celestial glory with which she was soon to be
+surrounded. Emma, too weak, could not close her fingers, and the taper,
+but for Monsieur Bournisien, would have fallen to the ground.
+
+"However, she was not quite so pale, and her face had an expression of
+serenity as if the sacrament had cured her.
+
+"The priest did not fail to point this out; he even explained to Bovary
+that the Lord sometimes prolonged the life of persons when he thought it
+meet for their salvation; and Charles remembered the day when, so near
+death, she had received the communion. Perhaps there was no need to
+despair, he thought."
+
+Now, when a woman dies and the priest goes to give her extreme unction,
+if one portrays that mystic scene and translates for us the sacramental
+words with scrupulous fidelity, they say that he has touched upon holy
+things; that he has put a rash hand on sacred matters; because to the
+_deliquisti per oculos, per os, per aurem, per manus et per pedes_ he
+has added the sin which each of the organs has committed. But we are not
+the first to walk in this path. M. Sainte-Beuve, in a book which you
+know, has also a scene of extreme unction, and here is how he expresses
+it:
+
+"Oh! yes, upon the eyes first, as the most noble and most alive of the
+senses; upon those eyes for what they have seen and regarded too
+tenderly, or that which was too perfidious in others' eyes, or too
+mortal; for what they have read and re-read of endearment that was too
+dear; for what they have poured out in vain tears over fragile goods and
+faithless creatures; for the sleep which they have too often forgotten,
+thinking only of the evening!
+
+"Upon the ears also for what they have heard and allowed themselves to
+hear that was too sweet, too flattering and intoxicating; for that sound
+which the ear steals from deceptive words; for what it drinks in from
+stolen honey!
+
+"Then the smell, for the too subtle and voluptuous perfumes of evening
+and the springtime in the depth of the woods, for flowers received in
+the morning and all through the day, and breathed in with so much
+pleasure!
+
+"Upon the lips, for what they have pronounced that was too confused or
+too open; for what they did not reply at certain moments or what they
+have not revealed to certain persons; for what they have sung in
+solitude that was too melodious and too full of tears; for their
+inarticulate murmur and for their silence!
+
+"Upon the neck, in the place of on the breast, for the ardor of desire
+according to the consecrated expression (_propter ardorem libidinis_);
+yes, for the grief in affection and the rivalry, for too much anguish in
+human tenderness, for the tears which are suffocated in a voiceless
+throat, for all that goes to wound the heart and break it!
+
+"Upon the hands also, for having seized a hand which was not bound to
+holiness; for having received too burning tears; perhaps for having
+begun to write and for finishing a response not lawful!
+
+"Upon the feet, for not having fled, for not having been satisfied with
+long, solitary walks, for not having been weary soon enough in the midst
+of temptations which were ever beginning anew!"
+
+You did not prosecute that. Here are two men who, each in his own
+sphere, has taken the same thing and who have, according to his own
+idea, added the sin, the fault. Can it be that you make an indictment
+for simply translating the formula of the ritual: _Quidquid deliquisti
+per oculos, per aurem_, etc.?
+
+M. Flaubert has done just what M. Sainte-Beuve did, without
+plagiarizing. He has made use of a right which belongs to any writer,
+to add to what another has said and complete the subject. The last
+scene of the romance of _Madame Bovary_ has been made a complete study
+of this kind from religious documents. M. Flaubert has taken the scene
+of the extreme unction from a book which a venerable ecclesiastic, one
+of his friends, lent to him; this same friend has read the scene and
+been moved to tears, not imagining that the majesty of religion was in
+any way offended. The book is entitled: _An historic, dogmatic, moral,
+liturgical and canonical explanation of the catechism, with an answer to
+the objections drawn from science against religion, by the Abbe Ambroise
+Guillois, curate of Notre-Dame-du-Pre, 6th edition, etc_., a work
+approved by His Eminence the Cardinal Gousset, N.N.S.S. the Bishops and
+Archbishops of Mans, of Tours, of Bordeaux, of Cologne, etc., vol. III.,
+printed at Mans, by Charles Monnoyer, 1851. Now, you shall see in this
+book, as you saw just now in Bossuet's, the principles, and, in a
+certain way, the text of the passages which the Government has
+condemned. It is no longer M. Sainte-Beuve, an artist, a literary
+rhapsodist, whom I am quoting; we now listen to the Church itself:
+
+"Extreme unction can give back health to the body if it be useful to the
+glory of God" ... and the priest says that this often happens. Now, here
+is the extreme unction:
+
+"The priest addresses the sick with a short exhortation, if he is in a
+state to hear it, in order to dispose him worthily to receive the
+sacrament which is to be administered to him.
