and loved him with a pathos that is
inexpressible. {signature}

INTRODUCTION

BORN in the middle year of the nineteenth century, and fated
unfortunately never to see its close, Guy de Maupassant was probably
the most versatile and brilliant among the galaxy of novelists who
enriched French literature between the years 1800 and 1900. Poetry,
drama, prose of short and sustained effort, and volumes of travel and
description, each sparkling with the same minuteness of detail and
brilliancy of style, flowed from his pen during the twelve years of his
literary life.

Although his genius asserted itself in youth, he had the patience of
the true artist, spending his early manhood in cutting and polishing
the facets of his genius under the stern though paternal mentorship of
Gustave Flaubert. Not until he had attained the age of thirty did he
venture on publication, challenging criticism for the first time with a
volume of poems.

Many and various have been the judgments passed upon Maupassant's work.
But now that the perspective of time is lengthening, enabling us to
form a more deliberate, and therefore a juster, view of his complete
achievement, we are driven irresistibly to the conclusion that the
force that shaped and swayed Maupassant's prose writings was the
conviction that in life there could be no phase so noble or so mean, so
honorable or so contemptible, so lofty or so low as to be unworthy of
chronicling,--no groove of human virtue or fault, success or failure,
wisdom or folly that did not possess its own peculiar psychological
aspect and therefore demanded analysis.

To this analysis Maupassant brought a facile and dramatic pen, a
penetration as searching as a probe, and a power of psychological
vision that in its minute detail, now pathetic, now ironical, in its
merciless revelation of the hidden springs of the human heart, whether
of aristocrat, bourgeois, peasant, or priest, allow one to call him a
Meissonier in words.

The school of romantic realism which was founded by Merimee and Balzac
found its culmination in De Maupassant. He surpassed his mentor,
Flaubert, in the breadth and vividness of his work, and one of the
greatest of modern French critics has recorded the deliberate opinion,
that of all Taine's pupils Maupassant had the greatest command of
language and the most finished and incisive style. Robust in
imagination and fired with natural passion, his psychological curiosity
kept him t