Madame Bovary

As public prosecutor, I demand

that further publication of this novel be forbidden,

and that its author, Gustave Flaubert,

be found guilty of committing the misdemeanor

of an outrage against public morals

and established custom.

This man, this Flaubert,

has created a character, a Frenchwoman,

who is at once a disgrace to France

and an insult to womanhood.

Emma Bovary, a woman who neglects her own child,

a child that needs her,

who scorns her own husband, a husband who loves her,

who introduces adultery and ruin into her home,

this is our heroine.

This corrupt, loathsome, contemptible creature,

this woman of insatiable passions,

this monstrous creation of a degenerate imagination,

this is the heroine we are asked to pity, to forgive,

why, perhaps, to love.

Gentlemen, nowhere in this entire work

does Gustave Flaubert ask us to blame Emma Bovary

and find her guilty of her crimes.

The state asks you, gentlemen,

to find Gustave Flaubert guilty of his.

Gustave Flaubert.

Gustave Flaubert,

do you deny the accusations of the public attorney?

I do.

And I don't.

If it were only that easy, gentlemen, to confirm or deny.

The public attorney has read you certain passages from my work.

Can I deny them?

He has summed up certain unpleasant facts

concerning its heroine

as if he were a schoolboy doing a problem of two and two.

But still, can I deny them?

He has indicted me for the crime of forgiveness.

What can I say?

Forgiveness is still, as I understand it,

among the Christian sentiments.

I do not deny it.

Gentlemen, I do deny

that I have made any attack upon public morality.

I have shown you the vicious, yes,

for the sake of understanding it

so that we may preserve the virtuous.

Furthermore, I deny that Emma Bovary

is a monstrous creation of my degenerate imagination.

Monstrous she may be,

but it was not I who created her.

Our world --

your world and mine -- created her,

as I shall attempt to demonstrate.

There are thousands of Emma Bovarys.

I only had to draw from life.

And there are hundreds and thousands of women

who wish they were Emma Bovary...

...and who have been saved from her fate not by virtue,

but simply by lack of determination.

Let me proceed.

Let me take you back, gentlemen,

not to the passages that the public attorney

has read for you.

Let me take you back to the time when Emma was 20,

when she was still Emma Roualt and lived on her father's farm.

The night when Charles Bovary first met her.

See her for the first time as he saw her.

Flaubert: Charles Bovary took little notice of the farm.

It was rude, substantial, lonely -- in a way, miserable.

He'd seen hundreds of such farms.

Good evening.

I should say, good morning.

Are you the doctor from Tostes?

Look, Madame Foulard, how young he is!

Could he fix a broken leg? That's all I want to know.

I don't know. I have no faith in young doctors.

We're just neighbors, but we never would've called you

from as far away as Tostes, except that our local doctor

oh, a very imposing man, I assure you, with a beard

happens to be away.

His wife, poor man, is ill.

Madame, I share your doubts.

May I say that my only qualifications are these

that it's a very stormy night,

that I have no wife, that I am the doctor who came.

Now if you'll show me to the patient,

you both can go home and get some rest.

Oh, right this way.

I want to see him set the leg, Mama.

Never mind! Never mind!

We're going home.

Good night, Emma. Try to get some rest.

A doctor should have a beard.

- Well, I thank you. - That's it.

If those harpies are gone, rouse out my daughter.

- She'll give you some breakfast. - All right.

Goodbye, Monsieur Roualt.

Doctor Bovary? You must be very tired.

- How is my father? - Your fa...

Oh, uh, it's a simple fracture,

lower right tibia, no complications.

I'll be back in a week or so.

Boots. Your father's gonna get along just, uh...

He'll get along fine.

I'm sure you'll want some breakfast. I'll try to hurry.

Oh, no, no. Take your time, please. Take, uh...

Take a great deal of time.

Please sit down.

- Perfume. - Don't you like it?

Mademoiselle, I've come into

many a farmhouse kitchen at dawn.

I've smelled many smells milk, children's vomit... sour

I've never smelled perfume before.

Then you do like it. I hope you like this too.

What are you doing here?

- Why, I live here. - Oh.

Yes, I know, but why didn't I see you when I came in?

I didn't let you. I looked awful.

You do me too great honor.

Dr. Bovary, when I saw you come in here out of the rain,

and -- and you were so wet, and you'd come so far,

and those awful women...

I cannot do you too great honor.

And if I please you, well, then, I am honored too.

You know, I've been thinking,

your father's leg might develop complications.

Perhaps I'd better come back tomorrow.

Uh...

Please, uh...

Here, gentlemen, is the monster.

Here is the corrupt and loathsome creature.

Here is the disgrace to France and the insult to womanhood --

Emma Roualt, the flower beyond the dunghill.

How had she grown here,

the kitchen drudge who had dreamed of love and beauty?

What are dreams made of? Where do they come from?

Absurd dreams of fashion and luxury

in a farmhouse bedroom.

Who was the messenger?

Ridiculous dreams of high romance

and impossible love.

The cavalier, the serenade,

the long ago and the faraway.

Images of beauty that never existed.

These things she loved.

Emma Roualt, motherless,

had attended a convent

in the provincial city of Rouen.

Emma at first detested the convent.

The scales, the eternal scales,

when she might have been learning love songs.

The discipline, the dreadful conformity.

The eternal uniform,

when a girl's young body is budding.

Perhaps it was the discipline itself and Emma's discontent

that drove her to dreams,

and taught a lonely girl to live within herself.

For these became the happy years,

these convent years,

when a young girl's mind could wander.

And then, as if to feed her dreams,

there was the old Swiss seamstress

who sang the love songs of the last century

and told stories about love in a Swiss chalet

and love in a villa in Italy,

and to make the geography lesson complete,

slipped them on the sly novels forbidden by the sisters,

so they could read about love in a cottage in Scotland

and love in a castle in Spain.

Novels. Novels.

She lived in a world of love, lovers, sweethearts,

persecuted ladies fainting in lonely pavilions,

horses ridden to death on every page,

gentlemen brave as lions, gentle as lambs,

always well dressed and weeping like fountains.

Oh, love in Italy! Oh, love in Spain!

It seemed to Emma that certain places on Earth

must bring happiness,

as a plant peculiar to the soil that cannot thrive elsewhere.

She would find it someday.

Happiness.

Fashion.

High romance.

One kind of dream and another kind of life.

The convent years ended and Emma returned to the farm.

Had she been a normal girl,

her dreams might likewise have ended,

but in Emma there was a terrifying capacity

for pursuing the impossible.

The dream did not end.

She had learned to be a woman

for whom experience would always be a prison,

and freedom would lie always beyond the horizon.

Here, in these books, in these pictures,

we had taught her that the strange was beautiful

and the familiar contemptible.

We had taught her to find glamor, excitement,

in the faraway

and only boredom in the here and now.