+
+"The priest then passes the unction upon the sick person with the
+stiletto or the extremity of his right thumb, which he dips each time in
+the oil. This unction should be made especially upon the five parts of
+the body which nature has given to man as the organs of sensation,
+namely: the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the mouth and the hands."
+
+"As the priest makes the unctions [we have followed from point to point
+the ritual which we have copied], he pronounces the words which
+correspond to them.
+
+"_To the eyes, upon the closed eyeball_: Through this holy unction and
+His divine pity, may God pardon all the sins that you have committed
+through sight. The sick person should at this moment have a new hatred
+of all the sins committed through sight: such as indiscreet looks,
+criminal curiosity, and reading what has caused to be born in him a host
+of thoughts contrary to faith or morals."
+
+What has M. Flaubert done? He has put in the mouth of the priest, by
+uniting the two parts, what should be in his thoughts and also those of
+the sick person. He has copied purely and simply.
+
+"_To the ears_: Through this holy unction and through His divine pity,
+may God pardon all the sins that you have committed through the sense of
+hearing. The sick person should, at this moment, detest anew all the
+errors of which he is guilty from listening with pleasure to slander,
+calumny, proposed dishonesty and obscene songs.
+
+"_To the nostrils_: Through this holy unction and His divine pity, may
+the Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed through the sense
+of smell. At this moment the sick person should detest anew all the
+sins that he has committed through the sense of smell, his refined and
+voluptuous search for perfumes, all his sensibilities, all that he has
+breathed in of iniquitous odors.
+
+"_To the mouth, upon the lips_: Through this holy unction and through
+His great pity, may the Lord pardon you all the sins that you have
+committed by the sense of taste and words. The sick man at this moment
+should detest anew all the sins that he has committed in oaths and
+blaspheming ... in eating and drinking to excess....
+
+"_Upon the hands_: Through this holy unction and through His great pity,
+may the Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed through the
+sense of touch. The sick man ought to detest at this moment all the
+larcenies, the injustice of which he has been guilty, all the liberties,
+more or less criminal, which he has allowed himself. The priest receives
+the unction on his hands from without because he has already received it
+from within at the time of his ordination, and the sick person receives
+it within.
+
+"_Upon the feet_: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may God
+pardon all the sins that you have committed in your walks. The sick man
+ought, at this moment, to detest anew all the steps that he has taken in
+the path of iniquity, such as scandalous walks, and criminal
+interviews.... The unction of the feet is made upon the top or on the
+sole, according to the convenience of the sick person, and according to
+the custom of the diocese where it takes place. The most common practice
+seems to be to make it on the soles of the feet.
+
+"And finally upon the breast. [M. Sainte-Beuve has copied this; we have
+not, because it was concerned with the breast of a woman.] _Propter
+ardorem libidinis,_ etc.
+
+"_On the breast_: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may the
+Lord pardon all the sins which have been committed from the ardour of
+the passions. The sick man ought, at this moment, to detest anew all the
+bad thoughts to which he has abandoned himself, all sentiments of
+hatred, or vengeance that he has nourished in his heart."
+
+And following the ritual, we could have spoken of something more than
+the breast, but God knows what holy anger would have been aroused in the
+Public Attorney's office, if we had spoken of the loins!
+
+"_To the loins_: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may the
+Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed by irregular impulses
+of the flesh."
+
+If we had said that, what a thunderbolt you would have had with which to
+attempt to crush us, Mr. Attorney! and nevertheless, the ritual adds:
+"The sick man ought, at this moment, to detest anew all illicit
+pleasures, carnal delights, etc...."
+
+This is the ritual; and you have seen the condemned article. It has
+nothing of raillery in it, but is serious and earnest. And I repeat to
+you that he who lent my client this book, and saw my client make the use
+of it that he has, has taken him by the hand with tears in his eyes. You
+see, then, Mr. Government Attorney, how rash--not to use an expression
+which in order to be exact is not too severe--is your accusation of our
+touching upon holy things. You see now that we have not mingled the
+profane with the sacred when, at each sense we indicated the sin
+committed by that sense, since it is the language of the Church itself.
