._]

On the other hand, _Yvette_, which is only allowed the eponymship of a
volume of short stories, though it fills to itself some hundred and
seventy pages, is one of Maupassant's most carefully written things and
one of his best--till the not fully explained, but in any case
unsatisfactory, end[498]. Its heroine is the daughter of a sham Marquise
and real courtesan, who has attained wealth, who can afford herself
lovers "for love"[499] and not for money, when she chooses, and who
keeps up a sort of demi-monde society, in which most of the men are
adventurers and all the women adventuresses, but which maintains outward
decencies. In consequence of this Yvette herself--in a fashion a little
impossible, but artistically made not improbable--though she allows
herself the extreme "tricks and manners" of faster society, calls half
the men by nicknames, wanders about alone with them, etc., preserves not
merely her personal purity but even her ignorance of unclean things in
general, and especially of her mother's real character and conduct. Her
relations with a clever and not ungentlemanly _roue_, one M. de
Servigny; his difficulties (these are very curiously and cleverly told)
in making love to a girl not of the lower class (at least apparently)
and not vicious; his attempt to brusque the matter; her horror at it and
at the coincident discovery of her mother's ways; her attempt to poison
herself; and her salvage by Servigny's coolness and devotion--are
capitally done. Out of many passages, one, where Madame la Marquise
Obardi, otherwise Octavie Bardin, formerly domestic servant, drops her
mask, opens her mouth, and uses the crude language of a procuress-mother
to her daughter, is masterly. But the end is not from any point of view
satisfactory. Apparently (for it is not made quite clear) Yvette
retracts her refusal to be a kept mistress. In that case certainly, and
in the almost impossible one of marriage probably, it may be feared that
the catastrophe is only postponed. Now Yvette has been made too good (I
do not mean goody) to be allowed to pine or poison herself, as a
soon-to-be-neglected concubine or a not-much-longer-to-be-loved wife.

[Sidenote: Short stories--the various collections.]

That the very large multitude[500] of his short stories (or, one begs
pardon, brief-narratives) is composed of units very different in merit
is not wonderful. It was as certain that the covers of the author of
_Boule de Suif_[501] wo