“She undressed herself ...” [ah!  Mr. Government Attorney, how badly you have understood this passage!] “she undressed hastily [poor thing], tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding snake; then pale, serious, and without speaking, with one movement she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder....  There was upon that brow covered with cold drops ... in the strain of those arms something vague and dreary....”

We must ask here where the lascivious colour is? and where is the severe colour? and ask if the senses of the young girl into whose hands this book might fall, could be aroused, excited—­as she might by reading a classic of classics, which I shall cite presently, and which has been reprinted a thousand times without any prosecution, public or royal, following it.  Is there anything analogous in what I am going to read you?  Is there not, on the contrary, a horror of vice that this “something dreary glides in between them to separate them?” Let us continue, I pray: 

“He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must have passed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of pleasure.  What had once charmed now frightened him a little.  Besides, he rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked by her personality.  He begrudged Emma this constant victory.  He even strove not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like drunkards at the sight of strong drinks.”

What is lascivious there?

And then, take the last paragraph: 

“One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a form in the shade of the elm-trees.  How calm that time had been!  How she longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure to herself out of books!  The first month of her marriage, her rides in the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repassed before her eyes.  And Leon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the others.

“‘Yet I love him,’ she said to herself.”

Do not forget this, Mr. Attorney, when you judge the thought of the author, when you wish to find absolutely lascivious colour where I can only find an excellent book.

“She was not happy—­she never had been.  Whence came this insufficiency of life—­this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?”

Is that lascivious?

“But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet’s heart in angel’s form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him?  Ah! how impossible!  Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie.  Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.