+
+I insist now upon mentioning the other details of the charge of outrage
+against religion. The Public Minister said to me: "It is no longer
+religion but the morals of all time that you have outraged; you have
+insulted death!" How have we insulted death? Because at the moment when
+this woman dies, there passes in the street a man whom she had met more
+than once, to whom she had given alms from her carriage as she was going
+to her adulterous meetings; a blind man whom she was accustomed to see,
+who sang his song walking along slowly by the side of her carriage, to
+whom she threw a piece of money, but whose countenance made her shiver?
+This man was passing in the street; and at the moment when Divine pity
+pardoned, or promised pardon, to the unfortunate woman who was expiating
+the faults of her life by a frightful death, human raillery appeared to
+her in the form of the song under her window. Great Heavens! you find
+an outrage in this! But M. Flaubert has only done what Shakespeare and
+Goethe have done, who, at the supreme moment of death, have not failed
+to make heard some chant, or perhaps plaint, or it might be raillery,
+which recalls to him who is passing to eternity some pleasure which he
+will never more enjoy, or some fault to be atoned. Let us read:
+
+"In fact, she looked around her slowly, as one awakening from a dream;
+then in a distinct voice she asked for her looking-glass, and remained
+some time bending over it, until the big tears fell from her eyes. Then
+she turned away her head with a sigh and fell back upon the pillows."
+
+I could not read it, I am like Lamartine: "The punishment seems to me to
+go beyond truth...." I should not consider that I was doing a bad deed,
+Mr. Attorney, in reading these pages to my married daughters, honest
+girls who have had a good example and good teaching, and who would
+never, never go away from the straight path for indiscretion, or away
+from things that could and ought to be understood.... It is impossible
+for me to continue this reading and I shall hold myself rigorously to
+the condemned passages:
+
+"As the death-rattle became stronger [Charles was by her side, the man
+whom you did not see but who is admirable] the priest prayed faster; his
+prayers mingled with Bovary's stifled sobs, and sometimes all seemed
+lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled like a
+passing bell.
+
+"Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs, and the
+clattering of a stick; and a voice, a raucous voice, sang:
+
+"'Maids in the warmth of a summer day,
+Dream of love and of love alway;
+The wind is strong this summer day,
+Her petticoat is blown away.'"
+
+Emma raised herself like a galvanized corpse, her hair undone, her eyes
+fixed, staring.
+
+"Where the sickle blades have been,
+  Nannette, gathering ears of corn,
+Passes bending down, my queen,
+  To the earth where they were born."
+
+"'The blind man!" she cries.
+
+"And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh,
+thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch that stood out
+against the eternal night like a menace.
+
+"She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew
+near. She was dead."
+
+You see, gentlemen, in this supreme moment, a recalling of her sin, and
+with it remorse and all that goes with it of poignancy and fear. It is
+not alone the whim of an artist wishing only to make a contrast without
+a purpose or a moral; she hears the blind man in the street singing the
+frightful song he had sung when she was returning all in a perspiration
+and hideous from an adulterous meeting; it is the same blind man whom
+she saw at each of those meetings; the blind man who pursued her with
+his song and his importunity; it is he who comes now to personify human
+rage at the instant when Divine pity comes to her and follows her to the
+supreme moment of death! And this is called an outrage against public
+morals! But I say, on the contrary, that it is an homage to public
+morals, that there is nothing more moral than this; I say that in this
+book the vice of education is awake, that it is taken from the true,
+from the living flesh of our society, and that at each stroke the author
+places before us this question: "Have you done what you ought for the
+education of your daughters? Is the religion you have given them such as
+will sustain them in the tempests of life, or is it only a mass of
+carnal superstitions which leaves them without support when the storm
+rages? Have you taught them that life is not the realization of
+chimerical dreams, that it is something prosaic to which it is necessary
+to accommodate oneself? Have you taught them that? Have you done what
+you ought for their happiness? Have you said to them: Poor children,
+outside the route I have pointed out to you, in the pleasures you may
+pursue, only disgust awaits you, trouble, disorder, dilapidation,
+convulsions, and execution...." And you will see that if anything were
+lacking in the picture, the sheriff's officer is there; there, too, is
+the Jew who has seized and sold her furniture to satisfy the caprices of
+this woman; and the husband is still ignorant of this. Nothing remains
+for the unfortunate woman, except death!
