ernment Attorney, that young women might read
this! I am less frightened, less timid than you. On my own personal
account, I can admirably understand a father of a family saying to his
daughter: Young lady, if your heart, your conscience, if religious
sentiment and the voice of duty are not sufficient to make you walk in
the right path, look, my child, look well at the weariness, the
suffering, the grief and desolation attending the woman who seeks
happiness outside her home! This language would not wound you in the
mouth of a father, would it? M. Flaubert has said nothing but this; he
has made a painting most true, and most powerful, of what the woman who
dreams of finding happiness outside her house immediately discovers.

But let us go on and we shall come to all the adventures of the
disillusion. You show me the caresses of Leon on page 60. Alas! she
will soon pay the ransom of adultery, and that ransom you will find
terrible, in some pages farther on in the book you condemn. She sought
happiness in adultery, poor unfortunate one! And she found, besides the
disgust and fatigue that the monotony of marriage can bring to the woman
who does not walk in the path of duty, the disillusion and the scorn of
the man to whom she has given herself. Was any of this scorn lacking in
the book? Oh, no! and you cannot deny it, for the book is under your
eyes. Rodolphe, who has shown himself so vile, gives to her a last proof
of egoism and cowardice. She has said to him: "Take me! Carry me away!
I am stifling; I can no longer breathe in my husband's house, to which I
have brought shame and misfortune." He hesitates; she insists. Finally,
he promises, and the next day she receives a terrible letter under which
she falls crushed and annihilated. She is taken ill and is dying. The
number you are consulting shows you all the convulsions of a soul at war
with itself, which perhaps could be led back to duty by an excess of
suffering, but unfortunately she meets a boy with whom she had played
when she was inexperienced. This is the movement of the romance, and
then comes the expiation.

But the Government Attorney stops me and asks: Although it may be true
that the purpose of the book is good from one end to the other, could
you allow such obscene details as those that have been brought forward?

Very certainly I could not allow such details, but where have I allowed
them? Where are they? I now arrive at the passages most condemned. I
wi