drew near. She was dead."

And then later, when the body is cold, above all should the cadaver,
which the soul has just left, be respected. When the husband is there
on his knees, weeping for his wife, when he extends the shroud over her,
any other would have stopped, but M. Flaubert makes a final stroke with
his brush:

"The sheet sank in from her breast to her knees, and then rose at the
tips of her toes."

This the scene of death. I have abridged it and have grouped it after a
fashion. It is now for you to judge and determine whether there is a
mixture of the sacred and the profane in it, or rather, a mixture of the
sacred and the voluptuous.

I have related the romance, I have brought a charge against it and,
permit me to say, against the kind of art that M. Flaubert cultivates,
the kind that is realistic but not discreet. You shall see to what
limits he has gone. A copy of the _Artiste_ lately came to my hand; it
is not for us to make accusations against the _Artiste_, but to learn to
what school M. Flaubert belongs, and I ask your permission to read you
some lines, which have nothing to do with M. Flaubert's prosecuted book,
only to show to what a degree he excels in this kind of painting. He
loves to paint temptations, especially the temptations to which Madame
Bovary succumbed. Well, I find a model of its kind in the lines to
follow, from the _Artiste_, for the month of January, signed _Gustave
Flaubert_, upon the temptation of Saint Anthony. Heaven knows it is a
subject upon which many things might be said, but I do not believe it
possible to give more vivacity to the image, stronger lines to the