t, as does
the foul assassin in "Petite Roque," or Duroy, as does the sly hero of
"Bel-Ami," or Bretigny, as does the vile seducer of "Mont Oriol," or
Cesaire, the son of Old Amable in the novel of that name,--this
degraded type abounds in Maupassant's stories, evoked with a ferocity
almost jovial where it meets the robustness of temperament which I have
pointed out, a ferocity which gives them a reality more exact still
because the half-civilized person is often impulsive and, in
consequence, the physical easily predominates. There, as elsewhere, the
degenerate is everywhere a degenerate who gives the impression of being
an ordinary man.

There are quantities of men of this stamp in large cities. No writer
has felt and expressed this complex temperament with more justice than
De Maupassant, and, as he was an infinitely careful observer of milieu
and landscape and all that constitutes a precise middle distance, his
novels can be considered an irrefutable record of the social classes
which he studied at a certain time and along certain lines. The Norman
peasant and the Provencal peasant, for example; also the small
officeholder, the gentleman of the provinces, the country squire, the
clubman of Paris, the journalist of the boulevard, the doctor at the
spa, the commercial artist, and, on the feminine side, the servant
girl, the working girl, the demigrisette, the street girl, rich or
poor, the gallant lady of the city and of the provinces, and the
society woman--these are some of the figures that he has painted at
many sittings, and whom he used to such effect that the novels and
romances in which they are painted have come to be history. Just as it
is impossible to comprehend the Rome of the Caesars without the work of
Petronius, so is it impossible to fully comprehend the France of
1850-90 without these stories of Maupassant. They are no more the whole
image of the country than the "Satyricon" was the whole image of Rome,
but what their author has wished to paint, he has painted to the life
and with a brush that is graphic in the extreme.

If Maupassant had only painted, in general fashion, the characters and
the phase of literature mentioned he would not be distinguished from
other writers of the group called "naturalists." His true glory is in
the extraordinary superiority of his art. He did not invent it, and his
method is not alien to that of "Madame Bovary," but he knew how to give
it a suppleness, a variety, and