Now, I do not wish to say it is not your opinion that you have expressed, since you have expressed it, but you have yielded to a prejudice.  No, it cannot be you, the husband, the father of a family, the man who is there, it is not you, that is not possible; without the prejudice of the speech of the prosecution and a preconceived idea, you would never say that M. Flaubert was the author of a bad book!  Surely, left to your inspirations, your appreciation would be the same as mine.  I do not speak from a literary point of view; but from a moral and religious standard, as you understand it and I understand it, you and I could not differ.

They have said, furthermore, that we have brought upon the scene a materialistic curate.  We took the curate as we took the husband.  He is not an eminent ecclesiastic, but an ordinary priest, a country curate.  And as we have insulted no one, expressed no thought or sentiment that could be injurious to a husband, so we have insulted no ecclesiastic.  I have only a word to say beyond this.  Do you wish to read books in which ecclesiastics play a deplorable role?  Take Gil Blas, The Canon (of Balzac), Notre-Dame de Paris of Victor Hugo.  If you wish to read of priests who are the shame of the clergy, seek them elsewhere, for you will not find them in Madame Bovary.  What have we shown?  A country curate, who in his function of country curate is, like M. Bovary, an ordinary man.  Have I represented him as a gourmand, a libertine, or a drunkard?  I have not said a word of that kind.  I have represented him fulfilling his ministry, not with elevated intelligence, but as his nature allowed him to fulfill it.  I have put in contact with him, and in an almost continual state of discussion, a type which lives—­as the creatures of M. Prudhomme live—­as all other creations of our time will live who are taken from truth and which it is not possible for one to forget, and that is the country pharmacist, the Voltairean, the sceptic, the incredulous man, who is in a perpetual quarrel with the curate.  But in these quarrels, who is it that is beaten, buffeted, and ridiculed?  It is Homais; to him is the most comic role given, because he is the most true, because he best paints our sceptical epoch, a fury whom we call a priest-hater.  Permit me still to read to you page 206.  It is the good woman of the inn who offers something to her curate: 

“‘What can I do for you, Monsieur le Cure?’ asked the landlady, as she reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with their candles in a row.  ’Will you take something?  A thimbleful of cassis?  A glass of wine?’

“The priest declined very politely.  He had come for his umbrella, that he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking Madame Lefrancois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.