order to avoid this twofold difficulty, there is but
one course to follow, and that is, to relate to you the whole story of
the romance without reading any of it, or pointing out any incriminating
passage; then to cite incriminating texts, and finally to answer the
objections that may arise against the general method of indictment.

What is the title of the romance? _Madame Bovary_. This title in itself
explains nothing. There is a second in parentheses: _Provincial Morals
and Customs_. This is also a title which does not explain the thought of
the author but which gives some intimation of it. The author does not
endeavour to follow such or such a system of philosophy, true or false;
he endeavours to produce certain pictures, and you shall see what kind
of pictures! Without doubt, it is the husband who begins and who
terminates the book; but the most serious portrait of the work, the one
that illumines the other paintings, is that of Madame Bovary.

Here I relate, I do not cite. It takes the husband first at college, and
it must be stated that the boy already gave evidence of the kind of
husband he would make. He is excessively heavy and timid, so timid that
when he arrives at the college and is asked his name, he responds:
"_Charbovari_" He is so dull that he works continually without
advancing. He is never the first, nor is he the last in his class; he
is the type, if not of the cipher at least of the laughing-stock of the
college. After finishing his studies here, he goes to study medicine at
Rouen, in a fourth-story room overlooking the Seine, which his mother
rented for him, in the house of a dyer of her acquaintance. Here he
studies his medical books, and arrives little by little, not at the
degree of doctor of medicine, but that of health officer. He frequented
the inns, failed in his studies, but as for the rest, he had no other
passion than that of playing dominoes. This is M. Bovary.

The time comes for him to marry. His mother finds him a wife in the
widow of a sheriff's officer of Dieppe; she is virtuous and plain, is
forty-five years old, and has six thousand a year income. Only, the
lawyer who had her capital to invest set out one fine morning for
America, and the younger Madame Bovary was so much affected, so struck
down by this unexpected blow that she died of it. Here we have the first
marriage and the first scene.

M. Bovary, now being a widower, begins to think of marrying again. He
questions his m