M. SENARD: 

If I have been mistaken, if you made no reproach, that is the best response that could be given.  I believed that I understood you to make one; let us see how I may be deceived.  Moreover, here is what I read at the end of page 36: 

“And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she desired to make herself in love with him.  By moonlight in the garden she recited all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after this as before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.

“When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that Charles’s passion was nothing very exorbitant.  His outbursts became regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times.  It was one habit among other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony of dinner.”

On page 37 we find a group of similar things.  Now, here is where the peril begins.  You know how she has been brought up; and I beg you not to forget this for an instant.

There is not a man who, having read this, would not say that M. Flaubert is not only a great artist but a man of heart, for having in the last six pages turned all the horror and scorn upon the woman and all the interest towards the husband.  He is a great artist, as has been said, because he has left the husband as he was, he has not transformed him, and to the end he is the same good man, commonplace, mediocre, full of the duties of his profession, loving his wife well, but destitute of education or elevation of thought.  He is the same at the death-bed of his wife.  And nevertheless, there is not an individual to whom the memory returns with more interest.

Why?  Because he has kept to the end his simplicity and uprightness of heart; because to the end he has fulfilled his duty while his wife was led astray.  His death is as beautiful and as touching as the death of his wife is hideous.  On the dead body of the woman the author has shown the spots made by the vomiting of poison; they soil the white shroud in which she goes to her burial, and he has made her, as he desired, an object of disgust; but there is a man there who is sublime—­the husband standing beside the grave.  There is a man who is grand, sublime, whose death is admirable—­the husband, who, finding himself broken-hearted by the death of his wife, sees afterwards all the illusions of the heart that remained to him embraced in the thought of his wife in the tomb.  Keep that, I beg you, in your remembrance.  The author has gone beyond what was necessary—­as Lamartine has said—­in rendering the death of the woman hideous and her punishment