“He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry, nor passionate caresses that made her mad; so that their great love, which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it.  She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less.

“She did not know whether she regretted yielding to him, or whether, she did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more.  The humiliation of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their voluptuous pleasures.  It was not affection; it was like a continual seduction.  He subjugated her; she almost feared him.”

And you are afraid, Mr. Government Attorney, that young women might read this!  I am less frightened, less timid than you.  On my own personal account, I can admirably understand a father of a family saying to his daughter:  Young lady, if your heart, your conscience, if religious sentiment and the voice of duty are not sufficient to make you walk in the right path, look, my child, look well at the weariness, the suffering, the grief and desolation attending the woman who seeks happiness outside her home!  This language would not wound you in the mouth of a father, would it?  M. Flaubert has said nothing but this; he has made a painting most true, and most powerful, of what the woman who dreams of finding happiness outside her house immediately discovers.

But let us go on and we shall come to all the adventures of the disillusion.  You show me the caresses of Leon on page 60.  Alas! she will soon pay the ransom of adultery, and that ransom you will find terrible, in some pages farther on in the book you condemn.  She sought happiness in adultery, poor unfortunate one!  And she found, besides the disgust and fatigue that the monotony of marriage can bring to the woman who does not walk in the path of duty, the disillusion and the scorn of the man to whom she has given herself.  Was any of this scorn lacking in the book?  Oh, no! and you cannot deny it, for the book is under your eyes.  Rodolphe, who has shown himself so vile, gives to her a last proof of egoism and cowardice.  She has said to him:  “Take me!  Carry me away!  I am stifling; I can no longer breathe in my husband’s house, to which I have brought shame and misfortune.”  He hesitates; she insists.  Finally, he promises, and the next day she receives a terrible letter under which she falls crushed and annihilated.  She is taken ill and is dying.  The number you are consulting shows you all the convulsions of a soul at war with itself, which perhaps could be led back to duty by an excess of suffering, but unfortunately she meets a boy with whom she had played when she was inexperienced.  This is the movement of the romance, and then comes the expiation.

But the Government Attorney stops me and asks:  Although it may be true that the purpose of the book is good from one end to the other, could you allow such obscene details as those that have been brought forward?