Flaubert's mockery of bourgeois indifference to justice and legality contrasts his own devotion to justice as the supreme literary value, the virtue in which all others are comprehended. The just word – le mot juste – is a phrase expressing his ideal of linguistic precision associated with painstaking craft seeking exactly the right word to express exactly the right idea to convey exactly the right impression to his readers. Writing well, he claimed, is more than a matter of verbal felicity, although felicity is its reward. “[T]o write well is everything,” a writer's first duty, he told George Sand (Flaubert, Letters 2.231), but it is not an end in itself. Although he once proposed writing a book “about nothing, a book dependent on nothing external, which would be held together by the internal strength of its style” (1.154), his letters reveal that he was not satisfied with style for its own sake. It should be an avenue to illumination and “exaltation” (2.80). The wrong word is an affront not just to harmony, but to clear-sightedness and clear thinking.