In 1881 Turgenieff gave Tolstoy a book by a young Frenchman, telling
him that he would find it amusing. This book was La Maison Tellier.
Tolstoy revolted at the theme, but could not deny the freshness and
power of the author. He found Maupassant "deficient in the moral
sense"; yet he was interested and followed the progress of Flaubert's
pupil. When Une Vie appeared, the Russian novelist pronounced it
incomparably the best work of its author--perhaps the best French
novel since Hugo's Les Miserables. He wrote this in an article
entitled Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction. It was doubtless
the Norman's clear, robust vision that appealed to Tolstoy, who, at
that period was undergoing a change of heart; else how could he call
Les Miserables the greatest novel of France, he the writer of Anna
Karenina--the antipodes of that windy apotheosis of vapid
humanitarianism, the characteristic trait of Hugo's epic of pity and
unreality.
But Maupassant affected Tolstoy as he had affected Turgenieff. Guy has
told us of his first meeting with the latter, an artist superior to
Tolstoy. "The first time I saw Turgenieff was at Gustave Flaubert's--a
door opened; a giant came in, a giant with a silver head, as they
would say in a fairy tale." This must have been in 1876, for in a
letter dated January 24, 1877, Turgenieff writes: "Poor Maupassant is
losing all his hair. He came to see me. He is as nice as ever, but
very ugly just at present." In 1880 the young man published a volume
of poetry, Des Vers. He was thirty years old (born August 5, 1850).
The literary apprenticeship of Guy to Gustave Flaubert is a
thrice-told tale, and signifies only this: If the pupil had not been
richly endowed all the lessons of Flaubert would have availed him
little. Perhaps the anecdote has been overdone; Maupassant has related
it in the preface to Pierre et Jean, and in the introduction to the
George Sand-Flaubert correspondence--now at the head of the edition of
Bouvard et Pecuchet. There are letters of Flaubert to his disciple
full of his explosive good nature, big heart, irascibility and
generous outpouring on the subject of his art. The thing that
surprises a close student of this episode and its outcome is that
Maupassant was in reality so unlike his master. And when I further
insist that the younger man appropriated whole scenes from Flaubert
for his longer stories, especially from L'Education Sentimentale, I
feel that I am uttering a paradox.
What I mean is this: Maupassant's temperament was utterly different
from Flaubert's. They were both prosecuted for certain things they
wrote, Guy for a poem in 1880, at Estampes; there had been a detraque
nervous system in both cases. Yet, similar in ideals and physical
peculiarities as were these two men, there was a profound psychical
gulf between their temperaments. Flaubert was a great genius, a path
breaker, a philosophic poet, and the author of La Tentation de St.
Antoine, the nearest approach that France can show to a prose epic,
and a book of beauty and originality. Maupassant was a great talent,
and a growing one when disease cut him down. He imitated the externals
of Flaubert, his irony, his vivid power of picture-making; even his
pessimism he developed--though that was personal, as we shall soon
see. And yet his work is utterly unlike Flaubert, probably unlike what
Flaubert had hoped for--the old man died in 1881 and therefore did not
live to enjoy Maupassant in full bloom. If it did not sound quite
heretical I should be tempted to assert that the writer Maupassant
most patterned after, was Prosper Merimee, an artist detested by
Flaubert because of his hard style. It is this precise style that
Maupassant exhibits but coupled with a clarity, an ease, and a grace
that Merimee could not boast. Of Flaubert's harmonious and
imaginatively coloured manner, Maupassant shows no trace in his six
novels and his two hundred and odd tales.
Maupassant was not altogether faithful to Flaubert's injunctions
regarding the publication of his early attempts. He made many secret
flights under different pen-names, though Boule de Suif was the first
prose signed by him. It appeared in Les Soirees de Medan, and its
originality quite outshone the more solid qualities of Zola's
L'Attaque au Moulin, and a realistic tale of Huysmans's, Sac au dos.
