Complete Works of Gustave Flaubert

by Gustave Flaubert

“Upon the feet, for not having fled, for not having been satisfied with long, solitary walks, for not having been weary soon enough in the midst of temptations which were ever beginning anew!”

  You did not prosecute that. Here are two men who, each in his own sphere, has taken the same thing and who have, according to his own idea, added the sin, the fault. Can it be that you make an indictment for simply translating the formula of the ritual: Quidquid deliquisti per oculos, per aurem, etc.?

  M. Flaubert has done just what M. Sainte-Beuve did, without plagiarizing. He has made use of a right which belongs to any writer, to add to what another has said and complete the subject. The last scene of the romance of Madame Bovary has been made a complete study of this kind from religious documents. M. Flaubert has taken the scene of the extreme unction from a book which a venerable ecclesiastic, one of his friends, lent to him; this same friend has read the scene and been moved to tears, not imagining that the majesty of religion was in any way offended. The book is entitled: An historic, dogmatic, moral, liturgical and canonical explanation of the catechism, with an answer to the objections drawn from science against religion, by the Abbé Ambroise Guillois, curate of Nôtre-Dame-du-Pré, 6th edition, etc., a work approved by His Eminence the Cardinal Gousset, N.N.S.S. the Bishops and Archbishops of Mans, of Tours, of Bordeaux, of Cologne, etc., vol. III., printed at Mans, by Charles Monnoyer, 1851. Now, you shall see in this book, as you saw just now in Bossuet’s, the principles, and, in a certain way, the text of the passages which the Government has condemned. It is no longer M. Sainte-Beuve, an artist, a literary rhapsodist, whom I am quoting; we now listen to the Church itself:

  “Extreme unction can give back health to the body if it be useful to the glory of God” … and the priest says that this often happens. Now, here is the extreme unction:

  “The priest addresses the sick with a short exhortation, if he is in a state to hear it, in order to dispose him worthily to receive the sacrament which is to be administered to him.

  “The priest then passes the unction upon the sick person with the stiletto or the extremity of his right thumb, which he dips each time in the oil. This unction should be made especially upon the five parts of the body which nature has given to man as the organs of sensation, namely: the eyes, the ears, the nostrils, the mouth and the hands.”

  “As the priest makes the unctions [we have followed from point to point the ritual which we have copied], he pronounces the words which correspond to them.

  “To the eyes, upon the closed eyeball: Through this holy unction and His divine pity, may God pardon all the sins that you have committed through sight. The sick person should at this moment have a new hatred of all the sins committed through sight: such as indiscreet looks, criminal curiosity, and reading what has caused to be born in him a host of thoughts contrary to faith or morals.”

  What has M. Flaubert done? He has put in the mouth of the priest, by uniting the two parts, what should be in his thoughts and also those of the sick person. He has copied purely and simply.

  “To the ears: Through this holy unction and through His divine pity, may God pardon all the sins that you have committed through the sense of hearing. The sick person should, at this moment, detest anew all the errors of which he is guilty from listening with pleasure to slander, calumny, proposed dishonesty and obscene songs.

  “To the nostrils: Through this holy unction and His divine pity, may the Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed through the sense of smell. At this moment the sick person should detest anew all the sins that he has committed through the sense of smell, his refined and voluptuous search for perfumes, all his sensibilities, all that he has breathed in of iniquitous odors.

  “To the mouth, upon the lips: Through this holy unction and through His great pity, may the Lord pardon you all the sins that you have committed by the sense of taste and words. The sick man at this moment should detest anew all the sins that he has committed in oaths and blaspheming … in eating and drinking to excess….

  “Upon the hands: Through this holy unction and through His great pity, may the Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed through the sense of touch. The sick man ought to detest at this moment all the larcenies, the injustice of which he has been guilty, all the liberties, more or less criminal, which he has allowed himself. The priest receives the unction on his hands from without because he has already received it from within at the time of his ordination, and the sick person receives it within.