+
+But, said the Public Minister, her death is voluntary; this woman died
+in her own time.
+
+But how could she live? Was she not condemned? Had she not drunk to the
+last dregs her shame and baseness?
+
+Yes, upon our stage we show women who have strayed (and I cannot say
+what they have done) as happy, charming and smiling. _Questam corpore
+facerant_. I limit myself to this remark: When they show them to us
+happy, charming, enveloped in muslin, presenting a gracious hand to
+counts, marquises and dukes, often responding themselves to the name of
+countess or duchess, you call that respecting public morals. But the man
+who depicts the adulterous woman dying a shameful death, commits an
+outrage against public morals!
+
+Now, I do not wish to say it is not your opinion that you have
+expressed, since you have expressed it, but you have yielded to a
+prejudice. No, it cannot be you, the husband, the father of a family,
+the man who is there, it is not you, that is not possible; without the
+prejudice of the speech of the prosecution and a preconceived idea, you
+would never say that M. Flaubert was the author of a bad book! Surely,
+left to your inspirations, your appreciation would be the same as
+mine. I do not speak from a literary point of view; but from a moral and
+religious standard, as you understand it and I understand it, you and I
+could not differ.
+
+They have said, furthermore, that we have brought upon the scene a
+materialistic curate. We took the curate as we took the husband. He is
+not an eminent ecclesiastic, but an ordinary priest, a country
+curate. And as we have insulted no one, expressed no thought or
+sentiment that could be injurious to a husband, so we have insulted no
+ecclesiastic. I have only a word to say beyond this. Do you wish to
+read books in which ecclesiastics play a deplorable role? Take _Gil
+Blas_, _The Canon_ (of Balzac), _Notre-Dame de Paris_ of Victor Hugo. If
+you wish to read of priests who are the shame of the clergy, seek them
+elsewhere, for you will not find them in _Madame Bovary_. What have we
+shown? A country curate, who in his function of country curate is, like
+M. Bovary, an ordinary man. Have I represented him as a gourmand, a
+libertine, or a drunkard? I have not said a word of that kind. I have
+represented him fulfilling his ministry, not with elevated intelligence,
+but as his nature allowed him to fulfill it. I have put in contact with
+him, and in an almost continual state of discussion, a type which
+lives--as the creatures of M. Prudhomme live--as all other creations of
+our time will live who are taken from truth and which it is not possible
+for one to forget, and that is the country pharmacist, the Voltairean,
+the sceptic, the incredulous man, who is in a perpetual quarrel with the
+curate. But in these quarrels, who is it that is beaten, buffeted, and
+ridiculed? It is Homais; to him is the most comic role given, because he
+is the most true, because he best paints our sceptical epoch, a fury
+whom we call a priest-hater. Permit me still to read to you page 206. It
+is the good woman of the inn who offers something to her curate:
+
+"'What can I do for you, Monsieur le Cure?' asked the landlady, as she
+reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with
+their candles in a row. 'Will you take something? A thimbleful of
+_cassis_? A glass of wine?'
+
+"The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that
+he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking
+Madame Lefrancois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the
+evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.
+
+"When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the
+square, he thought the priest's behavior just now very unbecoming. This
+refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy;
+all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days
+of the tithe.
+
+"The landlady took up the defense of her cure.
+
+"'Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year
+he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six
+trusses at once, he is so strong.'
+
+"'Bravo!' said the chemist. 'Now just send your daughters to confess to
+fellows with such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I'd have
+the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrancois, every month--a
+good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals.'
+
+"'Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you've no religion.'
+
+"The chemist answered: 'I have a religion, my religion, and I even have
+more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling. I
+adore God, on the contrary. I believe in the Supreme Being, in a
+Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below
+to fulfill our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don't
+need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my
+pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one
+can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the
+eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates,
+of Franklin, of Voltaire, and Beranger! I am for the profession of faith
+of the 'Savoyard Vicar,' and the immortal principles of '89! And I can't
+admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane
+in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies
+uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd
+in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws,
+Which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in
+torpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.'
