Permit me to make a resume of all this.  I am defending a man who, if he had met a literary criticism upon the form of his book, or upon certain expressions, or on too much detail, upon one point or another, would have accepted that literary criticism with the best heart in the world.  But to find himself accused of an outrage against morals and religion!  M. Flaubert has not recovered from it; and he protests here before you with all the astonishment and all the energy of which he is capable against such an accusation.

You are not of the sort to condemn books upon certain lines, you are of the sort to judge after reflection, to judge of the way of putting a work, and you will put this question with which I began my plea and with which I shall end it:  Does the reading of such a book give a love of vice, or inspire a horror of it?  Does not a punishment so terrible drive one to virtue and encourage it?  The reading of this book cannot produce upon you an impression other than it has produced upon us, namely:  that the work is excellent as a whole, and that the details in it are irreproachable.  All classic literature authorizes the painting of scenes like these we are passing upon.

With this understanding, we might have taken one for a model, which we have not done; we have imposed upon ourselves a sobriety which we ask you to take into account.  If, as is possible, M. Flaubert has overstepped the bound he placed for himself, in one word or another, I have only to remind you that this is a first work, but I should then have to tell you that his error was simply one of self-deception, and was without damage to public morals.  And in making him come into Court—­him, whom you know a little now by his book, him whom you already love a little and will love more, I am sure, when you know him better—­is enough of a punishment, a punishment already too cruel.  And now it is for you to decide.  You have already judged the book as a whole and in its details; it is not possible for you to hesitate!

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THE DECISION

The Court has given audience for a part of the last week to the debate of the suit brought against MM.  Leon Laurent-Pichat and Auguste-Alexis Pillet, the first the director, the second the printer of a periodical publication called the Revue de Paris, and M. Gustave Flaubert, a man of letters, all three implicated:  1st, Laurent-Pichat, for having, in 1856, published in the numbers of the 1st and the 15th of December of the Revue de Paris, some fragments of a romance entitled, Madame Bovary and, notably, divers fragments contained in pages 73, 77, 78, 272, 273, has committed the misdemeanor of outraging public and religious morals and established customs; 2nd, Pillet and Flaubert are similarly guilty; Pillet in printing them, for they were published, and Flaubert for writing and sending to Laurent-Pichat for publication, the fragments of the romance entitled, Madame Bovary as above designated, for aiding and abetting, with knowledge, Laurent-Pichat in the facts which have been prepared, in facilitating and consummating the above-mentioned misdemeanor, and of thus rendering themselves accomplices in the misdeameanor provided for by articles 1 and 8 of the law of May 17, 1819, and 59 and 60 of the Penal Code.