I have not said that there was any of it in its inner meaning.
If not in its inner meaning, where then, is it? In your cuttings, evidently. But here is the work entire, as the Court will judge it, and it can see that the religious sentiment is so forcefully imprinted there that the accusation of scepticism is pure slander. And now, the Government Attorney will permit me to say to him that it was not for the purpose of accusing the author of scepticism that all this trouble has been made. Let us proceed:
"At mass on Sundays, when she looked up, she saw the gentle face of the Virgin amid the blue smoke of the rising incense. Then she was moved; she felt herself weak and quite deserted, like the down of a bird whirled by the tempest, and it was unconsciously that she went towards the church, inclined to no matter what devotions, so that her soul was absorbed and all existence lost in it."
This, gentlemen, is the first appeal of religion to hold Emma from the trend of her passions. She has fallen, poor woman, and then been repelled by the foot of the man to whom she abandoned herself. She is nearly dead, but raises herself and becomes reanimated; and you shall see now what is written in the 15th of November number, 1856, page 548:
"One day, when at the height of her illness, she had thought herself dying, and had asked for the communion; and while they were making the preparations in her room for the sacrament, while they were turning the night-table, covered with sirups, into an altar, and while Félicité was strewing dahlia flowers on the floor, Emma felt some power passing over her that freed her from her pains, from all perception, from all feeling. Her body, relieved, no longer thought; another life was beginning; it seemed to her that her being, mounting toward God, would be annihilated in that love like a burning insense that melts into vapour. [You see that this is the language in which M. Flaubert speaks of religious things]. The bed-clothes were sprinkled with holy water, the priest drew from the holy pyx the white wafer; and it was fainting with a celestial joy that she put out her lips to accept the body of the Saviour presented to her."
I ask the pardon of the Government Attorney, I ask the Court's pardon for interrupting this passage; but I must needs say that it is the author who is speaking, and bring to your notice in what terms he expresses the mystery of the communion. Before going on with the reading, I must needs impress the literary value of this picture upon the Court and insist that they seize upon these expressions which are the author's own: