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The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert
Published by Good Press, 2019
EAN 4064066244996
Table of Contents
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.
The affirmation is grave on account of the personality that makes it: and, permit me to say to you that M. Gustave Flaubert is not to me an unknown man who has instructions to give me, and who has need of recommendations from me—I speak not only of his morality but of his position. I come here, into this precinct, fulfilling a duty of conscience after reading the book, after feeling myself exalted, by this reading, in all that is honest and profoundly religious. But, at the same time that I come fulfilling a duty of conscience, I come to fulfill a duty of friendship. I remember, and I can never forget, that his father was an old friend of mine. His father, by whose friendship I was long honoured, to the last day of his life, his father—permit me to say his illustrious father—was for thirty years surgeon-in-chief at the hospital at Rouen. He was in charge of the Dupuytren dissecting room, and in giving to science great instruction, he has endowed it with some great names; I will mention but one, that of Cloquet. He has not only left for himself a good name in science, he has left a grand memento in his immense service to humanity. And at the same time I am recalling my bond of friendship with him, I wish to tell you that his son, who has been dragged into Court for an outrage against morals and religion, this son is the friend of my children, as I was the friend of his father. I know his thought, I know his intentions, and the counsellor has the right here of placing himself as a personal guaranty of his client.
Gentlemen, a great name and great memories have obligations. Children were not wanting to M. Flaubert. There were three of them, two sons, and a daughter who died at twenty-one. The eldest has been judged worthy to succeed his father; and he is to-day, as he has been for many years, carrying on the mission which his father conducted for thirty years. The younger son is here; he is at your bar. In leaving them a considerable 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 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,