+
+"He ceased looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the
+chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town
+council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a
+distant rolling."
+
+What is this? A dialogue, a scene such as occurred each time that Homais
+had occasion to speak of priests.
+
+There is something better in the last passage of page 271:
+
+"Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur
+Bournisien, who was going across the market with the holy oil.
+
+"Homais, as we due to his principles, compared priests to ravens
+attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was
+personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the
+shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other."
+
+Our old friend, he who lent us the catechism, was very happy over this
+phrase; he said to us: "It is a true hit; it is indeed the portrait of a
+_priestophobe_ whom the cassock makes think of a shroud, and who holds
+one in execration from a little fear of the other." He was impious, and
+he profaned the cassock a little through impiety, perhaps, but much more
+because he was made to think of a shroud.
+
+Permit me to make a _resume_ of all this. I am defending a man who, if
+he had met a literary criticism upon the form of his book, or upon
+certain expressions, or on too much detail, upon one point or another,
+would have accepted that literary criticism with the best heart in the
+world. But to find himself accused of an outrage against morals and
+religion! M. Flaubert has not recovered from it; and he protests here
+before you with all the astonishment and all the energy of which he is
+capable against such an accusation.
+
+You are not of the sort to condemn books upon certain lines, you are of
+the sort to judge after reflection, to judge of the way of putting a
+work, and you will put this question with which I began my plea and with
+which I shall end it: Does the reading of such a book give a love of
+vice, or inspire a horror of it? Does not a punishment so terrible drive
+one to virtue and encourage it? The reading of this book cannot produce
+upon you an impression other than it has produced upon us, namely: that
+the work is excellent as a whole, and that the details in it are
+irreproachable. All classic literature authorizes the painting of
+scenes like these we are passing upon.
+
+With this understanding, we might have taken one for a model, which we
+have not done; we have imposed upon ourselves a sobriety which we ask
+you to take into account. If, as is possible, M. Flaubert has
+overstepped the bound he placed for himself, in one word or another, I
+have only to remind you that this is a first work, but I should then
+have to tell you that his error was simply one of self-deception, and
+was without damage to public morals. And in making him come into
+Court--him, whom you know a little now by his book, him whom you already
+love a little and will love more, I am sure, when you know him
+better--is enough of a punishment, a punishment already too cruel. And
+now it is for you to decide. You have already judged the book as a whole
+and in its details; it is not possible for you to hesitate!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE DECISION
+
+
+The Court has given audience for a part of the last week to the debate
+of the suit brought against MM. Leon Laurent-Pichat and Auguste-Alexis
+Pillet, the first the director, the second the printer of a periodical
+publication called the _Revue de Paris_, and M. Gustave Flaubert, a man
+of letters, all three implicated: 1st, Laurent-Pichat, for having, in
+1856, published in the numbers of the 1st and the 15th of December of
+the _Revue de Paris_, some fragments of a romance entitled, _Madame
+Bovary_ and, notably, divers fragments contained in pages 73, 77, 78,
+272, 273, has committed the misdemeanor of outraging public and
+religious morals and established customs; 2nd, Pillet and Flaubert are
+similarly guilty; Pillet in printing them, for they were published, and
+Flaubert for writing and sending to Laurent-Pichat for publication, the
+fragments of the romance entitled, _Madame Bovary_ as above designated,
+for aiding and abetting, with knowledge, Laurent-Pichat in the facts
+which have been prepared, in facilitating and consummating the
+above-mentioned misdemeanor, and of thus rendering themselves
+accomplices in the misdeameanor provided for by articles 1 and 8 of the
+law of May 17, 1819, and 59 and 60 of the Penal Code.
+
+M. PINARD, substitute, has sustained the prosecution.
