"At about six o'clock, the carriage stopped in a back street of the Beauvoisine Quarter, and a woman got out, who walked with her veil down, and without turning her head.
"On reaching the inn, Madame Bovary was surprised not to see the diligence. Hivert, who had waited for her fifty-three minutes, had at last started.
"Nothing, however, could prevent her setting out; she had promised to return that evening. Moreover, Charles expected her, and in her heart she felt already that cowardly docility that is for some women at once the chastisement and atonement of adultery."
M. Flaubert calls my attention to the fact that the Public Attorney condemned this last clause.
It is certain that if he had made a reproach it would have fallen before these words: "at once the chastisement and atonement of adultery." Furthermore, that could be made a matter of reproach with as much foundation as the other quotations, for in all that you have condemned there is no point that can be seriously held.
Now, gentlemen, this kind of fantastic journey having displeased the editors of the _Revue_, it was suppressed. This was certainly excess of reserve on the part of the _Revue_; and it is very certain that it is not an excess of reserve which could furnish material for a lawsuit. You shall see now what has furnished the material. What is not seen, what has been suppressed, comes thus to appear a very strange thing. People imagine many things, and often those which do not exist, as you have seen from the reading of the original passage. Heavens! Do you know what they imagined? Probably that there was in the suppressed passage something analogous to that which you will have the goodness to read in one of the most marvellous romances from the pen of an honorable member of the French Academy, M. Mérimée.
M. Mérimée, in a romance entitled _The Double Mistake_, describes a scene which took place in a postchaise. It is not the locality where the carriage is that is of importance, it is, as here, in the detail of what is done in the interior. I do not wish to abuse the audience, and will pass the book to the Public Attorney and to the court. If we had written a half, or a quarter part of what M. Mérimée wrote, I should find some embarrassment in the task that has been given me, or rather I should have to modify it; in place of saying what I have said, and what I affirm, that M. Flaubert has written a good book, an honest book, useful and moral, I should say: literature has its rights; M. Mérimée has made a very remarkable literary work, and it is not necessary to show ourselves too particular about details when the whole is irreproachable. I take my stand there; I should acquit, and you will acquit. Great Heavens! It is not by omission that an author can sin in a matter of this kind. And besides, you will have the detail of that which took place in the cab. But as my client himself was content to make a journey, revealing what passed in the interior of the carriage only by a bare hand which appeared under the yellow silk curtains and threw out bits of torn paper which were scattered by the wind and settled down afar off like white butterflies upon a field of red clover all in flower, as my client was content with that, no one knew anything about it and everyone supposed--from the suppression itself--that he had at least said as much as the member of the French Academy. You have seen that there was nothing in it.