you will one day be cruelly deceived. But this man, gentlemen, who knows
how to speak strongly, makes use of the word pollution to express what
we would have called disillusion, and he has used the true word,
although vague to him who can bring to it no intelligence. I would have
liked better his not speaking so strongly, his not pronouncing the word
_pollution_, but rather averting the woman from deception, from
disillusion, and saying to her: Where you believe you will find love,
you will find only libertinism; where you think you will find happiness,
there is only bitterness. A husband who goes tranquilly about his
affairs, who kisses you, puts on his house cap and eats his soup with
you, is a prosaic husband revolting to you; you aspire to a man who will
love you, idolize you; poor child! that man will be a libertine who will
have taken you for a minute for the sake of playing with you. There will
be some illusion about it the first time, perhaps the second; you may
come back home joyous, singing the song of adultery. "I have a lover!"
but the third time you will not wish to go to him, for the disillusion
will have come. The man you have dreamed of will have lost all his
prestige; you will have found again in love the platitudes of marriage,
and this time with scorn, disdain, disgust and poignant remorse.

This, gentlemen, is what M. Flaubert has said, what he has painted, what
is in each line of his book; and this is what distinguishes his work
from all other works of the kind. Under his hand, the great
irregularities of society figure on each page, and adultery walks abroad
full of disgust and shame. He has brought into the common relations of
life the most powerful teaching that can be given to a young woman. And
Heaven knows that to those of our young women who do not find in lofty,
honest principle and stern religion enough to keep them steady in the
accomplishment of their duties as mothers, or who do not find it in that
resignation and practical science of life which bids us accommodate
ourselves to what we have, but who carry their dreams to the outside
(and the most honest, the most pure of our young women, in the prosaic
life of their households, are sometimes tormented by that which is going
on outside), a book like this would bring but one reflection. Of that
you may be sure. And this is what M. Flaubert has intended.

And notice carefully one thing: M. Flaubert is not the man who has
painted a charming