The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert

"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."