“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 Felicite 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 incense that melts into vapour.”

In what tongue does one pray to God in language addressed to a lover in the outpourings of adultery?  Without doubt they will tell us it is local colour, and excuse it on the ground that a vapourous, romantic woman does nothing, even in religion, like anybody else.  There is no local colour which can excuse this mixture!  Voluptuous one day, religious the next, there is no woman, even in other countries, under the sky of Spain or Italy, who murmurs to God the adulterous caresses which she gives her lover.  You can appreciate this language, gentlemen, and you will not excuse adulterous words being introduced in any way into the sanctuary of the Divinity!

This is the second situation.  I now come to the third, which is a series of adulteries.

After the religious transition, Madame Bovary is again ready to fall.  She goes to the theatre at Rouen.  The play is Lucia di Lammermoor.  Emma returns to her old self.

“Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the pollution of marriage and the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness.”

Seeing Lagardy upon the stage, she had a desire to run into his arms, to take refuge in his strength, even as in the incarnation of love, and of saying to him:  “Take me, take me away, let us go! thine, thine, with thee are all my ardour and all my dreams!”

Leon was with the Bovarys.

“He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair.”

You were spoken to just now of the pollution of marriage; then you are shown adultery in all its poesy, in its ineffable seductions.  I have said that the expression should be modified to read:  the disillusions of marriage and the pollution of adultery.  Very often when one is married, in the place of happiness without clouds which one promises himself, he finds but sacrifice and bitterness.  The word disillusion can then be used justifiably, that of pollution, never.

Leon and Emma have a rendezvous at the cathedral.  They look around or they do not, it makes no difference.  They go out.