The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII | Page 7

almost inscrutable shades of meaning, and let us have a
greater variety of phrases, more variously constructed, ingeniously
divided, full of sonority and learned rhythm. Let us strive to be
admirable in style, rather than curious in collecting rare words.
It is in fact more difficult to bend a sentence to one's will and make it
express everything--even what it does not say, to fill it full of
implications of covert and inexplicit suggestions, than to invent new
expressions, or seek out in old and forgotten books all those which
have fallen into disuse and lost their meaning, so that to us they are as a

dead language.
The French tongue, to be sure, is a pure stream, which affected writers
never have and never can trouble. Each age has flung into the limpid
waters its pretentious archaisms and euphuisms, but nothing has
remained on the surface to perpetuate these futile attempts and
impotent efforts. It is the nature of the language to be clear, logical, and
vigorous. It does not lend itself to weakness, obscurity, or corruption.
Those who describe without duly heeding abstract terms, those who
make rain and hail fall on the cleanliness of the window panes, may
throw stones at the simplicity of their brothers of the pen. The stones
may indeed hit their brothers, who have a body, but will never hurt
simplicity--which has none.
GUY DE MAUPASSANT.
LA GUILLETTE, ETRETAT, September, 1887.

PIERRE ET JEAN
CHAPTER I
"Tschah!" exclaimed old Roland suddenly, after he had remained
motionless for a quarter of an hour, his eyes fixed on the water, while
now and again he very slightly lifted his line sunk in the sea.
Madame Roland, dozing in the stern by the side of Madame Rosémilly,
who had been invited to join the fishing-party, woke up, and turning
her head to look at her husband, said:
"Well, well! Gérome."
And the old fellow replied in a fury:
"They do not bite at all. I have taken nothing since noon. Only men
should ever go fishing. Women always delay the start till it is too late."

His two sons, Pierre and Jean, who each held a line twisted round his
forefinger, one to port and one to starboard, both began to laugh, and
Jean remarked:
"You are not very polite to our guest, father."
M. Roland was abashed, and apologized.
"I beg your pardon, Madame Rosémilly, but that is just like me. I invite
ladies because I like to be with them, and then, as soon as I feel the
water beneath me, I think of nothing but the fish."
Madame Roland was now quite awake, and gazing with a softened look
at the wide horizon of cliff and sea.
"You have had good sport, all the same," she murmured.
But her husband shook his head in denial, though at the same time he
glanced complacently at the basket where the fish caught by the three
men were still breathing spasmodically, with a low rustle of clammy
scales and struggling fins, and dull, ineffectual efforts, gasping in the
fatal air. Old Roland took the basket between his knees and tilted it up,
making the silver heap of creatures slide to the edge that he might see
those lying at the bottom, and their death-throes became more
convulsive, while the strong smell of their bodies, a wholesome reek of
brine, came up from the full depths of the creel. The old fisherman
sniffed it eagerly, as we smell at roses, and exclaimed:
"Cristi! But they are fresh enough!" and he went on: "How many did
you pull out, doctor?"
His eldest son, Pierre, a man of thirty, with black whiskers trimmed
square like a lawyer's, his moustache and beard shaved away, replied:
"Oh, not many; three or four."
The father turned to the younger. "And you, Jean?" said he.
Jean, a tall fellow, much younger than his brother, fair, with a full beard,

smiled and murmured:
"Much the same as Pierre--four or five."
Every time they told the same fib, which delighted father Roland. He
had hitched his line round a row-lock, and folding his arms he
announced:
"I will never again try to fish after noon. After ten in the morning it is
all over. The lazy brutes will not bite; they are taking their siesta in the
sun." And he looked round at the sea on all sides, with the satisfied air
of a proprietor.
He was a retired jeweler who had been led by an inordinate love of
seafaring and fishing to fly from the shop as soon as he had made
enough money to live in modest comfort on the interest of his savings.
He retired to le Havre, bought a boat, and became an amateur skipper.
His two sons, Pierre et Jean, had remained