It was this knapsack of story, nevertheless, that opened the eyes of
both Zola and Goncourt to the genuine realism of Huysmans as opposed
to the more human but also more sentimental surface realism of
Maupassant. Huysmans proved himself devoid of the story-telling gift,
of dramatic power; yet he has, if compared to Maupassant, without an
iota of doubt, the more vivid vision of the two; "the intensest vision
of the modern world," says Havelock Ellis. Pictorial, not imaginative
vision, be it understood. In his mystic latter-day rhapsodies it is
the realist who sees, the realist who makes those poignant,
image-breeding phrases. Take up Maupassant and in his best tales and
novels, such as La Maison Tellier, Boule de Suif, Une Vie, Fort Comme
la Mort, to mention a few, you will be surprised at the fluidity, the
artful devices to elude the harshness of reality, the pessimistic
poetry that suffuses his pages after reading Huysmans's immitigable
exposition of the ugly and his unflinching attitude before the
unpleasant. And Huysmans's point of departure is seldom from an idea;
facts furnish him with an adequate spring-board. Maupassant is more
lyric in tone and texture. Edmond de Goncourt, jealous of the success
of the newcomer, wrote in his diary that Maupassant was an admirable
conteur, but a great writer, never. Zola admitted to a few intimates
that Guy was not the realist that Huysmans was. All of which is
interesting, but proves nothing except that Maupassant wrote a
marvellous collection of short stories, real, hyphenated
short-stories, as Mr. Brander Matthews makes the delicate distinction,
while Huysmans did not.
Edouard Maynial's La Vie et l'Oeuvre de Guy de Maupassant is the
most recent of the biographical studies devoted to our subject, though
Baron Albert Lumbroso, who escapes by a single letter from being
confounded with the theory-ridden Turin psychiatrist, has given us,
with the approval of Guy's mother, the definitive study of
Maupassant's malady and death. It is frequently quoted by Maynial;
there is a careful study of it which appeared in _Mercure de France_,
June, 1905, by Louis Thomas. And there is that charming volume, Amitie
amoureuse, in which Guy is said to figure as the Philippe, by Henri
Amic and Madame Lecomte du Nouy. Here we get another Maupassant, not
the taureau triste of Taine, but a delightful, sweet-tempered,
unselfish, and altogether lovable fellow. What was the cause of his
downfall? Dissipation? Mental overwork--which is the same thing?
Disease? Maynial, Lumbroso, and Thomas offer us such a variety of
documents that there can be no doubt as to the determining element.
From 1880 to his death in 1893 Guy de Maupassant was "a candidate for
general paralysis." These are the words of his doctor, later approved
by Doctor Blanche, to whose sanitarium in Paris he was taken, January
7, 1893.
The father of Guy was Gustave de Maupassant, of an ancient Lorraine
family. This family was noble. His mother was of Norman extraction,
Laure de Poittevin, the sister of Alfred de Poittevin, Flaubert's
dearest friend, a poet who died young. There is no truth in the gossip
that Guy was the son of Flaubert. Flaubert loved both the Poittevins;
hence his lively interest in Guy. There was a younger brother, Herve
de Maupassant, who died of a mental disorder. His daughter, Simone, is
the legatee of her uncle. The marriage of the elder Maupassants proved
a failure. They are both dead now, and the subject may be discussed to
the point of admitting that the father was not a domestic man; Guy
inherited his taste for Bohemian life, and Madame Laure de Maupassant,
after separating from her husband, was subject to nervous crises in
which she attempted her life by swallowing laudanum and by strangling
herself with her own hair. She was rescued both times, but she was an
invalid to the last. A loving mother, she overlooked the education of
Guy, and let it be said that no happier child ever lived. His early
days were passed at Etretat, at the Villa Verguies, and generally in
the open air.
The future writer adored the sea; he has written many tales of the
water, of yachts and river sports. He went to the seminary at Yvetot
and the lyceum of Rouen, but his education was desultory, his reading
principally of his own selection--like most men of individual
character. He was a farceur, fond of mystifications, of rough
practical jokes, of horseplay. His physique was more Flemish than
French--a deep chest, broad shoulders, heavy muscular arms and legs, a
small head, a bull-neck. He looked like the mate of a deep-sea ship
rather than a literary man. Add to this a craze for rowing, canoeing,
swimming, boxing, fencing, and running. An all-round athlete, as the
phrase goes, Guy, it is related, once paid a hulking chap to let
himself be kicked. So hard was Guy's kick, done in an experimental
humour, that the victim became enraged and knocked the kicker off his
pins. Flaubert, the apostle of the immobile, objected. Too many
flirtations, too much exercise! he admonishingly cried. A writer must
cultivate repose.
