Defend the queen, defend her especially before the scaffold, say that because of her title she had the right of respect, but suppress your accusations when one contents himself with saying that he had been, it was said, the lover of the queen.  Can that be so serious that you reproach us with having insulted the memory of that unfortunate woman?

“He had lived a life of noisy debauch, full of duels, bets, elopements; he had squandered his fortune and frightened all his family.  A servant behind his chair named aloud to him in his ear the dishes that he pointed to, stammering, and constantly Emma’s eyes turned involuntarily to this old man with hanging lips, as to something extraordinary.  He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens!

“Iced champagne was poured out.  Emma shivered all over as she felt it cold in her mouth.  She had never seen pomegranates nor tasted pine-apples.”

You see that these descriptions are charming, incontestably, and that it is not difficult to take a line here and there for the purpose of creating a kind of colour, against which my conscience protests.  It is not a lascivious colour, it is only lifelike; it is the literary element and at the same time the moral element.

Here we have a young girl, whose education you are acquainted with, become a woman.  The Government Attorney has asked:  Did she even try to love her husband?  He has not read the book; if he had read it, he would not have made the objection.

We have, gentlemen, this poor woman dreaming at first.  On page 34 you will find her dreams.  And there is something more here, something of which the Government Attorney did not speak, and which I must tell you, and these are her impressions when her mother died; you will see if they are lascivious soon enough!  Have the goodness to turn to page 33 and follow me: 

“When her mother died she cried much the first few days.  She had a funeral picture made with the hair of the deceased, and, in a letter sent to the Bertaux full of sad reflections on life, she asked to be buried some day in the same grave.  The good man thought she must be ill, and came to see her.  Emma was secretly pleased that she had reached at a first attempt the rare ideal of pale lives, never attained by mediocre hearts.  She let herself glide along with Lamartine meanderings, listened to harps on lakes, to all the songs of dying swans, to the falling of the leaves, the pure virgins ascending to heaven, and the voice of the Eternal discoursing down the valleys.  She wearied of it, would not confess it, continued from habit, and at last was surprised to feel herself soothed, and with no more sadness at heart than wrinkles on her brow.”

I wish to make answer to the Government Attorney’s reproach that she made no effort to love her husband.

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY: 

I did not reproach her for that, I said that she did not succeed in loving him.