This passage is the only one that remained in my mind ten years after my first perusal of "Madame Bovary," and it is a most admirable passage. It is not arbitrarily ironical, _à la_ Heine; irony, in this case, is simply keen pénétration, the work of a versatile mind. It is quite natural that Justin should be stirred to the most profound and poetic emotions by the death of the lady whom he adored; but it is none the less natural that he should previously have stolen potatoes, and that the grave-digger should intuitively discover in the fact of his clambering over the wall of the churchyard an indication of his potato theft. But that Flaubert should have these two circumstances, these two sides of life, before his eyes at the same time, is proof of an intellectual vigor and a command of his subject which, as far as I am aware, have never before appeared in a similar form. The artistic irony of Flaubert is here impersonal, necessary, true, and profound, in quite a different way than that of Mérimée. It is merely a stereoscopic view, by means of which reality is set forth in bold relief. It is no wonder that at first people scarcely discovered anything else in the work than this mode of contemplation, and the fidelity to real life that was its product. If we leave out of consideration the brief period when the absurd notion was afloat that Flaubert was an immoral writer, it may safely be said that the prevailing idea concerning him was that he was what is called a realist. He copied the insignificant and the important with equal conscientiousness, but with an evident predilection for the commonplace and the morally repulsive; in fact, everything with him centred in one plan, vigorous but harsh. The admirers of the book found it a most remarkable work; the fault-finders pronounced the tendency introduced by Flaubert photographic, but not artistic. People expected, or rather dreaded, a new "Madame Bovary" from his hand.