them.

Ah! you have accused me of having confounded the religious element with
sensualism, in the picture of modern society! Accuse rather the society
in the midst of which we live, but do not accuse the man who cries with
Bossuet: "Awake and be on thy guard against peril!" And say to the
fathers of families: Take care! These are not good customs for your
daughters; there is in all these mixtures of mysticism something which
sensualises religion; say that, and you will speak the truth. It is for
this that you accuse Flaubert; it is for this that I exalt his conduct.
Yes, he has given very good warning of the whole family of dangers
arising from exaltation among young persons, who take upon themselves
petty devotions instead of attaching themselves to a strong and severe
religion which would sustain them in a day of weakness. And now you
shall see whence comes the invention of the little sins "under the
whisperings of the priest." Read page 30:

"She had read 'Paul and Virginia,' and she had dreamed of the little
bamboo-house, the nigger Domingo, the dog Fidele, but above all the
sweet friendship of some dear little brother, who seeks red fruit for
you on trees taller than steeples, or who runs barefoot over the sand,
bringing you a bird's nest."

Is this lascivious, gentlemen? Let us continue.

THE GOVERNMENT ATTORNEY:

I did not say that passage was lascivious.

M. SENARD:

I ask your pardon, but it is precisely in this passage that you found a
lascivious phrase, and it was only by isolating it from what preceded
and what followed that you could make it seem lascivious.

"Instead of attending to mass, she looked at the pious vignettes with
their azure borders in her book, and she loved the sick lamb, the sacred
heart pierced with sharp arrows, or the poor Jesus sinking beneath the
cross he carries. She tried, by way of mortification, to eat nothing a
whole day. She puzzled her head to find some vow to fulfill."

Do not forget this; when one invents little sins to confess and seeks
some vow to fulfill, as you will find in the preceding line, evidently
one has got ideas that are a little false from somewhere. And now I ask
you if I have to discuss your passage! I continue:

"In the evening, before prayers, there was some religious reading in the
study. On week-nights it was some abstract of sacred history or the
Lectures of the Abbe Frayssinous, and on Sundays passages from the
'Genie du Christianism,