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.