Gentlemen, a great name and great memories have obligations.  Children were not wanting to M. Flaubert.  There were three of them, two sons, and a daughter who died at twenty-one.  The eldest has been judged worthy to succeed his father; and he is to-day, as he has been for many years, carrying on the mission which his father conducted for thirty years.  The younger son is here; he is at your bar.  In leaving them a considerable fortune and a great name, their father has left upon them the obligation of being men of intelligence and of heart; that is to say, useful men.  The brother of my client has been thrown into a career where each day brings its own service.  This one has devoted his life to study and to letters, the work before you being his first work.  This first work, gentlemen, which provokes the passions, as the Government Attorney has said, is the result of long study and much thought.  M. Gustave Flaubert is a man of serious character, turning his attention, through his very nature, to serious subjects, to sad subjects.  He is not the man whom the prosecuting attorney, in fifteen or twenty lines bitten out here and there, has presented to you as a maker of lascivious pictures.  No; there is in his nature, I repeat, all that is gravest, most serious, and even the saddest that one could imagine.  His book, by restoring a single phrase, by putting beside the quoted lines the lines which precede and follow, will take on its veritable colour, as soon as you understand the intentions of the author.  And, of the too clever words to which you have listened, there will remain to you only the memory of a sentiment of profound admiration for a talent which can thus transform things.

I have told you that M. Gustave Flaubert was a serious and grave man.  His studies, conforming to his nature, have been serious and broad.  They have embraced not only all branches of literature, but the right branches.  M. Flaubert is not the man to be content with observations of even the best where he lived; he has sought out the best in other places; Qui mores multorum vidit et urbes.

After his father’s death and the completion of his studies at college, he visited Italy, and from 1848 to 1852 traveled through the countries of the Orient,—­Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor—­in which countries, doubtless, a man traveling through and bringing to his travels a fine intelligence, could acquire something exalted, something poetic, as well as the colour and prestige of style which the public minister has just pointed out, to make good the misdemeanor that he imputes.  That prestige of style, those literary qualities pointed to with eclat in this debate, are there, but after no fashion can they be brought up for indictment.

Since his return, in 1852, M. Gustave Flaubert has written and sought to produce in a grand outline the result of his close and serious studies, the result of what he had gathered in his journeys.