Madame Bovary - Penn State University

Flaubertwere hot; some sweet cider was brought out, and they drank But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The theatre,together to madame’s complete restoration.he contended, served for railing at prejudices, and, beneath aBinet was there; that is to say, a little lower down against mask of pleasure, taught virtue.the terrace wall, fishing for crayfish. Bovary invited him to “‘Castigat ridendo mores,’* Monsieur Bournisien! Thus considerthe greater part of Voltaire’s tragedies; they are cleverlyhave a drink, and he thoroughly understood the uncorking ofthe stone bottles.strewn with philosophical reflections, that made them a vast“You must,” he said, throwing a satisfied glance all round school of morals and diplomacy for the people.”him, even to the very extremity of the landscape, “hold the “I,” said Binet, “once saw a piece called the ‘Gamin de Paris,’bottle perpendicularly on the table, and after the strings are in which there was the character of an old general that is reallycut, press up the cork with little thrusts, gently, gently, as hit off to a T. He sets down a young swell who had seduced aindeed they do seltzer-water at restaurants.”working girl, who at the ending—”But during his demonstration the cider often spurted right “Certainly,” continued Homais, “there is bad literature asinto their faces, and then the ecclesiastic, with a thick laugh, there is bad pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the mostnever missed this joke—important of the fine arts seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic“Its goodness strikes the eye!”idea, worthy of the abominable times that imprisonedHe was, in fact, a good fellow and one day he was not even Galileo.”scandalised at the chemist, who advised Charles to give madame “I know very well,” objected the cure, “that there are goodsome distraction by taking her to the theatre at Rouen to hear the works, good authors. However, if it were only those personsillustrious tenor, Lagardy. Homais, surprised at this silence, wanted of different sexes united in a bewitching apartment, decoratedrouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this must,to know his opinion, and the priest declared that he consideredmusic less dangerous for morals than literature.*It corrects customs through laughter.187