“It was the beginning of April, when the primroses are in bloom, and a warm wind blows over the flower-beds newly turned, and the gardens, like women, seem to be getting ready for the summer fetes.  Through the bars of the arbour and away beyond, the river could be seen in the fields, meandering through the grass in wandering curves.  The evening vapors rose between the leafless poplars, touching their outlines with a violet tint, paler and more transparent than a subtle gauze caught athwart their branches.  In the distance cattle moved about; neither their steps nor their lowing could be heard; and the bell, still ringing through the air, kept up its peaceful lamentation.

“With this repeated tinkling the thoughts of the young woman lost themselves in old memories of her youth and school-days.  She remembered the great candlesticks that rose above the vases full of flowers on the altar, and the tabernacle with its small columns.  She would have liked to be once more lost in the long line of white veils, marked off here and there by the stiff black hoods of the good sisters bending over their prie-Dieu.”

This is the language in which his religious sentiment is expressed.  And yet we have understood from the Government Attorney that scepticism reigned in M. Flaubert’s book from one end to the other.  Where, I pray you, have you found this scepticism?

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY: 

I have not said that there was any of it in its inner meaning.

M. SENARD: 

If not in its inner meaning, where then, is it?  In your cuttings, evidently.  But here is the work entire, as the Court will judge it, and it can see that the religious sentiment is so forcefully imprinted there that the accusation of scepticism is pure slander.  And now, the Government Attorney will permit me to say to him that it was not for the purpose of accusing the author of scepticism that all this trouble has been made.  Let us proceed: 

“At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense.  Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it.”

This, gentlemen, is the first appeal of religion to hold Emma from the trend of her passions.  She has fallen, poor woman, and then been repelled by the foot of the man to whom she abandoned herself.  She is nearly dead, but raises herself and becomes reanimated; and you shall see now what is written in the 15th of November number, 1856, page 548: