Now, in the prayers for the dying which the priest recites, at the end or at the close of each verse occur these words:  “Christian soul, go out to a higher region.”  They are murmured at the moment when the last breath of the dying escapes from his lips.  The priest recites, etc.

“As the death-rattle became stronger the priest prayed faster; his prayers mingled with the stifled sobs of Bovary, and sometimes all seemed lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled like a passing-bell.”

After the fashion of alternating these words, the author has tried to make for them a sort of reply.  He puts upon the sidewalk a blind man who intones a song of which the profane words are a kind of response to the prayers for the dying.

“Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs and the clattering of a stick; and a voice rose—­a raucous voice—­that sang—­

“’Maids in the warmth of a summer day
Dream of love and of love alway. 
The wind is strong this summer day,
Her petticoat has flown away.’”

This is the moment when Madame Bovary dies.

Thus we have here the picture:  on one side the priest reciting the prayers for the dying; on the other the hand-organ player who excites from the dying woman

“an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a menace....  She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion.  They all drew near.  She was dead.”

And then later, when the body is cold, above all should the cadaver, which the soul has just left, be respected.  When the husband is there on his knees, weeping for his wife, when he extends the shroud over her, any other would have stopped, but M. Flaubert makes a final stroke with his brush: 

“The sheet sank in from her breast to her knees, and then rose at the tips of her toes.”

This the scene of death.  I have abridged it and have grouped it after a fashion.  It is now for you to judge and determine whether there is a mixture of the sacred and the profane in it, or rather, a mixture of the sacred and the voluptuous.

I have related the romance, I have brought a charge against it and, permit me to say, against the kind of art that M. Flaubert cultivates, the kind that is realistic but not discreet.  You shall see to what limits he has gone.  A copy of the Artiste lately came to my hand; it is not for us to make accusations against the Artiste, but to learn to what school M. Flaubert belongs, and I ask your permission to read you some lines, which have nothing to do with M. Flaubert’s prosecuted book, only to show to what a degree he excels in this kind of painting.  He loves to paint temptations, especially the temptations to which Madame Bovary succumbed.  Well, I find a model of its kind in the lines to follow, from the Artiste, for the month of January, signed Gustave Flaubert, upon the temptation of Saint Anthony.  Heaven knows it is a subject upon which many things might be said, but I do not believe it possible to give more vivacity to the image, stronger lines to the picture.  Apollonius says to Saint Anthony:—­