The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert | Page 7

toward God, would be annihilated in that love like a burning incense that melts into vapour."
In what tongue does one pray to God in language addressed to a lover in the outpourings of adultery? Without doubt they will tell us it is local colour, and excuse it on the ground that a vapourous, romantic woman does nothing, even in religion, like anybody else. There is no local colour which can excuse this mixture! Voluptuous one day, religious the next, there is no woman, even in other countries, under the sky of Spain or Italy, who murmurs to God the adulterous caresses which she gives her lover. You can appreciate this language, gentlemen, and you will not excuse adulterous words being introduced in any way into the sanctuary of the Divinity!
This is the second situation. I now come to the third, which is a series of adulteries.
After the religious transition, Madame Bovary is again ready to fall. She goes to the theatre at Rouen. The play is _Lucia di Lammermoor_. Emma returns to her old self.
"Ah! if in the freshness of her beauty, before the pollution of marriage and the disillusions of adultery, she could have anchored her life upon some great, strong heart, then virtue, tenderness, voluptuousness, and duty blending, she would never have fallen from so high a happiness."
Seeing Lagardy upon the stage, she had a desire to run into his arms, to take refuge in his strength, even as in the incarnation of love, and of saying to him: "Take me, take me away, let us go! thine, thine, with thee are all my ardour and all my dreams!"
Léon was with the Bovarys.
"He was standing behind her, leaning with his shoulder against the wall of the box; now and again she felt herself shuddering beneath the hot breath from his nostrils falling upon her hair."
You were spoken to just now of the pollution of marriage; then you are shown adultery in all its poesy, in its ineffable seductions. I have said that the expression should be modified to read: the disillusions of marriage and the pollution of adultery. Very often when one is married, in the place of happiness without clouds which one promises himself, he finds but sacrifice and bitterness. The word disillusion can then be used justifiably, that of pollution, never.
Léon and Emma have a rendezvous at the cathedral. They look around or they do not, it makes no difference. They go out.
"A lad was playing about the close.
"'Go and get me a cab!'
"The child bounded off like a ball by the Rue Quartre-Vents; then they were alone a few minutes, face to face, and a little embarrassed.
"'Ah! Léon! Really--I don't know--if I ought,' she whispered. Then with a more serious air, 'Do you know, it is very improper?'
"'How so?' replied the clerk. 'It is done at Paris.'
"And that, as an irresistible argument, decided her."
We know now, gentlemen, that the fall did not take place in the cab. Through a scruple which honors him, the editor of the Revue de Paris has suppressed the passage of the fall in the cab. But if the Revue lowered the blinds of the cab, it does allow us to penetrate into the room where they found a rendezvous.
Emma wished to leave it, because she had given her word that she would 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."
Once upon the sidewalk, Léon continued to walk; she followed him as far as the hotel; he mounted the stairs, opened the door and entered. What an embrace! Words followed each other quickly after the kisses. They told the disappointments of the week, their presentiments, their fears about the letters; but now all was forgotten, and they were face to face, with their laugh of voluptuousness and terms of endearment.
"The bed was large, of mahogany, in the shape of a boat. The curtains were in red levantine, that hung from the ceiling and bulged out too much towards the bell-shaped bed-side; and nothing in the world was so lovely as her brown head and white skin standing out against this purple colour, when, with a movement of shame, she crossed her bare arms, hiding her face in her hands.
"The warm room, with its discreet carpet, its gay ornaments, and its calm light, seemed made for the intimacies of passion."
We are told what happened in that room. Here is still a passage, very important as a piece of lascivious painting:
"How they loved that dear room, so full of gaiety, despite of its rather faded splendour! They always found the furniture in the same place, and sometimes hairpins that she had forgotten the Thursday before under the pedestal of the clock. They