said to herself."

Do not forget this, Mr. Attorney, when you judge the thought of the
author, when you wish to find absolutely lascivious colour where I can
only find an excellent book.

"She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency
of life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she
leant?"

Is that lascivious?

"But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant
nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in
angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac
epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how
impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it;
everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a
curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips
only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.

"A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard
from the convent-clock. Four o'clock! And it seemed to her that she had
been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of passions may be
contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small space."

It is not necessary to look at the end of the book to find what is in it
from one end to the other. I have read the incriminated passage without
adding a word, to defend a work which defends itself through itself. Let
us continue leading from this same incriminated passage, looking at it
from a moral point of view:

"Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all day
long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish
pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop. In order
not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of
manoeuvering, she at least succeeded in banishing him to the second
floor, while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures
of orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried
out, and Charles hurried to her.

"'Oh, go away!' she would say.

"Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame
to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw
open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her
masses of hair, too heavy, and gazing upon the stars, longed for some
princely love. She thought of him, of Leon. She would then have given
anything for a single one of those meetings that surfei