Page 287 - madame-bovary

give madame some distraction by taking her to the the-
atre at Rouen to hear the illustrious tenor, Lagardy. Homais,
surprised at this silence, wanted to know his opinion, and
the priest declared that he considered music less dangerous
for morals than literature.
But the chemist took up the defence of letters. The the-
atre, he contended, served for railing at prejudices, and,
beneath a mask of pleasure, taught virtue.
‘Castigat ridendo mores,’* Monsieur Bournisien! Thus
consider the greater part of Voltaire’s tragedies; they are
cleverly strewn with philosophical reflections, that made
them a vast school of morals and diplomacy for the people.’
*It corrects customs through laughter.
‘I,’ said Binet, ‘once saw a piece called the ‘Gamin de Par-
is,’ in which there was the character of an old general that
is really hit off to a T. He sets down a young swell who had
seduced a working girl, who at the ending—‘
‘Certainly,’ continued Homais, ‘there is bad literature as
there is bad pharmacy, but to condemn in a lump the most
important of the fine arts seems to me a stupidity, a Gothic
idea, worthy of the abominable times that imprisoned Gali-
leo.’
‘I know very well,’ objected the cure, ‘that there are good
works, good authors. However, if it were only those persons
of different sexes united in a bewitching apartment, deco-
rated rouge, those lights, those effeminate voices, all this
must, in the long-run, engender a certain mental libertinage,
give rise to immodest thoughts and impure temptations.
Such, at any rate, is the opinion of all the Fathers. Finally,’

Madame Bovary