In 1881 Turgenieff gave Tolstoy a book by a young Frenchman, telling him that he would find it amusing. This book was La Maison Tellier. Tolstoy revolted at the theme, but could not deny the freshness and power of the author. He found Maupassant "deficient in the moral sense"; yet he was interested and followed the progress of Flaubert\'s pupil. When Une Vie appeared, the Russian novelist pronounced it incomparably the best work of its author—perhaps the best French novel since Hugo\'s Les Misérables. He wrote this in an article entitled Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction. It was doubtless the Norman\'s clear, robust vision that appealed to Tolstoy, who, at that period was undergoing a change of heart; else how could he call Les Misérables the greatest novel of France, he the writer of Anna Karenina—the antipodes of that windy apotheosis of vapid humanitarianism, the characteristic trait of Hugo\'s epic of pity and unreality.

But Maupassant affected Tolstoy as he had affected Turgenieff. Guy has told us of his first [Pg 289] meeting with the latter, an artist superior to Tolstoy. "The first time I saw Turgenieff was at Gustave Flaubert\'s—a door opened; a giant came in, a giant with a silver head, as they would say in a fairy tale." This must have been in 1876, for in a letter dated January 24, 1877, Turgenieff writes: "Poor Maupassant is losing all his hair. He came to see me. He is as nice as ever, but very ugly just at present." In 1880 the young man published a volume of poetry, Des Vers. He was thirty years old (born August 5, 1850).

The literary apprenticeship of Guy to Gustave Flaubert is a thrice-told tale, and signifies only this: If the pupil had not been richly endowed all the lessons of Flaubert would have availed him little. Perhaps the anecdote has been overdone; Maupassant has related it in the preface to Pierre et Jean, and in the introduction to the George Sand-Flaubert correspondence—now at the head of the edition of Bouvard et Pécuchet. There are letters of Flaubert to his disciple full of his explosive good nature, big heart, irascibility and generous outpouring on the subject of his art. The thing that surprises a close student of this episode and its outcome is that Maupassant was in reality so unlike his master. And when I further insist that the younger man appropriated whole scenes from Flaubert for his longer stories, especially from L\'Education Sentimentale, I feel that I am uttering a paradox.

[Pg 290] What I mean is this: Maupassant\'s temperament was utterly different from Flaubert\'s. They were both prosecuted for certain things they wrote, Guy for a poem in 1880, at Estampes; there had been a détraqué nervous system in both cases. Yet, similar in ideals and physical peculiarities as were these two men, there was a profound psychical gulf between their temperaments. Flaubert was a great genius, a path breaker, a philosophic poet, and the author of La Tentation de St. Antoine, the nearest approach that France can show to a prose epic, and a book of beauty and originality. Maupassant was a great talent, and a growing one when disease cut him down. He imitated the externals of Flaubert, his irony, his vivid power of picture-making; even his pessimism he developed—though that was personal, as we shall soon see. And yet his work is utterly unlike Flaubert, probably unlike what Flaubert had hoped for—the old man died in 1881 and therefore did not live to enjoy Maupassant in full bloom. If it did not sound quite heretical I should be tempted to assert that the writer Maupassant most patterned after, was Prosper Mérimée, an artist detested by Flaubert because of his hard style. It is this precise style that Maupassant exhibits but coupled with a clarity, an ease, and a grace that Mérimée could not boast. Of Flaubert\'s harmonious and imaginatively coloured manner, Maupassant shows no trace in his six novels and his two hundred and odd tales.

