THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:

I did not reproach her for that, I said that she did not succeed in
loving him.

M. SENARD:

If I have been mistaken, if you made no reproach, that is the best
response that could be given. I believed that I understood you to make
one; let us see how I may be deceived. Moreover, here is what I read at
the end of page 36:

"And yet, in accord with theories she believed right, she desired to
make herself in love with him. By moonlight in the garden she recited
all the passionate rhymes she knew by heart, and, sighing, sang to him
many melancholy adagios; but she found herself as calm after this as
before, and Charles seemed no more amorous and no more moved.

"When she had thus for a while struck the flint on her heart without
getting a spark, incapable, moreover, of understanding what she did not
experience as of believing anything that did not present itself in
conventional forms, she persuaded herself without difficulty that
Charles's passion was nothing very exorbitant. His outbursts became
regular; he embraced her at certain fixed times. It was one habit among
other habits, and, like a dessert, looked forward to after the monotony
of dinner."

On page 37 we find a group of similar things. Now, here is where the
peril begins. You know how she has been brought up; and I beg you not to
forget this for an instant.

There is not a man who, having read this, would not say that M. Flaubert
is not only a great artist but a man of heart, for having in the last
six pages turned all the horror and scorn upon the woman and all the
interest towards the husband. He is a great artist, as has been said,
because he has left the husband as he was, he has not transformed him,
and to the end he is the same good man, commonplace, mediocre, full of
the duties of his profession, loving his wife well, but destitute of
education or elevation of thought. He is the same at the death-bed of
his wife. And nevertheless, there is not an individual to whom the
memory returns with more interest.

Why? Because he has kept to the end his simplicity and uprightness of
heart; because to the end he has fulfilled his duty while his wife was
led astray. His death is as beautiful and as touching as the death of
his wife is hideous. On the dead body of the woman the author has shown
the spots made by the vomiting of poison; they soil the white shroud in
which she goes to her burial, and he has made her, as he desired,