MAUPASSANT, nWpfesiiN', HENRI RENE ALnERT GEv DE ( 1850-93 ) . A French novelist, one of the greatest modern writers of short stories. Maupassant, after serving in the Navy Department as clerk, and as soldier in the Ger m:1u vas slowly initiated by Flaubert, who was an old friend of Madame he Maupassant, into the craft of story-telling. Restraint ripened Ids genius, and his first story, Houle de suif, pub lished in Les soirees de Medan in 1880, revealed a finished master of the naturalistic school. fn the same year he published sonic striking but sensual poems, Des rens (1880), and a drama, HiNtoire du ricux temps, but he saw clearly that his career was elsewhere. He confirmed the promise of lion le dr sitif in about two hundred tales gathered under the titles: 1,a maison Tether (1881); Fifi (1883); routes de la Ikeasse (1883) ; Clair de Dine (1883) ; Les :years Boado/i (1884); Yvette (1884) ; Conics du jour et de la nuit ( 1885) ; Contes ct nourclles (1.883); Le Herta (1887) ; La petite Rogue (1888); La anziehe (1889) ; Le in're (1899), and others, among them L'in-utile brunt(' (1890). Be sides these he wrote six novels, (Inc vie lkl-Ami ( 1885) ; Mont-Orio/ (1887) ; Pierre et dean (1888); Fort eomme la wort (1889) ; Notre ewer (1890) ; and several volumes of traveler's impressions, Au soled (1SS4) ; Sur Peru (1888) ; La rie errante (1890). Traces of insanity appear at times in all the work from 1887 onward. The condition is most strongly marked in the longer novels. It caused a practical suspension of his literary work in 1S90. In 1892 Maupassant be came wholly insane. July 0, 1893, he died in an asylum at Passy. His whole work is a melan choly yet fascinating study in imaginative psychology. Ile begins as a playful satyr, yet with an aristocratic assumption of superiority to his fellow men that masked a pessimism as deep as Flaubert's. Year by year he loses the seicwous exuberance of youth, more and more he is, as it were, hypnotized by the ghastly fas cinations of death, as were Villon. Gautier, and Baudelaire. The moral gloom deepens, the moral unrest grows. The robust animalism of [rife vie
becomes a melancholy moral anatomy in it ealtr. In losing its sensuality it had become morbid and morally uncertain even in Pierre it Jean, artistically Maupassant's best novel. The shorter stories, because requiring less sustained effort, show this less clearly. To the very end Maupassant (lid work of a character similar to his early work; hut from Le Horla onward there are stories that could not be attributed to the ear lier period. Asa whole and in average excellence these stories are in style and art the best in France. There are stories of his native Nor mandy, tales of selfishness and meanness, chiefly tragic, occasionally comic, more off en grim in their irony; there are stories, usually cynical, of Parisian foibles, of life in strange lands, of hunting, medical incident, of love. crime, hor ror, misery, all carefully elaborated and in credibly deft in the rapid portraiture of a scene or character. All is sharply individualized and the point of view is the absence of any moral law. Characteristic of Manpassant's good hu mor and better nature are Le papa de Simon, Les idecs du colonel, Miss Harriet, Mademoiselle Perk., and Clochette; typical of his whimsical and satirical irony are Le paraplu.ie, Denis, Decore, Aux Lois; bitterly satirical are L'her-i tage, La "Katie de campagne, Pain maudit, „iai son Ilautlit pre(' et fibs, and most exquis ite of all this group, ludic; more intensely misanthropic• are tales of sordid brutality or wanton cruelty such as En mer, L'onele Jules. Lc di abbe, Coco, L'One, La fille de feriae, or Les sabots, and it is to the wanton side of war that he directs attention in item saitunge awl Snint Antoine. Finally there are at least forty stories that are pathologic in their pessimism. Nause ated horror of life and haunting terror of 'tenth are whispered in the stories of 1884 and recur with growing frequency and intensity, as will appear from consecutive reading of Petit soldat, Solitude, T'n fo-u, Lui, La petite Roque, Le llorla, and Qui