In sooth Maupassant went a terrific pace. He abused his constitution
from the beginning, seemingly tormented by seven restless devils. He
spent five hours a day at his office in the Ministry, in the afternoon
he rowed on the Seine, in the evening he wrote. After he had resigned
as a bureaucrat he worked from seven until twelve every morning, no
matter the excesses of the previous night; the afternoon he spent on
the river, retiring very late. "Toujours les femmes, petit cochon,"
wrote Flaubert in 1876, "il faut travailler." But it was precisely
work that helped to kill the man. Those six pages a day, while they
seldom showed erasures, were carefully written, and not until after
much thought. Guy was the type of the apparently spontaneous writers.
His manuscripts are free from the interlineations of Flaubert. He
wrote at one jet; but there was elaborate mental preparation. Toward
the last began the ether inhalations, the chloroform, hasheesh, the
absinthe, cocaine, and the "odour symphonies"--Huysmans's des
Esseintes, and his symphonic perfume sprays were not altogether the
result of invention. On his yacht _Bel Ami_ Guy never ceased his daily
travail. It was Taine who called him un taureau triste. Paul Bourget
relates that when he told Maupassant of this epigram, he calmly
replied: "Better a bull than an ox."
His output--as they say in publishing circles--was breath-catching. It
is whispered that he worked all the better after a "hard night." Now
there can be but one end to such an expenditure of nervous energy, and
that end came, not suddenly, but with the treacherous, creeping
approach of paralysis. "Literary" criticism of the Nordau type is
usually a foolish thing; yet in Maupassant's case one does not need to
be a skilled psychiatrist to follow and note the gradual palsy of the
writer's higher centres. Such stories as Qui Sait? Lui, Le Horla--a
terrifying conception that beats Poe on his own chosen field--Fou, Un
Fou, and several others show the nature of his malady. Guy de
Maupassant came fairly by his cracked nervous constitution, and
instead of dissipation, mental and physical, being the determining
causes of his shattered health, they were really the outcome of an
inherited predisposition to all that is self-destructive. The French
alienists called it une heredite chargee. (No doubt the dread
Spirochaeta pallida.)
He never relaxed his diligence, even writing criticism. He saluted the
literary debuts of Paul Hervieu and Edouard Rod in an article which
appeared in _Gil Blas_. At the time of his death he was contemplating
an extensive study of Turgenieff. Edmond de Goncourt did not like him,
suspecting him of irreverence because of some words Guy had written in
the preface to Pierre et Jean about complicated exotic vocabularies;
meaning the Goncourts, of course. It is to be believed that Flaubert
also had some quiet fun with the brothers and with Zola regarding
their mania for note taking; read Bouvard et Pecuchet for confirmation
of this idea of mine.
Maupassant was paid one franc a line for his novels in the
periodicals, and 500 francs for the newspaper rights of publication
only; good prices twenty-five years ago in Paris.
His annual income was about 28,000 to 35,000 francs, and it kept up
for at least ten years. A table shows us that to December, 1891, the
sale of his books was as follows: short stories, 169,000; novels,
180,000; travel, 24,000; in all 373,000 volumes. Maupassant was even
for these days of swollen figures a big "seller." His mother had an
income of 5,000 francs, but she far excelled the amount in her living
expenses. Guy was an admirable son--tender, thoughtful, and generous.
He made her an allowance, and at his death left her in comfort, if not
actually wealthy. She died at Nice, December 8, 1904, his father
surviving him until 1899.
And that death was achieved by the most hideous route--insanity.
