the way, that priests have always wallowed in
torpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.'

"He ceased looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the
chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town
council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a
distant rolling."

What is this? A dialogue, a scene such as occurred each time that Homais
had occasion to speak of priests.

There is something better in the last passage of page 271:

"Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur
Bournisien, who was going across the market with the holy oil.

"Homais, as we due to his principles, compared priests to ravens
attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was
personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the
shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other."

Our old friend, he who lent us the catechism, was very happy over this
phrase; he said to us: "It is a true hit; it is indeed the portrait of a
_priestophobe_ whom the cassock makes think of a shroud, and who holds
one in execration from a little fear of the other." He was impious, and
he profaned the cassock a little through impiety, perhaps, but much more
because he was made to think of a shroud.

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