Mademoiselle Fifi | Page 2

stories. His second novel "Bel Ami", which came out in 1885, had
thirty-seven editions in four months. His editor, Havard, commissioned
him to write new masterpieces and, without the slightest effort, his pen
produced new masterpieces of style, description, conception and
penetration[*]. With a natural aversion for Society, he loved retirement,
solitude and meditation. He traveled extensively in Algeria, Italy,
England, Britany, Sicily, Auvergne, and from each voyage he brought
back a new volume. He cruised on his private yacht "Bel Ami", named
after one of his earlier masterpieces. This feverish life did not prevent
him from making friends among the literary celebrities of his day:
Dumas fils had a paternal affection for him; at Aix-les-Bains he met
Taine and fell under the spell of the philosopher-historian. Flaubert
continued to act as his literary Godfather. His friendship with the
Goucourts was of short duration; his frank and practical nature reacted
against the ambiance of gossip, scandal, duplicity and invidious
criticism that the two brothers had created around them in the guise of
an Eighteenth Century style salon. He hated the human comedy, the
social farce.
In his latter years he developed an exaggerated love for solitude, a
predilection for self-preservation and still worse, a constant fear of
death and mania of persecution, which ran like a black thread through
all his writings and brought on gradually the final tragic
catastrophe.--He became insane in 1891 and died in 1893 without
having recovered his mind.
Life, movement, penetrating[*] observation, and hypersensitiveness,
both artistic and physical, are the dominant traits of this literary

phenomenon. His rise to fame was as vertiginous as his fall and decay.
As a novelist he may have his equals and superiors, but as a short
story-writer, with the exception of Charles Nodier and Alphonse
Daudet, he had none.--
The Happy Hour Library
[*][Note from Brett: The original uses "penertation" and "penertating"
but I could not find this word anywhere so assumed it was a
typographical error.]

Mademoiselle Fifi

The Prussian Commander, Major Graf von Farlsberg, was finishing the
reading of his mail, comfortably seated in a large tapestry armchair,
with his booted feet resting on the elegant marble of the mantelpiece on
which, for the last three months that he had been occupying the
Chateau d'Uville, his spurs had traced two deep grooves, growing
deeper every day.
A cup of coffee was steaming on an inlaid guerdon, stained with
liqueur, burned by cigars, notched by the penknife of the conquering
officer who, while sharpening his pencil, would stop at times and trace
on the marble monograms or designs according to the fancy of his
indolent dream.
After he had finished his letters and read the German newspapers,
which his orderly had brought him, he rose, threw into the fire three or
four enormous pieces of green wood, for these gentlemen were cutting
down, little by little, the trees of the park to keep themselves warm and
stepped over to the window. The rain was pouring, a regular Normandy
rain which one might have thought was let loose and showered down
by a furious hand, a slanting rain, thick like a curtain, forming a kind of
wall with oblique stripes, a rain that lashed, splashed, deluged
everything, a rain peculiar to the neighborhood of Rouen, that watering

pot of France.
The Officer looked for a long while at the inundated lawn, and yonder,
the swollen Andilles, which was overflowing; and with his fingers he
was drumming on the window-pane a waltz from the Rhineland, when
a noise caused him to turn around; it was his second in command,
Baron von Kelweingstein, holding a rank equivalent to that of Captain.
The Major was a giant, with broad shoulders, graced by a fan-shaped
blond beard, flowing down his chest and forming a breast-shield. His
whole tall, solemn person suggested the image of a military peacock, a
peacock that would carry its tail spread on its chin. He had blue eyes,
cold and gentle; a cheek bearing the scar of a sword wound inflicted
during the Austrian war; and he was said to be a kind hearted man as
well as a brave officer.
Short, red faced, corpulent, tightly belted, the Captain wore, cropped
almost close, his red hair, the fiery filaments of which, when under the
reflection of certain lights, might have given the impression as though
his face had been rubbed with phosphorus. Two teeth lost in a night
orgy and brawl, he did not exactly remember now, caused him to spit
out indistinct words which one could not always understand. He was
bald only on the top of his head, like a tonsured monk, with a crop of
short, curly hair, golden and shiny, around this circle of bare flesh.
The Commander shook hands, and gulped down his cup