  “Upon the feet: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may God pardon all the sins that you have committed in your walks. The sick man ought, at this moment, to detest anew all the steps that he has taken in the path of iniquity, such as scandalous walks, and criminal interviews…. The unction of the feet is made upon the top or on the sole, according to the convenience of the sick person, and according to the custom of the diocese where it takes place. The most common practice seems to be to make it on the soles of the feet.

  “And finally upon the breast. [M. Sainte-Beuve has copied this; we have not, because it was concerned with the breast of a woman.] Propter ardorem libidinis, etc.

  “On the breast: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may the Lord pardon all the sins which have been committed from the ardour of the passions. The sick man ought, at this moment, to detest anew all the bad thoughts to which he has abandoned himself, all sentiments of hatred, or vengeance that he has nourished in his heart.”

  And following the ritual, we could have spoken of something more than the breast, but God knows what holy anger would have been aroused in the Public Attorney’s office, if we had spoken of the loins!

  “To the loins: Through this holy unction and His great pity, may the Lord pardon all the sins that you have committed by irregular impulses of the flesh.”

  If we had said that, what a thunderbolt you would have had with which to attempt to crush us, Mr. Attorney! and nevertheless, the ritual adds: “The sick man ought, at this moment, to detest anew all illicit pleasures, carnal delights, etc….”

  This is the ritual; and you have seen the condemned article. It has nothing of raillery in it, but is serious and earnest. And I repeat to you that he who lent my client this book, and saw my client make the use of it that he has, has taken him by the hand with tears in his eyes. You see, then, Mr. Government Attorney, how rash — not to use an expression which in order to be exact is not too severe — is your accusation of our touching upon holy things. You see now that we have not mingled the profane with the sacred when, at each sense we indicated the sin committed by that sense, since it is the language of the Church itself.

  I insist now upon mentioning the other details of the charge of outrage against religion. The Public Minister said to me: “It is no longer religion but the morals of all time that you have outraged; you have insulted death!” How have we insulted death? Because at the moment when this woman dies, there passes in the street a man whom she had met more than once, to whom she had given alms from her carriage as she was going to her adulterous meetings; a blind man whom she was accustomed to see, who sang his song walking along slowly by the side of her carriage, to whom she threw a piece of money, but whose countenance made her shiver? This man was passing in the street; and at the moment when Divine pity pardoned, or promised pardon, to the unfortunate woman who was expiating the faults of her life by a frightful death, human raillery appeared to her in the form of the song under her window. Great Heavens! you find an outrage in this! But M. Flaubert has only done what Shakespeare and Goethe have done, who, at the supreme moment of death, have not failed to make heard some chant, or perhaps plaint, or it might be raillery, which recalls to him who is passing to eternity some pleasure which he will never more enjoy, or some fault to be atoned. Let us read:

  “In fact, she looked around her slowly, as one awakening from a dream; then in a distinct voice she asked for her looking-glass, and remained some time bending over it, until the big tears fell from her eye
s. Then she turned away her head with a sigh and fell back upon the pillows.”

  I could not read it, I am like Lamartine: “The punishment seems to me to go beyond truth….” I should not consider that I was doing a bad deed, Mr. Attorney, in reading these pages to my married daughters, honest girls who have had a good example and good teaching, and who would never, never go away from the straight path for indiscretion, or away from things that could and ought to be understood…. It is impossible for me to continue this reading and I shall hold myself rigorously to the condemned passages:

  “As the death-rattle became stronger [Charles was by her side, the man whom you did not see but who is admirable] the priest prayed faster; his prayers mingled with Bovary’s stifled sobs, and sometimes all seemed lost in the muffled murmur of the Latin syllables that tolled like a passing bell.

  “Suddenly on the pavement was heard a loud noise of clogs, and the clattering of a stick; and a voice, a raucous voice, sang:

  “‘Maids in the warmth of a summer day,

  Dream of love and of love alway;

  The wind is strong this summer day,

  Her petticoat is blown away.’“

  Emma raised herself like a galvanized corpse, her hair undone, her eyes fixed, staring.

