fortune and a great name, their father has left upon them the obligation
of being men of intelligence and of heart; that is to say, useful men.
The brother of my client has been thrown into a career where each day
brings its own service. This one has devoted his life to study and to
letters, the work before you being his first work. This first work,
gentlemen, which provokes the passions, as the Government Attorney has
said, is the result of long study and much thought. M. Gustave Flaubert
is a man of serious character, turning his attention, through his very
nature, to serious subjects, to sad subjects. He is not the man whom the
prosecuting attorney, in fifteen or twenty lines bitten out here and
there, has presented to you as a maker of lascivious pictures. No; there
is in his nature, I repeat, all that is gravest, most serious, and even
the saddest that one could imagine. His book, by restoring a single
phrase, by putting beside the quoted lines the lines which precede and
follow, will take on its veritable colour, as soon as you understand the
intentions of the author. And, of the too clever words to which you have
listened, there will remain to you only the memory of a sentiment of
profound admiration for a talent which can thus transform things.

I have told you that M. Gustave Flaubert was a serious and grave man.
His studies, conforming to his nature, have been serious and broad. They
have embraced not only all branches of literature, but the right
branches. M. Flaubert is not the man to be content with observations of
even the best where he lived; he has sought out the best in other
places; _Qui mores multorum vidit et urbes_.

After his father's death and the completion of his studies at college,
he visited Italy, and from 1848 to 1852 traveled through the countries
of the Orient,--Egypt, Palestine, Asia Minor--in which countries,
doubtless, a man traveling through and bringing to his travels a fine