you will speak the truth.  It is for this that you accuse Flaubert; it is for this that I exalt his conduct.  Yes, he has given very good warning of the whole family of dangers arising from exaltation among young persons, who take upon themselves petty devotions instead of attaching themselves to a strong and severe religion which would sustain them in a day of weakness.  And now you shall see whence comes the invention of the little sins “under the whisperings of the priest.”  Read page 30: 

“She had read ‘Paul and Virginia,’ and she had dreamed of the little bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all the sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand, bringing you a bird’s nest.”

Is this lascivious, gentlemen?  Let us continue.

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY: 

I did not say that passage was lascivious.

M. SENARD: 

I ask your pardon, but it is precisely in this passage that you found a lascivious phrase, and it was only by isolating it from what preceded and what followed that you could make it seem lascivious.

“Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the cross he carries.  She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a whole day.  She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill.”

Do not forget this; when one invents little sins to confess and seeks some vow to fulfill, as you will find in the preceding line, evidently one has got ideas that are a little false from somewhere.  And now I ask you if I have to discuss your passage!  I continue: 

“In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the study.  On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the ‘Genie du Christianism,’ as a recreation.  How she listened at first to the sonorous lamentations of its romantic melancholies re-echoing through the world and eternity!  If her childhood had been spent in the shop-parlor of some business quarter, she might perhaps have opened her heart to those lyrical invasions of Nature, which usually come to us only through translation in books.  But she knew the country too well; she knew the lowing of cattle, the milking, the plow.  Accustomed to calm aspects of life, she turned, on the contrary, to those of excitement.  She loved the sea only for the sake of its storms, and the green fields only when broken up by ruins.  She wished to get some personal profit out of things, and she rejected as useless all that did not contribute to the immediate desire of her heart, being of a temperament, more sentimental than artistic, looking for emotions not landscapes.”