that
governed Maupassant's work, and even the hasty reader or critic, on
reading "Mont Oriol," which was published two years later and is based
on a combination of the motifs which inspired "Une Vie" and "Bel-Ami,"
will reconsider former hasty judgments, and feel, too, that beneath the
triumph of evil which calls forth Maupassant's satiric anger there lies
the substratum on which all his work is founded, viz: the persistent,
ceaseless questioning of a soul unable to reconcile or explain the
contradiction between love in life and inevitable death. Who can read
in "Bel-Ami" the terribly graphic description of the consumptive
journalist's demise, his frantic clinging to life, and his refusal to
credit the slow and merciless approach of death, without feeling that
the question asked at Naishapur many centuries ago is still waiting for
the solution that is always promised but never comes?

In the romances which followed, dating from 1888 to 1890, a sort of
calm despair seems to have settled down upon De Maupassant's attitude
toward life. Psychologically acute as ever, and as perfect in style and
sincerity as before, we miss the note of anger. Fatality is the
keynote, and yet, sounding low, we detect a genuine subtone of sorrow.
Was it a prescience of 1893? So much work to be done, so much work
demanded of him, the world of Paris, in all its brilliant and
attractive phases, at his feet, and yet--inevitable, ever advancing
death, with the question of life still unanswered.

This may account for some of the strained situations we find in his
later romances. Vigorous in frame and hearty as he was, the atmosphere
of his mental processes must have been vitiated to produce the dainty
but dangerous pessimism that pervades some of his later work. This was
partly a consequence of his honesty and partly of mental despair. He
never accepted other people's views on the questions of life. He looked
into such problems for himself, arriving at the truth, as it appeared
to him, by the logic of events, often finding evil where he wished to
find good, but never hoodwinking himself or his readers by adapting or
distorting the reality of things to suit a preconceived idea.

Maupassant was essentially a worshiper of the eternal feminine. He was
persuaded that without the continual presence of the gentler sex man's
existence would be an emotionally silent wilderness. No other French
writer has described and analyzed so minutely and comprehensive