[Pg 291] Maupassant was not altogether faithful to Flaubert\'s injunctions regarding the publication of his early attempts. He made many secret flights under different pen-names, though Boule de Suif was the first prose signed by him. It appeared in Les Soirées de Medan, and its originality quite outshone the more solid qualities of Zola\'s L\'Attaque au Moulin, and a realistic tale of Huysmans\'s, Sac au dos. It was this knapsack of story, nevertheless, that opened the eyes of both Zola and Goncourt to the genuine realism of Huysmans as opposed to the more human but also more sentimental surface realism of Maupassant. Huysmans proved himself devoid of the story-telling gift, of dramatic power; yet he has, if compared to Maupassant, without an iota of doubt, the more vivid vision of the two; "the intensest vision of the modern world," says Havelock Ellis. Pictorial, not imaginative vision, be it understood. In his mystic latter-day rhapsodies it is the realist who sees, the realist who makes those poignant, image-breeding phrases. Take up Maupassant and in his best tales and novels, such as La Maison Tellier, Boule de Suif, Une Vie, Fort Comme la Mort, to mention a few, you will be surprised at the fluidity, the artful devices to elude the harshness of reality, the pessimistic poetry that suffuses his pages after reading Huysmans\'s immitigable exposition of the ugly and his unflinching attitude before the unpleasant. And Huysmans\'s point of departure is seldom from an idea; facts furnish him with an adequate spring-board. Maupassant is more [Pg 292] lyric in tone and texture. Edmond de Goncourt, jealous of the success of the newcomer, wrote in his diary that Maupassant was an admirable conteur, but a great writer, never. Zola admitted to a few intimates that Guy was not the realist that Huysmans was. All of which is interesting, but proves nothing except that Maupassant wrote a marvellous collection of short stories, real, hyphenated short-stories, as Mr. Brander Matthews makes the delicate distinction, while Huysmans did not.

Edouard Maynial\'s La Vie et l\'?uvre de Guy de Maupassant is the most recent of the biographical studies devoted to our subject, though Baron Albert Lumbroso, who escapes by a single letter from being confounded with the theory-ridden Turin psychiatrist, has given us, with the approval of Guy\'s mother, the definitive study of Maupassant\'s malady and death. It is frequently quoted by Maynial; there is a careful study of it which appeared in Mercure de France, June, 1905, by Louis Thomas. And there is that charming volume, Amitié amoureuse, in which Guy is said to figure as the Philippe, by Henri Amic and Madame Lecomte du Nouy. Here we get another Maupassant, not the taureau triste of Taine, but a delightful, sweet-tempered, unselfish, and altogether lovable fellow. What was the cause of his downfall? Dissipation? Mental overwork—which is the same thing? Disease? Maynial, Lumbroso, and Thomas offer us such a variety of documents [Pg 293] that there can be no doubt as to the determining element. From 1880 to his death in 1893 Guy de Maupassant was "a candidate for general paralysis." These are the words of his doctor, later approved by Doctor Blanche, to whose sanitarium in Paris he was taken, January 7, 1893.

The father of Guy was Gustave de Maupassant, of an ancient Lorraine family. This family was noble. His mother was of Norman extraction, Laure de Poittevin, the sister of Alfred de Poittevin, Flaubert\'s dearest friend, a poet who died young. There is no truth in the gossip that Guy was the son of Flaubert. Flaubert loved both the Poittevins; hence his lively interest in Guy. There was a younger brother, Hervé de Maupassant, who died of a mental disorder. His daughter, Simone, is the legatee of her uncle. The marriage of the elder Maupassants proved a failure. They are both dead now, and the subject may be discussed to the point of admitting that the father was not a domestic man; Guy inherited his taste for Bohemian life, and Madame Laure de Maupassant, after separating from her husband, was subject to nervous crises in which she attempted her life by swallowing laudanum and by strangling herself with her own hair. She was rescued both times, but she was an invalid to the last. A loving mother, she overlooked the education of Guy, and let it be said that no happier child ever lived. His early [Pg 294] days were passed at Etretat, at the Villa Verguies, and generally in the open air.

The future writer adored the sea; he has written many tales of the water, of yachts and river sports. He went to the seminary at Yvetot and the lyceum of Rouen, but his education was desultory, his reading principally of his own selection—like most men of individual character. He was a farceur, fond of mystifications, of rough practical jokes, of horseplay. His physique was more Flemish than French—a deep chest, broad shoulders, heavy muscular arms and legs, a small head, a bull-neck. He looked like the mate of a deep-sea ship rather than a literary man. Add to this a craze for rowing, canoeing, swimming, boxing, fencing, and running. An all............