MADAME BOVARY
575
increasingly more contagious hypocrisy, and to consider it ridiculous
for men and women, perverted to the point of triviality, to raise a
hue and cry over an unfortunate author who has deigned with his
chaste rhetoric to throw a veil of glory over the adventures of the
bedchamber, always repulsive and grotesque, when Poetry refuses
to caress them with her soft clarity of an opaline bed-lamp.
If
I pursued further this line of analysis, I would never finish
with
Madame Bovary;
the book, essentially suggestive, might inspire
a volume of observations. For the moment I will limit myself to re–
marking that several of its most important episodes were originally
either neglected or vituperously attacked by the critics. Examples:
the episode of the botched operation for club-foot, and that very re–
markable one, so filled with desolation, so profoundly
modern,
in
which the future adulteress-for she is still only at the beginning of
the downward path, unfortunate woman !-goes to ask help of the
Church, of the Divine Mother, of Her who has no excuses for not
being always ready, of that Pharmacy where none has the right to
go to sleep ! The good cure Bournisien, solely absorbed by the little
urchins of his catechism class performing gymnastics over the pews
and benches of the church, ingenuously replies: "Since you are sick,
Madame, and since your husband is a doctor,
why don't you go find
your husband?"
Who is the woman who would not, before this failure on the
part of the cure, proceed, like a madwoman granted amnesty, to
plunge her head in the turbulent waters of adultery? And who is
there among us who has not, at a more naive age and in troubled
circumstances, been forced to make the .acquaintance of an incom–
petent priest?
VI
I had originally intended, with two books of the same author on
hand
(Madame Bovary
and
La Tentation de Saint
Antoine~
install–
ments of which have not yet been gathered together by the publisher),
to build up a sort of parallel between them. I wished to establish some
equations and correspondences. It would have been easy for me to
reveal, beneath the interwoven detail of
Madame Bovary,
the high
qualities of
irony
and
lyricism
which shine forth to an extreme from
the pages of
La Tentation de Saint Antoine.
Here the poet has put on
no disguise, and his
Eo vary,
tempted by
all
the demons of illusion, and
of heresy, by all the foulness of surrounding matter-his
Saint Antoine