Restless, travelling incessantly, fearful of darkness, of his own
shadow, he was like an Oriental magician who had summoned malignant
spirits from outer space only to be destroyed by them. Not in Corsica
or Sicily, in Africa nor the south of France, did Guy fight off his
rapidly growing disease. He worked hard, he drank hard, but to no
avail; the blackness of his brain increased. Melancholia and
irritability supervened; he spelled words wrong, he quarrelled with
his friends, he instituted a lawsuit against a New York newspaper,
_The Star_; then the persecution craze, folie des grandeurs, frenzy.
The case was "classic" from the beginning, even to the dilated pupils
of his eyes, as far back as 1880. The 1st of January, 1892, he had
promised to spend with his mother at Villa de Ravenelles, at Nice. But
he went, instead, against his mother's wishes, to Ste.-Marguerite in
company with two sisters, society women, one of them said to have been
the heroine of Notre Coeur.
The next day he arrived, his features discomposed, and in a state of
great mental excitement. He was tearful and soon left for Cannes with
his valet, Francois. What passed during the night was never exactly
known, except that Guy attempted suicide by shooting, and with a
paper-knife. The knife inflicted a slight wound; the pistol contained
blank cartridges--Francois had suspected his master's mood, and told
the world later of it in his simple loving memoirs--and his forehead
was slightly burned. Some months previous he had told Doctor Fremy
that between madness and death he would not hesitate; a lucid moment
had shown him his fate, and he sought death. After a week, during
which two stout sailors of his yacht, _Bel Ami_, guarded him, as he
sadly walked on the beach regarding with tear-stained cheeks his
favourite boat, he was taken to Passy, to Doctor Blanche's
institution. One of his examining physicians there was Doctor Franklin
Grout, who later married Flaubert's niece, Caroline Commanville.
July 6, 1893, Maupassant died, as a lamp is extinguished for lack of
oil. But the year he spent at the asylum was wretched; he became a
mere machine, and perhaps the only pleasure he experienced was the
hallucination of bands of black butterflies that seemed to sweep
across his room. Monsieur Maynial does not tell of the black
butterflies, the truth of which I can vouch for, as I heard the story
from Lassalle, the French barytone, a friend of Maupassant's.
It may be interesting to the curious to learn that the good-hearted,
brave heroine of Boule de Suif was a certain Adrienne Legay of Rouen,
and that she heartily reprobated the writer for giving her story to
the world. She even went so far as to say that Guy did it in a spirit
of revenge. Madame Laure de Maupassant made inquiries about the
patriotic little sinner so as to help her. It was too late. She had
died in extreme poverty. The heroine of Mademoiselle Fifi was a
brunette, Rachel by name; the hero was a young German officer, Baron
William d'Eyrick.
Would Maupassant have reached the sunlit heights, as Tolstoy believed?
Who may say? Truth lies not at the bottom of a well, but in suffering;
suffering alone reveals the truth of himself, of his soul to man, and
Guy had suffered as few; he had passed into the Inferno that later
Nietzsche entered, passed into though not through it. Turgenieff, for
whom Guy entertained a profound regard, had influenced him more than
he, with his doglike fidelity for Flaubert, would have cared to
acknowledge. Paul Bourget gives us chapter and verse for this
statement; furthermore, the same authority, has described--in his
Etudes et Portraits--the enormous travail of Maupassant in pursuit of
style--he, seemingly, the most spontaneous writer of his generation.
His books offend, delight, startle, and edify thousands of readers.
That they have done absolute harm we are not prepared to say; book
wickedness is, after all, an academic, not a vital question. If all
the wicked books that have seen the light of publication had wrought
the evil predicted of them the earth would be an abomination. In
reality, we discuss with varying shades of enthusiasm or detestation
such frank literature--naturally when it is literature--and after the
hullabaloo of the moral bell-boys has ceased, the book is quietly
forgotten on its shelf. Flaubert once wrote of the vast fund of
indifference possessed by society. Dramas, books, pictures, statues
have never ruined our overmoral world. The day for such things--if
there ever was such a day--has passed. Besides, among the people of
most nations, the hatred of art and literature is pushed to the point
of lecturing boastfully about that same hatred.