discards all clothing. To impose upon art the one rule of public decency
is not to subject it, not to dishonor it. One grows great only by rule.
These, gentlemen, are the principles which we profess, this the doctrine
which we defend with conscience.

* * * * *

_Plea for the Defense, by_


M. SENARD


Gentlemen, M. Gustave Flaubert has been accused before you of making a
bad book; of having, in this book, outraged public morals and religion.
M. Gustave Flaubert is beside me and affirms before you that he has made
an honest book; he affirms before you that the thought in his book, from
the first line to the last, is a moral thought; and that, if it were not
perverted (and you have seen during the last hour how great a talent one
may have for perverting a thought) it would be (and will become again
presently) for you, as it has been already for the readers of the book,
an eminently moral and religious thought capable of being translated
into these words: the excitation of virtue through the horror of vice.

I bring M. Gustave Flaubert's affirmation here to you, and I put it
fearlessly in the light of the prosecuting attorney's speech, for this
affirmation is grave; and it is through the personality of its maker,
through the circumstances which have led to the writing of the book,
that I am going to make it understood to you.