Who is talking about putting yourself on the stage?  That, in truth, is of no use, unless it is done frankly by way of a chronicle.  But to withdraw one’s soul from what one does, what is that unhealthy fancy?  To hide one’s own opinion about the characters that one puts on the stage, to leave the reader therefore uncertain about the opinion that he should have of them, that is to desire not to be understood, and from that moment, the reader leaves you; for if he wants to understand the story that you are telling him, it is on the condition that you should show him plainly that this one is a strong character and that one weak.

L’Education sentimentale has been a misunderstood book, as I have told you repeatedly, but you have not listened to me.  There should have been a short preface, or, at a good opportunity, an expression of blame, even if only a happy epithet to condemn the evil, to characterize the defect, to signalize the effort.  All the characters in that book are feeble and come to nothing, except those with bad instincts; that is what you are reproached with, because people did not understand that you wanted precisely to depict a deplorable state of society that encourages these bad instincts and ruins noble efforts; when people do not understand us it is always our fault.  What the reader wants, first of all, is to penetrate into our thought, and that is what you deny him, arrogantly.  He thinks that you scorn him and that you want to ridicule him.  For my part, I understood you, for I knew you.  If anyone had brought me your book without its being signed, I should have thought it beautiful, but strange, and I should have asked myself if you were immoral, skeptical, indifferent or heart-broken.  You say that it ought to be like that, and that M. Flaubert will violate the rules of good taste if he shows his thought and the aim of his literary enterprise.  It is false in the highest degree.  When M. Flaubert writes well and seriously, one attaches oneself to his personality.  One wants to sink or swim with him.  If he leaves you in doubt, you lose interest in his work, you neglect it, or you give it up.

I have already combated your favorite heresy, which is that one writes for twenty intelligent people and does not care a fig for the rest.  It is not true, since the lack of success irritates you and troubles you.  Besides, there have not been twenty critics favorable to this book which was so well written and so important.  So one must not write for twenty persons any more than for three, or for a hundred thousand.

One must write for all those who have a thirst to read and who can profit by good reading.  Then one must go straight to the most elevated morality within oneself, and not make a mystery of the moral and profitable meaning of one’s book.  People found that with Madame Bovary.  If one part of the public cried scandal, the healthiest and the broadest part saw in it a severe and striking lesson given to a woman without conscience and without faith, to vanity, to ambition, to irrationality.  They pitied her; art required that, but the lesson was clear, and it would have been more so, it would have been so for everybody, if you had wished it, if you had shown more clearly the opinion that you had, and that the public ought to have had, about the heroine, her husband, and her lovers.