intelligence, could acquire something exalted, something poetic, as well
as the colour and prestige of style which the public minister has just
pointed out, to make good the misdemeanor that he imputes. That prestige
of style, those literary qualities pointed to with _éclat_ in this
debate, are there, but after no fashion can they be brought up for
indictment.

Since his return, in 1852, M. Gustave Flaubert has written and sought to
produce in a grand outline the result of his close and serious studies,
the result of what he had gathered in his journeys.

What is the outline he has chosen, the subject he has taken, and how has
he treated it? My client belongs to any of the schools, whose names I
have just learned in the Attorney's speech. Heaven knows he belongs to
the realistic school, in that he occupies himself with the reality of
things. He belongs to the psychological school, in the sense that it is
not material things which engage him, but human sentiment and the
development of the passions wherever the human being is placed. He
belongs to the romantic school less perhaps than to any other, because,
if romanticism appears in his book, as does realism, it appears only in
some ironical expressions here and there, which the public attorney has
taken seriously. What M. Flaubert especially wished was to take a
subject of study from real life, creating from it some true types of the
middle class, arriving finally at some useful result. Yes, what has most
occupied my client in the studies to which he has devoted himself, is
precisely this useful aim, followed out in putting upon the scene three
or four personages from actual society, living in the conditions of real
life, and presenting them to the eyes of the reader in a true picture of
what is met with very often in the world.