+
+The COURT, after hearing the defense, presented by M. SENARD for
+M. FLAUBERT, M. DEMAREST for PICHAT, and M. FAVERIE for the PRINTER,
+has set for audience this day (Feb. 7) for pronouncing judgment, which
+is rendered in the following terms:
+
+"_Be it known_, that Laurent-Pichat, Gustave Flaubert and Pillet are
+charged with having committed the misdemeanor of an outrage against
+public and religious morals and established customs; the first as
+author, in publishing in the periodical publication entitled the _Revue
+de Paris_ of which he is the manager-proprietor, and in the numbers of
+the 1st and 15th of October, the 1st and 15th of November and the 1st
+and 15th of December, 1856, a romance entitled _Madame Bovary_, Gustave
+Flaubert and Pillet as accomplices, the one for furnishing the
+manuscript, and the other for printing the said romance;
+
+"_Be it known_, that the particularly marked passages of the romance
+with which we have to do, which include nearly 300 pages, are contained,
+according to the terms of the ordinance of dismissal before the Court of
+Correction, in pages 73, 77 and 78 (of the number of the 1st of
+December), and 271, 272, 273 (of the 15th of December number, 1856);
+
+"_Be it known_, that the incriminated passages, viewed abstractively and
+isolatedly, present effectively either expressions, or images, or
+pictures which good taste reproves and which are of a nature to make an
+attack upon legitimate and honorable susceptibilities;
+
+"_Be it known_, that the same observations can justly be applied to
+other passages not defined by the ordinance of dismissal, and which, in
+the first place seem to present an exposition of theories which would at
+least be contrary to the good customs and institutions which are the
+basis of our society, as well as to a respect for the most august
+ceremonies of divine worship;
+
+"_Be it known_, that, from these diverse titles, the work brought before
+the Court merits severe blame, since the mission of literature should be
+to ornament and recreate the mind by raising the intelligence and
+purifying manners, rather than by showing the disgust of vice in
+offering a picture of disorder which may exist in our society;
+
+"_Be it known_, that the defendants, and particularly Gustave Flaubert,
+energetically denied the charge brought against them, setting forth that
+the romance submitted to the judgment of the Court had an eminently
+moral aim; that the author had principally in view the exposing of
+dangers which result from an education not appropriate to the sphere in
+which one lives, and that, pursuant to this idea, he has shown the
+woman, the principal personage in the romance, aspiring towards the
+world and a society for which she was not made, unhappy in her modest
+condition where she was placed by fate, forgetting first her duties as a
+mother, afterward lacking in her duties as a wife, introducing
+successively into her house adultery and ruin, and ending miserably by
+suicide, after passing through all degrees of the most complete
+degradation, having even descended to theft;
+
+"_Be it known_, that this data, moral without doubt in principle, must
+be completed in its development by a certain severity of language and by
+a reserve directed especially towards that which touches the exposition
+of the pictures and situations which the author has employed in placing
+it before the eyes of the public;
+
+"_Be it known_, that it is not allowed, under pretext of painting
+character or local colour, to reproduce the facts, words, and gestures
+of the digressions of the personages which a writer gives himself the
+mission to paint; that a like system, applied to works of the mind as
+well as to productions of the fine arts, would lead to a realism which
+would be the reverse of the beautiful and the good, and which, bringing
+forth works equally offensive to the eye and to the mind, would commit a
+continual outrage against public morals and good manners;
+
+"_Be it known_, that there are limits which literature, even the
+lightest, should not pass, and of which Gustave Flaubert and the
+co-indicted have not taken sufficient account;
+
+"_Be it known_, that the work of which Flaubert is the author, is a work
+which appears to be long and seriously elaborated, from a literary point
+of view and as a study of character; that the passages coming under the
+ordinance for dismissal, as reprehensible as they may be, are few in
+number as compared with the extent of the work; that these passages,
+either in the ideas they expose, or in the situations they represent,
+bring out as a whole the characters which the author wished to paint,
+although exaggerated and impregnated with a vulgar realism often
+shocking;
+
+"_Be it known_, that Gustave Flaubert affirms his respect for good
+manners, and all that attaches itself to religious morals; that it does
+not appear that his book has been written like certain other books, with
+the sole aim of giving satisfaction to the sensual passions, to a spirit
+of license and debauch, or of ridiculing things which should be held in
+the respect of all;
+
+"That he has done wrong only in losing sight of the rules which every
+writer who respects himself ought never to lose sight of, or forget:
+that literature, like art, in order to accomplish the good which it is
+expected to produce ought only to be chaste and pure in its form and
+expression;
+
+"In the circumstances, _be it known_, that it is not sufficiently proven
+that Pichat, Gustave Flaubert and Pillet are guilty of the misdemeanor
+with which they are charged;
+
+"The Court acquits them of the indictment brought against them, and
+decrees a dismissal without costs."
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert, by Various
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