“She none the less went on writing him love letters, in virtue of the notion that a woman must write to her lover.

“But whilst she wrote it was another man she saw, a phantom fashioned out of her most ardent memories. [This is certainly not incriminating.]

“Then she fell back exhausted, for these transports of vague love wearied her more than great debauchery.

“She now felt constant ache all over her.  Often she even received a summons, stamped paper that she barely looked at.  She would have liked not to be alive, or to be always asleep.”

I call that an excitation of virtue through a horror of vice, as the author himself calls it, and which the reader, no longer perplexed, cannot fail to see, unless influenced by ill-will.

And now, something more to make you perceive what kind of man you are about to judge.  And in order to show you, not what kind of justification I may expect, but whether M. Flaubert has made use of lascivious colour, and whence he got his inspiration, let me put upon your desk this book used by him, in whose passages he found himself inspired to paint this concupiscence, the entanglements of this woman who sought happiness in illicit pleasures, but could not find it there, who sought again and again and never found it.  Whence has Flaubert derived his inspiration, gentlemen?  It was from this book; listen: 

ILLUSION OF THE SENSES.

“Whoever, then, attaches himself to the senses, must necessarily wander from object to object and deceive himself, so to speak, by a change of place, as concupiscence,—­that is to say, love of pleasure,—­is always changing, because its ardour languishes and dies in continuity, and it is only change that makes it revive.  Again, what is that other characteristic of a life of the senses, that alternate movement of appetite and disgust, of disgust and appetite, the soul floating ever uncertain between ardour which abates and ardour which is renewed? Inconstantia concupiscentia.  That is what a life of the senses is.  However, in this perpetual movement, one must not allow himself to be deceived by the image of wandering liberty.”

This is what a life of the senses is.  Who has said that?  Who has written these words which you are about to hear upon these excitements and excessive ardor?  What is the book which M. Flaubert perused day and night, and which has inspired the passages that the Government Attorney condemns?  It is by Bossuet!  What I shall read to you is a fragment of Bossuet’s discourse upon Illicit Pleasures.  I shall bring you to see that all these incriminated passages are—­not plagiarized; the man who appropriates an idea is not a plagiarist—­but imitations of Bossuet.  Do you wish for another example?  Here it is: 

UPON SIN.