Complete Maupassant Original Short Stories | Page 5

the writer extolled the study of real life, and announced the publication
of the new work. It was picturesque and charming. In the quiet of

evening, on an island, in the Seine, beneath poplars instead of the
Neapolitan cypresses dear to the friends of Boccaccio, amid the
continuous murmur of the valley, and no longer to the sound of the
Pyrennean streams that murmured a faint accompaniment to the tales of
Marguerite's cavaliers, the master and his disciples took turns in
narrating some striking or pathetic episode of the war. And the issue, in
collaboration, of these tales in one volume, in which the master jostled
elbows with his pupils, took on the appearance of a manifesto, the tone
of a challenge, or the utterance of a creed.
In fact, however, the beginnings had been much more simple, and they
had confined themselves, beneath the trees of Medan, to deciding on a
general title for the work. Zola had contributed the manuscript of the
"Attaque du Moulin," and it was at Maupassant's house that the five
young men gave in their contributions. Each one read his story,
Maupassant being the last. When he had finished Boule de Suif, with a
spontaneous impulse, with an emotion they never forgot, filled with
enthusiasm at this revelation, they all rose and, without superfluous
words, acclaimed him as a master.
He undertook to write the article for the Gaulois and, in cooperation
with his friends, he worded it in the terms with which we are familiar,
amplifying and embellishing it, yielding to an inborn taste for
mystification which his youth rendered excusable. The essential point,
he said, is to "unmoor" criticism.
It was unmoored. The following day Wolff wrote a polemical
dissertation in the Figaro and carried away his colleagues. The volume
was a brilliant success, thanks to Boule de Suif. Despite the novelty,
the honesty of effort, on the part of all, no mention was made of the
other stories. Relegated to the second rank, they passed without notice.
From his first battle, Maupassant was master of the field in literature.
At once the entire press took him up and said what was appropriate
regarding the budding celebrity. Biographers and reporters sought
information concerning his life. As it was very simple and perfectly
straightforward, they resorted to invention. And thus it is that at the
present day Maupassant appears to us like one of those ancient heroes

whose origin and death are veiled in mystery.
I will not dwell on Guy de Maupassant's younger days. His relatives,
his old friends, he himself, here and there in his works, have furnished
us in their letters enough valuable revelations and touching
remembrances of the years preceding his literary debut. His worthy
biographer, H. Edouard Maynial, after collecting intelligently all the
writings, condensing and comparing them, has been able to give us
some definite information regarding that early period.
I will simply recall that he was born on the 5th of August, 1850, near
Dieppe, in the castle of Miromesnil which he describes in Une Vie. . . .
Maupassant, like Flaubert, was a Norman, through his mother, and
through his place of birth he belonged to that strange and adventurous
race, whose heroic and long voyages on tramp trading ships he liked to
recall. And just as the author of "Education sentimentale" seems to
have inherited in the paternal line the shrewd realism of Champagne, so
de Maupassant appears to have inherited from his Lorraine ancestors
their indestructible discipline and cold lucidity.
His childhood was passed at Etretat, his beautiful childhood; it was
there that his instincts were awakened in the unfoldment of his
prehistoric soul. Years went by in an ecstasy of physical happiness. The
delight of running at full speed through fields of gorse, the charm of
voyages of discovery in hollows and ravines, games beneath the dark
hedges, a passion for going to sea with the fishermen and, on nights
when there was no moon, for dreaming on their boats of imaginary
voyages.
Mme. de Maupassant, who had guided her son's early reading, and had
gazed with him at the sublime spectacle of nature, put, off as long as
possible the hour of separation. One day, however, she had to take the
child to the little seminary at Yvetot. Later, he became a student at the
college at Rouen, and became a literary correspondent of Louis
Bouilhet. It was at the latter's house on those Sundays in winter when
the Norman rain drowned the sound of the bells and dashed against the
window panes that the school boy learned to write poetry.

Vacation took the rhetorician back to the north of Normandy. Now it
was shooting at Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, across fields, bogs, and
through the woods. From that time on he sealed his pact