“A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard from the convent-clock.  Four o’clock!  And it seemed to her that she had been there on that form an eternity.  But an infinity of passions may be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space.”

It is not necessary to look at the end of the book to find what is in it from one end to the other.  I have read the incriminated passage without adding a word, to defend a work which defends itself through itself.  Let us continue leading from this same incriminated passage, looking at it from a moral point of view: 

“Madame was in her room, which no one entered.  She stayed there all day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian’s shop.  In order not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of manoeuvering, she at least succeeded in banishing him to the second floor, while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of orgies and thrilling situations.  Often, seized with fear, she cried out, and Charles hurried to her.

“‘Oh, go away!’ she would say.

“Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her masses of hair, too heavy, and gazing upon the stars, longed for some princely love.  She thought of him, of Leon.  She would then have given anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her.

“Those were her gala days.  She wished them to be sumptuous, and when he alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally, which happened almost every time.  He tried to make her understand that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel, but she always found some objection.”

You see all this is very simple when one reads the whole; but in cuttings like those of the Government Attorney, the smallest word becomes a mountain.

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY: 

I did not quote any of those phrases last mentioned; but since you wish to quote what I have not incriminated, it would be well not to pass over the foot of the page adjoining page 50.

M. SENARD: 

I pass over nothing, but I insist upon citing the incriminated passages in the quotations.  We are quoting from pages 77 and 78.

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY: 

I refer to the quotations made to the audience, and thought you imputed me with having cited the lines you are about to read.

M. SENARD: