dled, he had to look for a position. For
several years he was a clerk in the Ministry of Marine, where he turned
over musty papers, in the uninteresting company of the clerks of the
admiralty.

Then he went into the department of Public Instruction, where
bureaucratic servility is less intolerable. The daily duties are
certainly scarcely more onerous and he had as chiefs, or colleagues,
Xavier Charmes and Leon Dierx, Henry Roujon and Rene Billotte, but his
office looked out on a beautiful melancholy garden with immense plane
trees around which black circles of crows gathered in winter.

Maupassant made two divisions of his spare hours, one for boating, and
the other for literature. Every evening in spring, every free day,
he ran down to the river whose mysterious current veiled in fog or
sparkling in the sun called to him and bewitched him. In the islands in
the Seine between Chatou and Port-Marly, on the banks of Sartrouville
and Triel he was long noted among the population of boatmen, who
have now vanished, for his unwearying biceps, his cynical gaiety of
good-fellowship, his unfailing practical jokes, his broad witticisms.
Sometimes he would row with frantic speed, free and joyous, through the
glowing sunlight on the stream; sometimes, he would wander along the
coast, questioning the sailors, chatting with the ravageurs, or junk
gatherers, or stretched at full length amid the irises and tansy he
would lie for hours watching the frail insects that play on the surface
of the stream, water spiders, or white butterflies, dragon flies,
chasing each other amid the willow leaves, or frogs asleep on the
lily-pads.

The rest of his life was taken up by his work. Without ever becoming
despondent, silent and persistent, he accumulated manuscripts, poetry,
criticisms, plays, romances and novels. Every week he docilely submitted
his work to the great Flaubert, the childhood friend of his mother and
his uncle Alfred Le Poittevin. The master had consented to assist
the young man, to reveal to him the secrets that make chefs-d'oeuvre
immortal. It was he who compelled him to make copious research and to
use direct observation and who inculcated in him a horror of vulgarity
and a contempt for facility.

Maupassant himself tells us of those severe initiations in the Rue
Murillo, or in the tent at Croisset; he has recalled the implacable
didactics of his old master, his tender brutality, the paternal advice
of his generous and cand