tave Flaubert; that he made his debut late in 1880, with
a novel inserted in a small collection, published by Emile Zola and his
young friends, under the title: "The Soirees of Medan"; that
subsequently he did not fail to publish stories and romances every year
up to 1891, when a disease of the brain struck him down in the fullness
of production; and that he died, finally, in 1893, without having
recovered his reason.

We know, too, that he passionately loved a strenuous physical life and
long journeys, particularly long journeys upon the sea. He owned a
little sailing yacht, named after one of his books, "Bel-Ami," in which
he used to sojourn for weeks and months. These meager details are
almost the only ones that have been gathered as food for the curiosity
of the public.

I leave the legendary side, which is always in evidence in the case of
a celebrated man,--that gossip, for example, which avers that
Maupassant was a high liver and a worldling. The very number of his
volumes is a protest to the contrary. One could not write so large a
number of pages in so small a number of years without the virtue of
industry, a virtue incompatible with habits of dissipation. This does
not mean that the writer of these great romances had no love for
pleasure and had not tasted the world, but that for him these were
secondary things. The psychology of his work ought, then, to find an
interpretation other than that afforded by wholly false or exaggerated
anecdotes. I wish to indicate here how this work, illumined by the
three or four positive data which I have given, appears to me to demand
it.

And first, what does that anxiety to conceal his personality prove,
carried as it was to such an extreme degree? The answer rises
spontaneously in the minds of those who have studied closely the
history of literature. The absolute silence about himself, preserved by
one whose position among us was that of a Tourgenief, or of a Merimee,
and of a Moliere or a Shakespeare among the classic great, reveals, to
a person of instinct, a nervous sensibility of extreme depth. There are
many chances for an artist of his kind, however timid, or for one who
has some grief, to show the depth of his emotion. To take up again only
two of the names just cited, this was the case with the author of
"Terres Vierges," and with the writer of "Colomba."

A somewhat minute analysis of the novels and romances of Maupassant
would suffice to demonstrate, even if