charity bed of a hospital. It would be allowable to study and depict
all the poses of lasciviousness. It would be going against all the
rules of good sense. It would place the poison at the door of all, the
remedy at the doors of few, if there were any remedy. Who are the ones
to read M. Flaubert's romance? Are they men who are interested in
political or social economy? No! The light pages of Madame Bovary fall
into hands still lighter, into the hands of young girls, sometimes of
married women. Well, when the imagination has been seduced, when this
seduction has fallen upon the heart, when the heart shall have told it
to the senses, do you believe that cold reason would have much power
against this seduction of sense and sentiment? And then, man should not
clothe himself too much in his power and his virtue; man has low
instincts and high ideas, and, with all, virtue is only the consequence
of an effort ofttimes laborious. Lascivious pictures have generally 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 Léon'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