  “Where the sickle blades have been,

  Nannette, gathering ears of corn,

  Passes bending down, my queen,

  To the earth where they were born.”

  “‘The blind man!” she cries.

  “And Emma began to laugh, an atrocious, frantic, despairing laugh, thinking she saw the hideous face of the poor wretch that stood out against the eternal night like a menace.

  “She fell back upon the mattress in a convulsion. They all drew near. She was dead.”

  You see, gentlemen, in this supreme moment, a recalling of her sin, and with it remorse and all that goes with it of poignancy and fear. It is not alone the whim of an artist wishing only to make a contrast without a purpose or a moral; she hears the blind man in the street singing the frightful song he had sung when she was returning all in a perspiration and hideous from an adulterous meeting; it is the same blind man whom she saw at each of those meetings; the blind man who pursued her with his song and his importunity; it is he who comes now to personify human rage at the instant when Divine pity comes to her and follows her to the supreme moment of death! And this is called an outrage against public morals! But I say, on the contrary, that it is an homage to public morals, that there is nothing more moral than this; I say that in this book the vice of education is awake, that it is taken from the true, from the living flesh of our society, and that at each stroke the author places before us this question: “Have you done what you ought for the education of your daughters? Is the religion you have given them such as will sustain them in the tempests of life, or is it only a mass of carnal superstitions which leaves them without support when the storm rages? Have you taught them that life is not the realization of chimerical dreams, that it is something prosaic to which it is necessary to accommodate oneself? Have you taught them that? Have you done what you ought for their happiness? Have you said to them: Poor children, outside the route I have pointed out to you, in the pleasures you may pursue, only disgust awaits you, trouble, disorder, dilapidation, convulsions, and execution….” And you will see that if anything were lacking in the picture, the sheriff’s officer is there; there, too, is the Jew who has seized and sold her furniture to satisfy the caprices of this woman; and the husband is still ignorant of this. Nothing remains for the unfortunate woman, except death!

  But, said the Public Minister, her death is voluntary; this woman died in her own time.

  But how could she live? Was she not condemned? Had she not drunk to the last dregs her shame and baseness?

  Yes, upon our stage we show women who have strayed (and I cannot say what they have done) as happy, charming and smiling. Questam corpore facerant. I limit myself to this remark: When they show them to us happy, charming, enveloped in muslin, presenting a gracious hand to counts, marquises and dukes, often responding themselves to the name of countess or duchess, you call that respecting public morals. But the man who depicts the adulterous woman dying a shameful death, commits an outrage against public morals!

  Now, I do not wish to say it is not your opinion that you have expressed, since you have expressed it, but you have yielded to a prejudice. No, it cannot be you, the husband, the father of a family, the man who is there, it is not you, that is not possible; without the prejudice of the speech of the prosecution and a preconceived idea, you would never say that M. Flaubert was the author of a bad book! Surely, left to your inspirations, your appreciation would be the same as mine. I do not speak from a literary point of view; but from a moral and religious standard, as you understand it and I understand it, you and I could not differ.

  They have said, furthermore, that we have brought upon the scene a materialistic curate. We took the curate as we took the husband. He is not an eminent ecclesiastic, but an ordinary priest, a country curate. And as we have insulted no one, expressed no thought or sentiment that could be injurious to a husband, so we have insulted no ecclesiastic. I have only a word to say beyond this. Do you wish to read books in which ecclesiastics play a deplorable rôle? Take Gil Blas, The Canon (of Balzac), Nôtre-Dame de Paris of Victor Hugo. If you wish to read of priests who are the shame of the clergy, seek them elsewhere, for you will not find them in Madame Bovary. What have we shown? A country curate, who in his function of country curate is, like M. Bovary, an ordinary man. Have I represented him as a gourmand, a libertine, or a drunkard? I have not said a word of that kind. I have represented him fulfilling his ministry, not with elevated intelligence, but as his nature allowed him to fulfill it. I have put in contact with him, and in an almost continual state of discussion, a type which lives — as the creatures of M. Prudhomme live — as all other creations of our time will live who are taken from truth and which it is not possible for one to forget, and that is the country pharmacist, the Voltairean, the sceptic, the incredulous man, who is in a perpetual quarrel with the curate. But in these quarrels, who is it that is beaten, buffeted, and ridiculed? It is Homais; to him is the most comic rôle given, because he is the most true, because he best paints our sceptical epoch, a fury whom we call a priest-hater. Permit me still to read to you page 206. It is the good woman of the inn who offers something to her curate:

