Gentlemen, M. Gustave Flaubert has been accused before you of making a bad book; of having, in this book, outraged public morals and religion.  M. Gustave Flaubert is beside me and affirms before you that he has made an honest book; he affirms before you that the thought in his book, from the first line to the last, is a moral thought; and that, if it were not perverted (and you have seen during the last hour how great a talent one may have for perverting a thought) it would be (and will become again presently) for you, as it has been already for the readers of the book, an eminently moral and religious thought capable of being translated into these words:  the excitation of virtue through the horror of vice.

I bring M. Gustave Flaubert’s affirmation here to you, and I put it fearlessly in the light of the prosecuting attorney’s speech, for this affirmation is grave; and it is through the personality of its maker, through the circumstances which have led to the writing of the book, that I am going to make it understood to you.

The affirmation is grave on account of the personality that makes it:  and, permit me to say to you that M. Gustave Flaubert is not to me an unknown man who has instructions to give me, and who has need of recommendations from me—­I speak not only of his morality but of his position.  I come here, into this precinct, fulfilling a duty of conscience after reading the book, after feeling myself exalted, by this reading, in all that is honest and profoundly religious.  But, at the same time that I come fulfilling a duty of conscience, I come to fulfill a duty of friendship.  I remember, and I can never forget, that his father was an old friend of mine.  His father, by whose friendship I was long honoured, to the last day of his life, his father,—­permit me to say his illustrious father,—­was for thirty years surgeon-in-chief at the hospital at Rouen.  He was in charge of the Dupuytren dissecting room, and in giving to science great instruction, he has endowed it with some great names; I will mention but one, that of Cloquet.  He has not only left for himself a good name in science, he has left a grand memento in his immense service to humanity.  And at the same time I am recalling my bond of friendship with him, I wish to tell you that his son, who has been dragged into Court for an outrage against morals and religion, this son is the friend of my children, as I was the friend of his father.  I know his thought, I know his intentions, and the counsellor has the right here of placing himself as a personal guaranty of his client.