having comprehended marriage, felt herself polluted by contact with her husband, and who, having sought her ideal elsewhere, found the disillusions of adultery.  This word has shocked you; in the place of disillusions, you would have wished pollution of adultery.  This tribunal shall be the judge.  As for me, if I had depicted the same personage I would have said to her:  Poor woman! if you believe that your husband’s kisses are monotonous and wearisome, if you have found only platitudes—­this word has been especially brought to our notice—­the platitudes of marriage—­if you seem to see pollution in a union where love does not preside, take care, for your dreams are an illusion, and you will one day be cruelly deceived.  But this man, gentlemen, who knows how to speak strongly, makes use of the word pollution to express what we would have called disillusion, and he has used the true word, although vague to him who can bring to it no intelligence.  I would have liked better his not speaking so strongly, his not pronouncing the word pollution, but rather averting the woman from deception, from disillusion, and saying to her:  Where you believe you will find love, you will find only libertinism; where you think you will find happiness, there is only bitterness.  A husband who goes tranquilly about his affairs, who kisses you, puts on his house cap and eats his soup with you, is a prosaic husband revolting to you; you aspire to a man who will love you, idolize you; poor child! that man will be a libertine who will have taken you for a minute for the sake of playing with you.  There will be some illusion about it the first time, perhaps the second; you may come back home joyous, singing the song of adultery.  “I have a lover!” but the third time you will not wish to go to him, for the disillusion will have come.  The man you have dreamed of will have lost all his prestige; you will have found again in love the platitudes of marriage, and this time with scorn, disdain, disgust and poignant remorse.

This, gentlemen, is what M. Flaubert has said, what he has painted, what is in each line of his book; and this is what distinguishes his work from all other works of the kind.  Under his hand, the great irregularities of society figure on each page, and adultery walks abroad full of disgust and shame.  He has brought into the common relations of life the most powerful teaching that can be given to a young woman.  And Heaven knows that to those of our young women who do not find in lofty, honest principle and stern religion enough to keep them steady in the accomplishment of their duties as mothers, or who do not find it in that resignation and practical science of life which bids us accommodate ourselves to what we have, but who carry their dreams to the outside (and the most honest, the most pure of our young women, in the prosaic life of their households, are sometimes tormented by that which is going on outside), a book like this would bring but one reflection.  Of that you may be sure.  And this is what M. Flaubert has intended.