sn't_ want to meet them." Now, I
do not want to meet anybody in _Bel-Ami_; in fact, I would much rather
not.

[Sidenote: _Une Vie._]

_Une Vie_ is, in this respect and others, a curious pendant to
_Bel-Ami_. It illustrates another side of Maupassant's pessimism--the
overtly, but for the most part quietly, tragic. It might almost
(borrowing a second title from the _Index_) call itself "Jeanne; ou Les
Malheurs de la Vertu." The heroine is perfectly innocent, though both a
_femmelette_ and a fool. She never does any harm, nor, except through
weakness and folly, deserves that any should be done to her. But she has
an unwise and not blameless though affectionate and generous father,
with a mother who is an invalid, and whom, after her death, the daughter
discovers to have been, in early days, no better than she should be.
Both of them are, if not exactly spendthrifts, "wasters," very mainly
through careless and excessive generosity. She marries the first young
man of decent family, looks, and manners that she comes across; and he
turns out to be stingy, unfaithful in the most offensive way, with her
own maid and others, and unkind. She loses him, by the vengeance of a
husband whom he has wronged, and her second child is born dead in
consequence of this shock. Her first she spoils for some twenty years,
till he goes off with a concubine and nearly ruins his mother. We leave
her consoling herself, in a half-imbecile fashion, with a grandchild.
Her only earthly providence is her _bonne_ Rosalie, the same who had
been her husband's mistress, but a very "good sort" otherwise. The book
is charged with grime of all kinds. It certainly cannot be said of M. de
Maupassant, to alter the pronoun in Mr. Kipling's line, that "[_He_]
never talked obstetrics when the little stranger came," for _Une Vie_
contains two of these delectable scenes; and in other respects we are
treated with the utmost "candour." But the book is again saved by some
wonderful passages--specially those giving Jeanne's first night at the
sea-side _chateau_ which is to be her own, and her last visit to it a
quarter of a century after, when it has passed to strangers--and
generally by the true tragedy which pervades it. When Maupassant took
Sorrow into cohabitation and collaboration, there was no danger of the
result.

_Mont-Oriol_, though not, save in one respect, the most "arresting" of
Maupassant's books, has rather more varied and at the same time coherent
inte