  “‘What can I do for you, Monsieur le Curé?’ asked the landlady, as she reached down from the chimney one of the copper candlesticks placed with their candles in a row. ‘Will you take something? A thimbleful of cassis? A glass of wine?’

  “The priest declined very politely. He had come for his umbrella, that he had forgotten the other day at the Ernemont convent, and after asking Madame Lefrançois to have it sent to him at the presbytery in the evening, he left for the church, from which the Angelus was ringing.

  “When the chemist no longer heard the noise of his boots along the square, he thought the priest’s behavior just now very unbecoming. This refusal to take any refreshment seemed to him the most odious hypocrisy; all priests tippled on the sly, and were trying to bring back the days of the tithe.

  “The landlady took up the defense of her curé.

  “‘Besides, he could double up four men like you over his knee. Last year he helped our people to bring in the straw; he carried as many as six trusses at once, he is so strong.’

  “‘Bravo!’ said the chemist. ‘Now just send your daughters to confess to fellows with such a temperament! I, if I were the Government, I’d have the priests bled once a month. Yes, Madame Lefrançois, every month — a good phlebotomy, in the interests of the police and morals.’

  “‘Be quiet, Monsieur Homais. You are an infidel; you’ve no religion.’

  “The chemist answered: ‘I have a religion, my religion, and I even have more than all these others with their mummeries and their juggling. I adore God, on the contrary. I believe in th
e Supreme Being, in a Creator, whatever he may be. I care little who has placed us here below to fulfill our duties as citizens and fathers of families; but I don’t need to go to church to kiss silver plates, and fatten, out of my pocket, a lot of good-for-nothings who live better than we do. For one can know him as well in a wood, in a field, or even contemplating the eternal vault like the ancients. My God! mine is the God of Socrates, of Franklin, of Voltaire, and Béranger! I am for the profession of faith of the ‘Savoyard Vicar,’ and the immortal principles of ‘89! And I can’t admit of an old boy of a God who takes walks in his garden with a cane in his hand, who lodges his friends in the belly of whales, dies uttering a cry, and rises again at the end of three days; things absurd in themselves, and completely opposed, moreover, to all physical laws, Which proves to us, by the way, that priests have always wallowed in torpid ignorance, in which they would fain engulf the people with them.’

  “He ceased looking round for an audience, for in his bubbling over the chemist had for a moment fancied himself in the midst of the town council. But the landlady no longer heeded him; she was listening to a distant rolling.”

  What is this? A dialogue, a scene such as occurred each time that Homais had occasion to speak of priests.

  There is something better in the last passage of page 271:

  “Public attention was distracted by the appearance of Monsieur

  Bournisien, who was going across the market with the holy oil.

  “Homais, as we due to his principles, compared priests to ravens attracted by the odour of death. The sight of an ecclesiastic was personally disagreeable to him, for the cassock made him think of the shroud, and he detested the one from some fear of the other.”

  Our old friend, he who lent us the catechism, was very happy over this phrase; he said to us: “It is a true hit; it is indeed the portrait of a priestophobe whom the cassock makes think of a shroud, and who holds one in execration from a little fear of the other.” He was impious, and he profaned the cassock a little through impiety, perhaps, but much more because he was made to think of a shroud.