"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: