The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert Part 6

You see unmistakably that she was not deceived; she felt clearly that there was something about it of which she had not dreamed. Let us take pages 433 and 434 and you will be still further convinced:

"When the night was rainy, they took refuge in the consulting-room, between the cart-shed and the stable. She lighted one of the kitchen candles that she had hidden behind the books. Rodolphe settled down there as if at home. The sight of the library, of the bureau, of the whole apartment, in fine, excited his merriment, and he could not refrain from making jokes about Charles which rather embarra.s.sed Emma.

She would have liked to see him more serious and even on occasions more dramatic; as, for example, when she thought she heard a noise of approaching steps in the alley.

"'Some one is coming!' she said

"He blew out the light.

"'Have you your pistols?'

"'Why?'

"'Why, to defend yourself,' replied Emma.

"'From your husband? Oh, poor devil!'"

And Rodolphe finished his phrase with a gesture which signified: I could crush him with a fillip.

She was amazed at his bravery, although she felt that there was a sort of indelicacy and nave grossness about it that was scandalizing.

"Rodolphe reflected a good deal on the affair of the pistols. If she had spoken seriously, it was very ridiculous, he thought, even odious; for he had no reason to hate the good Charles, not being what is called devoured by jealousy; and on this subject Emma had treated him to a lecture, which he did not think in the best taste.

"Besides, she was growing very sentimental. She had insisted on exchanging miniatures; they had cut handfuls of hair, and now she was asking for a ring--a real wedding-ring, in sign of an eternal union. She often spoke to him of the evening chimes, of the voices of nature. Then she talked to him of her mother--hers! and of his mother--his!

"Finally she wearied him."

Then, on page 453:

"He had no longer, as formerly, words so gentle that they made her cry, nor pa.s.sionate caresses that made her mad; so that their great love, which engrossed her life, seemed to lessen beneath her like the water of a stream absorbed into its channel, and she could see the bed of it. She would not believe it; she redoubled in tenderness, and Rodolphe concealed his indifference less and less.

"She did not know whether she regretted yielding to him, or whether, she did not wish, on the contrary, to enjoy him the more. The humiliation of feeling herself weak was turning to rancour, tempered by their voluptuous pleasures. It was not affection; it was like a continual seduction. He subjugated her; she almost feared him."

And you are afraid, Mr. Government Attorney, that young women might read this! I am less frightened, less timid than you. On my own personal account, I can admirably understand a father of a family saying to his daughter: Young lady, if your heart, your conscience, if religious sentiment and the voice of duty are not sufficient to make you walk in the right path, look, my child, look well at the weariness, the suffering, the grief and desolation attending the woman who seeks happiness outside her home! This language would not wound you in the mouth of a father, would it? M. Flaubert has said nothing but this; he has made a painting most true, and most powerful, of what the woman who dreams of finding happiness outside her house immediately discovers.

But let us go on and we shall come to all the adventures of the disillusion. You show me the caresses of Leon on page 60. Alas! she will soon pay the ransom of adultery, and that ransom you will find terrible, in some pages farther on in the book you condemn. She sought happiness in adultery, poor unfortunate one! And she found, besides the disgust and fatigue that the monotony of marriage can bring to the woman who does not walk in the path of duty, the disillusion and the scorn of the man to whom she has given herself. Was any of this scorn lacking in the book? Oh, no! and you cannot deny it, for the book is under your eyes. Rodolphe, who has shown himself so vile, gives to her a last proof of egoism and cowardice. She has said to him: "Take me! Carry me away!

I am stifling; I can no longer breathe in my husband's house, to which I have brought shame and misfortune." He hesitates; she insists. Finally, he promises, and the next day she receives a terrible letter under which she falls crushed and annihilated. She is taken ill and is dying. The number you are consulting shows you all the convulsions of a soul at war with itself, which perhaps could be led back to duty by an excess of suffering, but unfortunately she meets a boy with whom she had played when she was inexperienced. This is the movement of the romance, and then comes the expiation.

But the Government Attorney stops me and asks: Although it may be true that the purpose of the book is good from one end to the other, could you allow such obscene details as those that have been brought forward?

Very certainly I could not allow such details, but where have I allowed them? Where are they? I now arrive at the pa.s.sages most condemned. I will say no more of the adventure in the cab. This Court has heard enough with regard to that; I come to the pa.s.sages that you have pointed out as contrary to public morals and which form a certain number of pages in the December number. And, in order to pull away all the scaffolding of your accusation, there is only one thing to be done: to restore what precedes and what follows your quotations, in a word, to subst.i.tute the text complete as opposed to your cutting.

At the bottom of page 72, Leon, after making an agreement with Homais, the chemist, goes to the Hotel de Boulogne; the chemist goes there to find him.

"Emma was no longer there. She had just gone in a fit of anger. She detested him now. This failing to keep their rendezvous seemed to her an insult.

"Then, growing calmer, she at length discovered that she had no doubt calumniated him. But the disparaging of those we love always alienates us from them to some extent. We must not touch our idols; the gilt sticks to our fingers."

Great heavens! And it is for such lines as I have been reading to you that we are dragged before you. Listen now:

"They gradually came to talking more frequently of matters outside their love, and in the letters that Emma wrote him she spoke of flowers, verses, the moon and the stars, nave resources of a waning pa.s.sion striving to keep itself alive by all external aids. She was constantly promising herself a profound felicity on her next journey. Then she confessed to herself that she felt nothing extraordinary. This disappointment quickly gave way to a new hope, and Emma returned to him more inflamed, more eager than ever. She undressed brutally, tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding snake. She went on tip-toe, barefooted, to see once more that the door was closed; then, pale, serious, and without speaking, with one movement she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder." You have stopped here, Mr. Attorney; permit me to continue:

"Yet there was upon that brow covered with cold drops, on those quivering lips, in those wild eyes, in the strain of those arms, something vague and dreary that seemed to Leon to glide between them subtly as if to separate them."

You call this lascivious colour, you say that this gives a taste for adultery, you say that these pages excite and arouse the senses,--that they are lascivious pages! But death is in these pages! You did not think of that, Mr. Attorney, and were simply frightened to find such words as _corset, clothing which falls off_, etc.; and you attach yourself to these three or four words, such as corset and falling clothing. Do you wish me to show you that corsets can appear in a cla.s.sic book, a very cla.s.sic book? I shall give myself the pleasure of so doing, presently.

"She undressed herself ..." [ah! Mr. Government Attorney, how badly you have understood this pa.s.sage!] "she undressed hastily [poor thing], tearing off the thin laces of her corset that nestled around her hips like a gliding snake; then pale, serious, and without speaking, with one movement she threw herself upon his breast with a long shudder.... There was upon that brow covered with cold drops ... in the strain of those arms something vague and dreary...."

We must ask here where the lascivious colour is? and where is the severe colour? and ask if the senses of the young girl into whose hands this book might fall, could be aroused, excited--as she might by reading a cla.s.sic of cla.s.sics, which I shall cite presently, and which has been reprinted a thousand times without any prosecution, public or royal, following it. Is there anything a.n.a.logous in what I am going to read you? Is there not, on the contrary, a horror of vice that this "something dreary glides in between them to separate them?" Let us continue, I pray:

"He did not dare to question her; but, seeing her so skilled, she must have pa.s.sed, he thought, through every experience of suffering and of pleasure. What had once charmed now frightened him a little. Besides, he rebelled against his absorption, daily more marked by her personality. He begrudged Emma this constant victory. He even strove not to love her; then, when he heard the creaking of her boots, he turned coward, like drunkards at the sight of strong drinks."

What is lascivious there?

And then, take the last paragraph:

"One day, when they had parted early and she was returning alone along the boulevard, she saw the walls of her convent; then she sat down on a form in the shade of the elm-trees. How calm that time had been! How she longed for the ineffable sentiments of love that she had tried to figure to herself out of books! The first month of her marriage, her rides in the wood, the viscount that waltzed, and Lagardy singing, all repa.s.sed before her eyes. And Leon suddenly appeared to her as far off as the others.

"'Yet I love him,' she said to herself."

Do not forget this, Mr. Attorney, when you judge the thought of the author, when you wish to find absolutely lascivious colour where I can only find an excellent book.

"She was not happy--she never had been. Whence came this insufficiency of life--this instantaneous turning to decay of everything on which she leant?"

Is that lascivious?

"But if there were somewhere a being strong and beautiful, a valiant nature, full at once of exaltation and refinement, a poet's heart in angel's form, a lyre with sounding chords ringing out elegiac epithalamia to heaven, why, perchance, should she not find him? Ah! how impossible! Besides, nothing was worth the trouble of seeking it; everything was a lie. Every smile hid a yawn of boredom, every joy a curse, all pleasure satiety, and the sweetest kisses left upon your lips only the unattainable desire for a greater delight.

"A metallic clang droned through the air, and four strokes were heard from the convent-clock. Four o'clock! And it seemed to her that she had been there on that form an eternity. But an infinity of pa.s.sions may be contained in a minute, like a crowd in a small s.p.a.ce."

It is not necessary to look at the end of the book to find what is in it from one end to the other. I have read the incriminated pa.s.sage without adding a word, to defend a work which defends itself through itself. Let us continue leading from this same incriminated pa.s.sage, looking at it from a moral point of view:

"Madame was in her room, which no one entered. She stayed there all day long, torpid, half dressed, and from time to time burning Turkish pastilles which she had bought at Rouen in an Algerian's shop. In order not to have at night this sleeping man stretched at her side, by dint of manoeuvering, she at least succeeded in banishing him to the second floor, while she read till morning extravagant books, full of pictures of orgies and thrilling situations. Often, seized with fear, she cried out, and Charles hurried to her.

"'Oh, go away!' she would say.

"Or at other times, consumed more ardently than ever by that inner flame to which adultery added fuel, panting, tremulous, all desire, she threw open her window, breathed in the cold air, shook loose in the wind her ma.s.ses of hair, too heavy, and gazing upon the stars, longed for some princely love. She thought of him, of Leon. She would then have given anything for a single one of those meetings that surfeited her.

"Those were her gala days. She wished them to be sumptuous, and when he alone could not pay the expenses, she made up the deficit liberally, which happened almost every time. He tried to make her understand that they would be quite as comfortable somewhere else, in a smaller hotel, but she always found some objection."

You see all this is very simple when one reads the whole; but in cuttings like those of the Government Attorney, the smallest word becomes a mountain.

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:

I did not quote any of those phrases last mentioned; but since you wish to quote what I have not incriminated, it would be well not to pa.s.s over the foot of the page adjoining page 50.