your brain through the senses of smell and sight. He even feels the influence of the seasons, and writes from Provence: "The sap is rising in me, it is true. The spring that I find just awakening here stirs all my plant nature, and causes me to produce those literary fruits that ripen in me, I know not how."
The "meteor" is at its apogee. All admire and glorify him. It is the period when Alexandre Dumas, fils, wrote to him thrice: "You are the only author whose books I await with impatience."
The day came, however, when this dominant impassivity became stirred, when the marble became flesh by contact with life and suffering. And the work of the romancer, begun by the novelist, became warm with a tenderness that is found for the first time in Mont Oriol…
But this sentimental outburst that astonished his admirers quickly dies down, for the following year, there appeared the sober Pierre et Jean, that admirable masterpiece of typical reality constructed with "human leaven," without any admixture of literary seasoning, or romantic combinations. The reader finds once more in his splendid integrity the master of yore.
But his heart has been touched, nevertheless. In the books that follow, his impassivity gives way like an edifice that has been slowly undermined. With an ever-growing emotion he relates under slight disguises all his physical distress, all the terrors of his mind and heart.
What is the secret of this evolution? The perusal of his works gives us a sufficient insight into it.
The Minstrel has been received in country houses; has been admitted to "the ladies' apartments." He has given up composing those hurried tales which made his fame, in order to construct beautiful romances of love and death… The story teller has forsaken rustics and peasants, the comrades of the "Repues franches," for the nobility and the wealthy. He who formerly frequented Mme. Tellier's establishment now praises Michèle de Burne.
Ysolde replaces Macette. In "l'Ostel de Courtoisie," Maupassant cultivates the usual abstractions of the modern Round Table:
Distinction and Moderation; Fervor and Delicacy. We see him inditing love sonnets and becoming a knight of chivalry. The apologist of brutal pleasures has become a devotee of the "culte de la Dame."
Everywhere he was sought after, fêted, petted… But Maupassant never let himself be carried away by the tinsel of his prestige, nor the puerility of his enchantment. He despised at heart the puppets that moved about him as he had formerly despised his short stories and his petit bourgeois. "Ah," he cries, "I see them, their heads, their types, their hearts and their souls! What a clinic for a maker of books! The disgust with which this humanity inspires me makes me regret still more that I could not become what I should most have preferred-an Aristophanes, or a Rabelais." And he adds: "The world makes failures of all scientists, all artists, all intelligences that it monopolizes. It aborts all sincere sentiment by its manner of scattering our taste, our curiosity, our desire, the little spark of genius that burns in us."
Maupassant had to bend to the conditions of his new life. Being well bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and conventionality, and bowed before the idols of the cave he had entered…
If Maupassant never became the slave of worldly ideas, the creature of instinct that was part of his being acquired the refined tastes of the salons, and the manners of the highest civilization.
The novelist lived for some time in these enchanted and artificial surroundings, when, suddenly, his malady became aggravated. He was tortured by neuralgia, and by new mysterious darting pains. His suffering was so great that he longed to scream. At the same time, his unhappy heart became softened and he became singularly emotional. His early faculties were intensified and refined, and in the overtension of his nerves through suffering his perceptions broadened, and he gained new ideas of things. This nobler personality Maupassant owes to those sufferings dear to great souls of whom Daudet speaks. This is what he says:
"If I could ever tell all, I should utter all the unexplored, repressed and sad thoughts that I feel in the depths of my being. I feel them swelling and poisoning me as bile does some people. But if I could one day give them utterance they would perhaps evaporate, and I might no longer have anything but a light, joyful heart. Who can say?
Thinking becomes an abominable torture when the brain is an open wound. I have so many wounds in my head that my ideas cannot stir without making me long to cry out. Why is it? Why is it? Dumas would say that my stomach is out of order. I believe, rather, that I have a poor, proud, shameful heart, that old human heart that people laugh at, but which is touched, and causes me suffering, and in my head as well; I have the mind of the Latin race, which is very worn out. And, again, there are days when I do not think thus, but when I suffer just the same; for I belong to the family of the thin-skinned. But then I do not tell it, I do not show it; I conceal it very well, I think.
Without any doubt, I am thought to be one of the most indifferent men in the world. I am sceptical, which is not the same thing, sceptical because I am clear-sighted. And my eyes say to my heart, Hide yourself, old fellow, you are grotesque, and it hides itself."
This describes, in spite of reservation, the struggle between two conflicting minds, that of yesterday, and that of to-day. But this sensitiveness that Maupassant seeks to hide, is plain to all clear-seeing people.
He soon begins to be filled with regrets and forebodings. He has a desire to look into the unknown, and to search for the inexplicable.
He feels in himself that something is undergoing destruction; he is at times haunted by the idea of a double. He divines that his malady is on guard, ready to pounce on him. He seeks to escape it, but on the mountains, as beside the sea, nature, formerly his refuge, now terrifies him.
Then his heart expands. All the sentiments that he once reviled, he now desires to experience. He now exalts in his books the passion of love, the passion of sacrifice, the passion of suffering; he extols self-sacrifice, devotion, the irresistible joy of ever giving oneself up more and more. The hour is late, the night is at hand; weary of suffering any longer, he hurriedly begs for tenderness and remembrance.
Occasionally, the Maupassant of former days protests against the bondage of his new personality; he complains that he no longer feels absolutely as formerly that he has no contact with anything in the world, that sweet, strong sensation that gives one strength. "How sensible I was," he says, "to wall myself round with indifference! If one did not feel, but only understand, without giving fragments of oneself to other beings! … It is strange to suffer from the emptiness, the nothingness, of this life, when one is resigned, as I am, to nothingness. But, there, I cannot live without recollections, and recollections sadden me. I can have no hope, I know, but I feel obscurely and unceasingly the harm of this statement, and the regret that it should be so. And the attachments that I have in life act on my sensibility, which is too human, and not literary enough."
Maupassant's pity now takes a pathetic turn. He no longer despises, but holds out his hand to those unfortunates who, like himself, are tormented on the pathway without hope. The tears that he sees flow make him sad, and his heart bleeds at all the wounds he discovers. He does not inquire into the quality or origin of the misfortune. He sympathizes with all suffering; physical suffering, moral suffering, the suffering caused by treachery, the bitter twilight of wasted lives…
His mind has also become active. He desires to dabble in science. One day he studies the Arab mystics, Oriental legends, and the next, he studies the marine fauna, etc. His perceptions have never been so clear. His brain is in continual activity. "It is strange," he acknowledges, "what a different man I am becoming mentally from what I was formerly. I can see it as I watch myself thinking, discovering, and developing stories, weighing and analyzing the imaginary beings that float through my imagination. I take the same enjoyment in certain dreams, certain exaltations of mind, as I formerly took in rowing like mad in the sunlight."
For
