"And do not ask me, Christians, in what way this great change of pleasure into punishment will come about. The thing is proved by the Scriptures. It is Truth who has said it, it is the All-Powerful who has made it so. And sometimes, if you will look at the nature of the passions to which you abandon your heart, you will easily comprehend that they may become an intolerable punishment. They all have in themselves cruel pain, disgust and bitterness. They all have an infinity which is angered by not being able to be satisfied. There are transports of rage mingled in all of them which degenerates into a kind of fury not less painful than unreasonable. Love, if I may be permitted so to name it in this guise, has its uncertainties, its violent agitations, its irresolute resolutions and an abyss of jealousies."
"Ah! What, then, is easier than making of our passions an insupportable pain or sin, when, if we cut out, as is very just, the little sweetness through which they lead us, there is left of them only the cruel disquiet and bitterness with which they abound? Our sins are against us, our sins are upon us, our sins are in the midst of us; like an arrow piercing our body, an insupportable weight upon our head, a poison devouring our entrails."
Is not all that you have just listened to designed to show you the bitterness of passion? I leave you this book, lined and thumb-marked by the studious man who has found his thought there. And that man, who has been inspired from a source of this kind, who has written of adultery in the terms you have listened to, is prosecuted for outrage of public and religious morals!
A few lines still upon the _woman sinner_, and you will see how M. Flaubert, having decided to paint this ardour, understood taking inspiration from this model:
"But, punished for our error, without being deceived by it, we seek in change the remedy for our scorn; we wander from object to object, and if, finally there is some one who holds us, it is not because we are content with our choice, but because we are bound by our inconstancy."
"All appeared to her empty, false, disgusting in these creatures: far from finding there those first charms which her heart had had so much difficulty in defending, she saw in them now only frivolity, danger and vanity."