id heart. For seven years Flaubert slashed,
pulverized, the awkward attempts of his pupil whose success remained
uncertain.

Suddenly, in a flight of spontaneous perfection, he wrote Boule de Suif.
His master's joy was great and overwhelming. He died two months later.

Until the end Maupassant remained illuminated by the reflection of the
good, vanished giant, by that touching reflection that comes from the
dead to those souls they have so profoundly stirred. The worship of
Flaubert was a religion from which nothing could distract him, neither
work, nor glory, nor slow moving waves, nor balmy nights.

At the end of his short life, while his mind was still clear: he wrote
to a friend: "I am always thinking of my poor Flaubert, and I say to
myself that I should like to die if I were sure that anyone would think
of me in the same manner."

During these long years of his novitiate Maupassant had entered the
social literary circles. He would remain silent, preoccupied; and if
anyone, astonished at his silence, asked him about his plans he answered
simply: "I am learning my trade." However, under the pseudonym of Guy de
Valmont, he had sent some articles to the newspapers, and, later,
with the approval and by the advice of Flaubert, he published, in the
"Republique des Lettres," poems signed by his name.

These poems, overflowing with sensuality, where the hymn to the Earth
describes the transports of physical possession, where the impatience
of love expresses itself in loud melancholy appeals like the calls of
animals in the spring nights, are valuable chiefly inasmuch as they
reveal the creature of instinct, the fawn escaped from his native
forests, that Maupassant was in his early youth. But they add nothing
to his glory. They are the "rhymes of a prose writer" as Jules Lemaitre
said. To mould the expression of his thought according to the strictest
laws, and to "narrow it down" to some extent, such was his aim.
Following the example of one of his comrades of Medan, being readily
carried away by precision of style and the rhythm of sentences, by
the imperious rule of the ballad, of the pantoum or the chant royal,
Maupassant also desired to write in metrical lines. However, he never
liked this collection that he often regretted having published. His
encounters with prosody had left him with that monotonous weariness that
the horseman and the fencer feel after a period in the riding school, or
a bout with the foils.