Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories | Page 2

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 début. His worthy
biographer, H. Édouard 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 "Éducation 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 Étretat, 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 with the earth,
and those "deep and delicate roots" which attached him to his native
soil began to grow. It was of Normandy, broad, fresh and virile, that he
would presently demand his inspiration, fervent and eager as a boy's
love; it was in her that he would take refuge when, weary of life, he
would implore a truce, or when he simply wished to work and revive
his energies in old-time joys. It was at this time that was born in him
that voluptuous love of the sea, which in later days could alone
withdraw him from the world, calm him, console him.
In 1870 he lived in the country, then he came to Paris to live; for, the
family fortunes having dwindled, he had to look for a position. For
several years he was a clerk in the Ministry of Marine, where he turned
over musty papers, in the uninteresting company of the clerks of the
admiralty.
Then he went into the department of Public Instruction, where
bureaucratic servility is less intolerable. The daily duties are certainly
scarcely more onerous and he had as chiefs, or colleagues, Xavier
Charmes and Leon Dierx, Henry Roujon and René Billotte, but his
office looked out on a beautiful melancholy garden with immense plane
trees around which black circles of crows gathered in winter.
Maupassant made two divisions of his spare hours, one for boating, and
the other for literature. Every evening in spring, every free day, he ran
down to the river whose mysterious current veiled in fog or sparkling in
the sun called to him and bewitched him. In the islands in the Seine
between Chatou and Port-Marly, on the banks of Sartrouville and