You see, gentlemen, in this supreme moment, a recalling of her sin, and with it remorse and all that goes with it of poignancy and fear.  It is not alone the whim of an artist wishing only to make a contrast without a purpose or a moral; she hears the blind man in the street singing the frightful song he had sung when she was returning all in a perspiration and hideous from an adulterous meeting; it is the same blind man whom she saw at each of those meetings; the blind man who pursued her with his song and his importunity; it is he who comes now to personify human rage at the instant when Divine pity comes to her and follows her to the supreme moment of death!  And this is called an outrage against public morals!  But I say, on the contrary, that it is an homage to public morals, that there is nothing more moral than this; I say that in this book the vice of education is awake, that it is taken from the true, from the living flesh of our society, and that at each stroke the author places before us this question:  “Have you done what you ought for the education of your daughters?  Is the religion you have given them such as will sustain them in the tempests of life, or is it only a mass of carnal superstitions which leaves them without support when the storm rages?  Have you taught them that life is not the realization of chimerical dreams, that it is something prosaic to which it is necessary to accommodate oneself?  Have you taught them that?  Have you done what you ought for their happiness?  Have you said to them:  Poor children, outside the route I have pointed out to you, in the pleasures you may pursue, only disgust awaits you, trouble, disorder, dilapidation, convulsions, and execution....”  And you will see that if anything were lacking in the picture, the sheriff’s officer is there; there, too, is the Jew who has seized and sold her furniture to satisfy the caprices of this woman; and the husband is still ignorant of this.  Nothing remains for the unfortunate woman, except death!

But, said the Public Minister, her death is voluntary; this woman died in her own time.

But how could she live?  Was she not condemned?  Had she not drunk to the last dregs her shame and baseness?

Yes, upon our stage we show women who have strayed (and I cannot say what they have done) as happy, charming and smiling. Questam corpore facerant.  I limit myself to this remark:  When they show them to us happy, charming, enveloped in muslin, presenting a gracious hand to counts, marquises and dukes, often responding themselves to the name of countess or duchess, you call that respecting public morals.  But the man who depicts the adulterous woman dying a shameful death, commits an outrage against public morals!