MADAME BOVARY
569
the French law-courts for the shining example of impartiality and
good taste which they have shown in this affair? Solicited by a blind
and too vehement zeal for morality, by a mind which mistook the
terrain; placed before a novel which .was the work of a writer un–
known the day before-and what a novel, the most impartial, the
most trustworthy !-a field, commonplace like
all
fields, scourged,
drenched, like nature herself, by all the winds and tempests-the
law-courts, I say, showed themselves trustworthy and impartial like
the book which was pushed before them for a holocaust. And better
still, let us say, if one may base a guess on the considerations which
accompanied the verdict, that
if
the judges had discovered anything
truly objectionable in the book they would still have granted it amnes–
ty in favor and recognition of the
beauty
with which it is invested.
This remarkable concern for beauty, in men whose talents are pub–
licly engaged only for the Just and the True, is a most touching symp–
tom amidst the greedy passions of a society which has definitively
abjured all spiritual love, and which, neglecting
its ancient heart and
bowels,
pays heed only to its belly. In short, one can say that this
judgment, through its high poetic implications, is definitive; that the
Muse has won the day, and that all writers, at least all those worthy
the name, have been acquitted in the person of M. Gustave Flaubert.
Let us not say, as do so many others with a certain amount of
unconscious bad humor, that the book has owed its immense recep–
tion to the trial and acquittal. The book, untormented, would have
stirred up the same curiosity, created the same bewilderment, the
same excitement. Besides, the whole literary world had lent its approval
long before. Already in its first version, in the
Revue de Paris,
in
which some ill-considered cuts had destroyed its harmony, it had
elicited a lively interest. The situation of Gustave Flaubert, so abruptly
made famous, was at once excellent and bad; and for this equivocal
situation, over which his sure and marvelous talent was able to tri–
umph, I shall give, as well as I can, the various reasons.
III
Excellent; for since the disappearance from the scene of Balzac
-the prodigious meteor who will cover our country with a cloud of
glory, like a bizarre and unprecedented sunrise, like an
aurora polaris
flooding the frozen desert with its other-worldly glow-all curiosity
in regard to the novel had been quenched or fallen asleep. Some
striking experiments had been attempted, it must be admitted. M. de
