place of doing as some classic authors have done, (as
the Public Attorney knows full well, but whom he forgot when he wrote
his address) a few pages of whose writings I have with me here, (not to
read to you but for you to run through in Court--and I might quote a few
lines here presently), in place of doing as our great classic authors,
our great masters have done, who never hesitate at description when they
have come to the scene of a union of the senses between man and woman,
M. Flaubert contents himself with a word. All his descriptive power
disappears, because his thought is chaste; because where he might write
in his own manner and with the magic of his style, he feels that there
are some things that should not be described or even touched upon. The
Public Attorney finds that he has still said too much. When I have shown
him some men who, in great philosophical works, have delighted in
descriptions of these things, and when in the light of this fact I have
shown that this man, who possesses the descriptive faculty to so high a
degree and who, far from using it, desists and abstains from it, I shall
indeed have the right to ask why this accusation has been brought?

Nevertheless, gentlemen, just as he has described to us the pleasant
cradle of Emma's infancy, with its foliage, its rose-colored and white
flowers which gladdened her with their blossoms and their perfume, so he
has described her when she went out from there into other paths, into
paths where she found mire, where her feet became soiled from its
contact, when the mire rose higher than herself and--he need not have
told it! But that would be to suppress the book completely, and I am
going far enough to say would suppress its moral element under a pretext
of defending it; for if a fault cannot be shown, if it cannot be pointed
out, if in a picture of real life which aims to show, through thought,
peril, fall and punishment, you would debar painting such as this, it is
evident you would cut out of the book its whole purpose.

This book was not a matter of a few hours' amusement for my client. It
represents two or three years of incessant study. And now I am going to
tell you something more: M. Flaubert who, after so many years of labor,
so many of study, so many journeys, so many notes culled from authors he
had read,--and Heaven grant you may see the fountain-head from which he
has drawn, for this strange fact will take upon itself his
justification--M.