this "works like poison in his brain," till--Jean, having
gained another piece of luck in Mme. Rosemilly's hand, and having,
though enlightened by Pierre and by his mother's confession, very
common-sensibly decided that he will not resign the legacy, smirched as
it is--Pierre accepts a surgeon-ship on a Transatlantic steamer, and the
story ends.

On its own scheme and showing there is scarcely a fault in it. The mere
settings--the fishing and prawn-catching; the scenery of port and cliff;
the "interiors"; the final sailing of the great ship--are perfect. The
minor characters--the good-tempered, thick-headed _bourgeois_ husband
and father; the wife and mother, with her bland acceptance of the
transferred wages of shame, and (after discovery only) her breaking down
with the banal blasphemy of "marriage before God" and the rest of it;
the younger brother--not exactly a bad fellow, but thoroughly convinced
of the truth of _non olet_; the widow playing her part and no more,--all
are artistically just what they should be. And so, always remembering
scale and scheme, is Pierre. One neither likes him (for he is not
exactly a likeable person) nor dislikes him (for he is quite excusable)
very much; one is only partially sorry for him. But one knows that he
_is_--he has that actual and indubitable existence which is the test and
quality alike of creator and creation. His first vague envy of his
brother's positive luck in money and probable luck in love--for both
have had floating fancies for the pretty widow; the again perfectly
natural spleen when this lucky brother, by an accident, secures the
particular set of rooms in which Pierre had hoped to improve his
position as a doctor; the crushing blow of finding out his mother's
shame; the process (the truest thing in the whole book, though it is all
true) by which he tortures both her and himself in constant oblique
references to her fault; the explosion when he directly informs his
brother; and all the rest, could hardly be improved. It is not a novel
on the great scale, but rather what may be called a long short story. It
does not quite attain to the position of some books on a small scale in
different kinds--_Manon Lescaut_ itself, _Adolphe_, _La Tentation de
Saint-Antoine_. But the author has done what he meant to do, and has
done it in such a fashion that it could not, on its own lines, be done
better.

Maupassant's last novel of some magnitude, _Notre Coeur_, was written
whe