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Ward

until mid-May of 1857, and he commented twice on Flaubert for his New York readers, revealing his critical attitude toward gov-emment policy, but his conventional, though educated, taste.

The “Revue de Paris,” which brought down upon itself the wrath of the Government last spring by speaking disre-spectfully of the Emperor Augustus, has just been subject-ed to another attack from the powers that be. It recently published a serial novel, by a M. Flaubert, whose name was not, I fancy, very generally known to the public. The story was somewhat in Balzacs style, with considerable power of minutę detail. It related the seduction of a country wife by a city dandy, and the conseąuent ruin, in mind, body, and fortunę, of herself and her family; altogether an unpleasant narrative, on many accounts, and particularly from the absence of any approach to poetical justice [...]. StiU, it was not morę objectionable than the majority of Balzac's works. [...] Nevertheless, the Government insti-tuted a prosecution against the author, editor, and pub-lisher for “an outrage of morality; ” but it would have been a little too absurd, in the face of what issues daily from the Parisian press, to have punished the accused in any way; they were acąuitted at once; indeed, it was obvi-ous that the prosecution had only been instituted for the purpose of annoying them and damaging the Review.¹⁶

Later in 1857, Bristed retumed to the question of Madame Bovary to revise his previous report. After commenting that the book “madę considerable noise in France, and some in England,” he

¹⁶ The Spirit of the Times. 27, n° 4 (March 7, 1857): 43.

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