ally more
influence than cold reason. This is what I respond to that theory, that
is, as a first response; but I have a second.

I hold that the romance of _Madame Bovary_, from a philosophic point of
view, is not moral. Without doubt Madame Bovary died of poison; she
suffered much, it is true; but she died at her own time and in her own
way, not because she had committed adultery but because she wished to;
she died in all the prestige of her youth and beauty; she died after
having two lovers, leaving a husband who loved her, who adored her, who
found Rodolphe's portrait, his letters and Leon's, who read the letters
of a woman twice an adulteress, and who, after that, loved her still
more, even on the other side of the tomb. Who would condemn this woman
in the book? No one. Such is the conclusion. There is not in the book a
person who condemns her. If you can find one wise person, if you can
find one single principal virtue by which the adulteress is condemned, I
am wrong. But if in all the book there is not a person who makes her
bow her head, there is not an idea, a line, by virtue of which the
adulteress is scourged, it is I who am right, and the book is immoral!

Should it be in the name of conjugal honor that the book be condemned?
No, for conjugal honor is represented here by a devoted husband who,
after the death of his wife, meets Rodolphe and seeks to find upon the
face of the lover the features of the woman he loved. I ask you whether
you could stigmatize this woman in the name of conjugal honor when there
is not in the book a single word where the husband does not bow before
the adulteress?

Should it be in the name of public opinion? No, for public opinion is
personified in a grotesque being, in the Homais apothecary surrounded by
ridiculous persons whom this woman dominated.

Will you condemn it in the name of religious sentiment? No, for this
sentiment you see personified in the curate Bournisien, a priest as
grotesque as the apothecary, believing only in physical suffering, never
in moral, and little more than a materialist.

Will you condemn it in the name of the author's conscience? I know not
what the author thinks, but in chapter 10, the only philosophical one of
his book, I read the following:

"There is always after the death of any one a kind of stupefaction; so
difficult is it to grasp this advent of nothingness and to resign
ourselves to believe in it."

This is not a cry of unbelief, but