serve (what I know
perfectly well) that Maupassant was, in the direct sense, Flaubert's
pupil and not Zola's.

[491] He was, says his historian well, "de la race des amants et non
point de la race des peres."

[492] The resemblances between Thackeray and Maupassant are very
numerous and most remarkable. That they have both been accused of
cynicism _and_ sentimentality is only, as it were, the index-finger to
the relationship.

[493] At the risk, however, of wearying the reader and "forcing open
doors," one may exemplify, from this book also, the artificial character
of this obligatory adultery. Anne de Guilleroy has all the
qualifications of an almost perfect mistress (in the honourable sense)
and wife. She is charming; a flirt to the right point and not beyond it;
passionate ditto; affectionate; not capricious; inviolably faithful (in
her unfaithfulness, of course); jealous to her own pain, but with no
result of malice to others. Yet in order to show all this she has to be
an adulteress first--in obedience to this mysterious modernisation and
topsy-turvification of ancient Babylonian custom, and the _jus primae
noctis_, and the proverb as to second thoughts being best, and Heaven or
the other place knows what else. Here also, as elsewhere,
Maupassant--satirist of women as he is--makes her lover a very inferior
creature to herself. For Bertin is a selfish coxcomb, and _does_, at
least half, allow himself to be "snuffed out by an article."

[494] Any one who chooses may compare it with the utterances of the late
Mr. Henry James. Maupassant's own selection of novels, to illustrate the
impossibility of defining _a_ novel, is of the first interest. They are:
_Manon Lescaut_, _Paul et Virginie_, _Don Quichotte_, _Les Liaisons
Dangereuses_, _Werther_, _Les Affinites Electives_, _Clarissa_ [_he_
adds _Harlowe_, an unauthentic addition, pardonable in a Frenchman,
though not in one of us], _Emile_, _Candide_, _Cinq-Mars_, _Rene_, _Les
Trois Mousquetaires_, _Mauprat_, _Le Pere Goriot_, _La Cousine Bette_,
_Colomba_, _Le Rouge et Le Noir_, _Mademoiselle de Maupin_, _Notre Dame
de Paris_, _Salammbo_, _Madame Bovary_, _Adolphe_, _M. de Camors_,
_L'Assommoir_, and _Sapho_.

[495] "Amant" as accurately distinguished by M. Jean Richepin in
_Cesarine_ (for the benefit of an innocent Hungarian) from "amoureux."

[496] Not that I wish to blaspheme Circe, who always seems to me to have
adjusted herself to a disconcertingly changed s