ich his religious sentiment is expressed. And
yet we have understood from the Government Attorney that scepticism
reigned in M. Flaubert's book from one end to the other. Where, I pray
you, have you found this scepticism?

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:

I have not said that there was any of it in its inner meaning.

M. SENARD:

If not in its inner meaning, where then, is it? In your cuttings,
evidently. But here is the work entire, as the Court will judge it, and
it can see that the religious sentiment is so forcefully imprinted there
that the accusation of scepticism is pure slander. And now, the
Government Attorney will permit me to say to him that it was not for the
purpose of accusing the author of scepticism that all this trouble has
been made. Let us proceed:

"At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the
Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved;
she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird
whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards
the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was
absorbed and all existence lost in it."

This, gentlemen, is the first appeal of religion to hold Emma from the
trend of her passions. She has fallen, poor woman, and then been
repelled by the foot of the man to whom she abandoned herself. She is
nearly dead, but raises herself and becomes reanimated; and you shall
see now what is written in the 15th of November number, 1856, page 548:

"One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself
dying, and had asked for the communion; and while they were making the
preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the
night-table, covered with sirups, into an altar, and while Felicite was
strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over
her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all
feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was
beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would
be annihilated in that love like a burning insense that melts into
vapour. [You see that this is the language in which M. Flaubert speaks
of religious things]. The bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water,
the priest drew from the holy pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting
with a celestial joy that she put out her lips to accept the body of the
Saviour presented to her."