The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert

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."