I say, gentlemen, that lascivious details cannot be covered by a moral conclusion, otherwise one could relate all the orgies imaginable, describe all the turpitude of a public woman, making her die in a charity bed of a hospital.  It would be allowable to study and depict all the poses of lasciviousness.  It would be going against all the rules of good sense.  It would place the poison at the door of all, the remedy at the doors of few, if there were any remedy.  Who are the ones to read M. Flaubert’s romance?  Are they men who are interested in political or social economy?  No!  The light pages of Madame Bovary fall into hands still lighter, into the hands of young girls, sometimes of married women.  Well, when the imagination has been seduced, when this seduction has fallen upon the heart, when the heart shall have told it to the senses, do you believe that cold reason would have much power against this seduction of sense and sentiment?  And then, man should not clothe himself too much in his power and his virtue; man has low instincts and high ideas, and, with all, virtue is only the consequence of an effort ofttimes laborious.  Lascivious pictures have generally more influence than cold reason.  This is what I respond to that theory, that is, as a first response; but I have a second.

I hold that the romance of Madame Bovary, from a philosophic point of view, is not moral.  Without doubt Madame Bovary died of poison; she suffered much, it is true; but she died at her own time and in her own way, not because she had committed adultery but because she wished to; she died in all the prestige of her youth and beauty; she died after having two lovers, leaving a husband who loved her, who adored her, who found Rodolphe’s portrait, his letters and Leon’s, who read the letters of a woman twice an adulteress, and who, after that, loved her still more, even on the other side of the tomb.  Who would condemn this woman in the book?  No one.  Such is the conclusion.  There is not in the book a person who condemns her.  If you can find one wise person, if you can find one single principal virtue by which the adulteress is condemned, I am wrong.  But if in all the book there is not a person who makes her bow her head, there is not an idea, a line, by virtue of which the adulteress is scourged, it is I who am right, and the book is immoral!

Should it be in the name of conjugal honor that the book be condemned?  No, for conjugal honor is represented here by a devoted husband who, after the death of his wife, meets Rodolphe and seeks to find upon the face of the lover the features of the woman he loved.  I ask you whether you could stigmatize this woman in the name of conjugal honor when there is not in the book a single word where the husband does not bow before the adulteress?

Should it be in the name of public opinion?  No, for public opinion is personified in a grotesque being, in the Homais apothecary surrounded by ridiculous persons whom this woman dominated.