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.