On the other hand, despite all his anger and derision, Flaubert wasn't an arrogant writer. And he had discovered a language that allowed him, through the framework of a novel, to analyse up-close his protagonists and those who were different from him. After reading in the letter to his mother how about his anger at his childhood friend's marriage and entry into mundane bourgeois life, we are reminded of the essential strength of Flaubert the novelist through the affection with which he described the same childhood friends in A Sentimental Education. We learn, too, of the deep compassion with which he discussed their "tomfoolery" and mental confusion. Here was a writer who could identify so thoroughly with his protagonists that he could feel in his own heart the misery and predicament of a struggling married woman, Madame Bovary, and convey that dilemma to readers in a clear idiom. 

Flaubert developed a special technique in which the novel's narrative voice came as close as possible to his protagonists' thoughts and inner worlds. This voice, this narrative technique, was imitated throughout France and later the world, and is more clearly perceptible to Flaubert specialists than to the general reader. Known as the "free indirect style", it was developed, rather than discovered, by Flaubert and does not make a distinction between the protagonists' thoughts and the contexts and events of which they are part. Furthermore, the narrative voice does not help the reader with tags like "she thought" or "he considered". And the descriptions of landscapes and settings, as should be the case in a novel, represent the protagonist's state of mind both through descriptive details and the choice of words. 

This is how we, the readers, come to see the world through the eyes of his characters, through their feelings and in their own words. After Jane Austen and Goethe, the "indirect free style" that Flaubert commonly but carefully (for a reader might suppose that Madame Bovary's feelings are Flaubert's thoughts) developed and practised was very influential and happily used in many non-Western countries like Turkey where the art of the novel and the language of modern narration developed after Flaubert's time. 

This style played a deterministic role not only in the formation of the art of the novel in "late-arriving" nation-states, but also in the emergence and adoption of national languages through literature and, of course, predominantly through the aid of the novel. 

The Flaubert that I love and admire, the Flaubert with whom I identify, is this second author: a great writer who, within the large canvas and panorama of the novel, discovered a new way to enter — suddenly, in a few words — his characters' inner lives. A writer who could approach his characters with the deep compassion and empathy demanded by the art of the novel, and as a result, could later simply declare, "I am Madame Bovary!" 

The derisive and belittling Flaubert that I've just now described is not at all distant from this compassionate Flaubert. 

It's not difficult for the reader who admires him to imagine these two Flauberts as chambers of the same heart. I've always wanted to identify with this author, who on the one hand felt boundless anger and resentment towards humanity, and on the other, nurtured a profound compassion for the same and understood men and women better than anybody else. Whenever I read his work, I'm urged to say, "Monsieur Flaubert, c'est moi!"