ained in the short stories known as "He" and "The Diary of a
Madman." Here and there, we know, were rising in him inklings of a
finer and less sordid attitude 'twixt man and woman throughout the
world and of a purer constitution of existing things which no exterior
force should blemish or destroy. But with these yearningly prophetic
gleams came a period of mental death. Then the physical veil was torn
aside and for Guy de Maupassant the riddle of existence was answered.
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MADEMOISELLE FIFI

The Major Graf[1] von Farlsberg, the Prussian commandant, was reading
his newspaper, lying back in a great armchair, with his booted feet on
the beautiful marble fireplace, where his spurs had made two holes,
which grew deeper every day, during the three months that he had been
in the chateau of Urville.

A cup of coffee was smoking on a small inlaid table, which was stained
with liquors burnt by cigars, notched by the penknife of the victorious
officer, who occasionally would stop while sharpening a pencil, to jot
down figures, or to make a drawing on it, just as it took his fancy.

When he had read his letters and the German newspapers, which his
baggage-master had brought him, he got up, and after throwing three or
four enormous pieces of green wood on to the fire--for these gentlemen
were gradually cutting down the park in order to keep themselves
warm--he went to the window. The rain was descending in torrents, a
regular Normandy rain, which looked as if it were being poured out by
some furious hand, a slanting rain, which was as thick as a curtain,
and which formed a kind of wall with oblique stripes, and which deluged
everything, a regular rain, such as one frequently experiences in the
neighborhood of Rouen, which is the watering-pot of France.

For a long time the officer looked at the sodden turf, and at the
swollen Andelle beyond it, which was overflowing its banks, and he was
drumming a waltz from the Rhine on the window-panes, with his fingers,
when a noise made him turn round; it was his second in command, Captain
Baron von Kelweinstein.

The major was a giant, with broad shoulders, and a long, fair beard,
which hung like a cloth on to his chest. His whole, solemn person
suggested the idea of a military peacock, a peacock who was carrying
his tail spread out on to his breast. He had cold, gentle, blue eyes,
and the scar from a sword-cut, which he had received in the war with
Austria; he was said to