The Public vs. M. Gustave Flaubert Part 10

"_Be it known_, that the defendants, and particularly Gustave Flaubert, energetically denied the charge brought against them, setting forth that the romance submitted to the judgment of the Court had an eminently moral aim; that the author had princ.i.p.ally in view the exposing of dangers which result from an education not appropriate to the sphere in which one lives, and that, pursuant to this idea, he has shown the woman, the princ.i.p.al personage in the romance, aspiring towards the world and a society for which she was not made, unhappy in her modest condition where she was placed by fate, forgetting first her duties as a mother, afterward lacking in her duties as a wife, introducing successively into her house adultery and ruin, and ending miserably by suicide, after pa.s.sing through all degrees of the most complete degradation, having even descended to theft;

"_Be it known_, that this data, moral without doubt in principle, must be completed in its development by a certain severity of language and by a reserve directed especially towards that which touches the exposition of the pictures and situations which the author has employed in placing it before the eyes of the public;

"_Be it known_, that it is not allowed, under pretext of painting character or local colour, to reproduce the facts, words, and gestures of the digressions of the personages which a writer gives himself the mission to paint; that a like system, applied to works of the mind as well as to productions of the fine arts, would lead to a realism which would be the reverse of the beautiful and the good, and which, bringing forth works equally offensive to the eye and to the mind, would commit a continual outrage against public morals and good manners;

"_Be it known_, that there are limits which literature, even the lightest, should not pa.s.s, and of which Gustave Flaubert and the co-indicted have not taken sufficient account;

"_Be it known_, that the work of which Flaubert is the author, is a work which appears to be long and seriously elaborated, from a literary point of view and as a study of character; that the pa.s.sages coming under the ordinance for dismissal, as reprehensible as they may be, are few in number as compared with the extent of the work; that these pa.s.sages, either in the ideas they expose, or in the situations they represent, bring out as a whole the characters which the author wished to paint, although exaggerated and impregnated with a vulgar realism often shocking;

"_Be it known_, that Gustave Flaubert affirms his respect for good manners, and all that attaches itself to religious morals; that it does not appear that his book has been written like certain other books, with the sole aim of giving satisfaction to the sensual pa.s.sions, to a spirit of license and debauch, or of ridiculing things which should be held in the respect of all;

"That he has done wrong only in losing sight of the rules which every writer who respects himself ought never to lose sight of, or forget: that literature, like art, in order to accomplish the good which it is expected to produce ought only to be chaste and pure in its form and expression;

"In the circ.u.mstances, _be it known_, that it is not sufficiently proven that Pichat, Gustave Flaubert and Pillet are guilty of the misdemeanor with which they are charged;

"The Court acquits them of the indictment brought against them, and decrees a dismissal without costs."