Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories | Page 9

de la Dame."
Everywhere he was sought after, fêted, petted.... But Maupassant never
let himself be carried away by the tinsel of his prestige, nor the
puerility of his enchantment. He despised at heart the puppets that
moved about him as he had formerly despised his short stories and his
petit bourgeois. "Ah," he cries, "I see them, their heads, their types,

their hearts and their souls! What a clinic for a maker of books! The
disgust with which this humanity inspires me makes me regret still
more that I could not become what I should most have preferred--an
Aristophanes, or a Rabelais." And he adds: "The world makes failures
of all scientists, all artists, all intelligences that it monopolizes. It aborts
all sincere sentiment by its manner of scattering our taste, our curiosity,
our desire, the little spark of genius that burns in us."
Maupassant had to bend to the conditions of his new life. Being well
bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and
conventionality, and bowed before the idols of the cave he had
entered....
If Maupassant never became the slave of worldly ideas, the creature of
instinct that was part of his being acquired the refined tastes of the
salons, and the manners of the highest civilization.
The novelist lived for some time in these enchanted and artificial
surroundings, when, suddenly, his malady became aggravated. He was
tortured by neuralgia, and by new mysterious darting pains. His
suffering was so great that he longed to scream. At the same time, his
unhappy heart became softened and he became singularly emotional.
His early faculties were intensified and refined, and in the overtension
of his nerves through suffering his perceptions broadened, and he
gained new ideas of things. This nobler personality Maupassant owes
to those sufferings dear to great souls of whom Daudet speaks. This is
what he says:
"If I could ever tell all, I should utter all the unexplored, repressed and
sad thoughts that I feel in the depths of my being. I feel them swelling
and poisoning me as bile does some people. But if I could one day give
them utterance they would perhaps evaporate, and I might no longer
have anything but a light, joyful heart. Who can say? Thinking
becomes an abominable torture when the brain is an open wound. I
have so many wounds in my head that my ideas cannot stir without
making me long to cry out. Why is it? Why is it? Dumas would say that
my stomach is out of order. I believe, rather, that I have a poor, proud,
shameful heart, that old human heart that people laugh at, but which is

touched, and causes me suffering, and in my head as well; I have the
mind of the Latin race, which is very worn out. And, again, there are
days when I do not think thus, but when I suffer just the same; for I
belong to the family of the thin-skinned. But then I do not tell it, I do
not show it; I conceal it very well, I think. Without any doubt, I am
thought to be one of the most indifferent men in the world. I am
sceptical, which is not the same thing, sceptical because I am
clear-sighted. And my eyes say to my heart, Hide yourself, old fellow,
you are grotesque, and it hides itself."
This describes, in spite of reservation, the struggle between two
conflicting minds, that of yesterday, and that of to-day. But this
sensitiveness that Maupassant seeks to hide, is plain to all clear-seeing
people.
He soon begins to be filled with regrets and forebodings. He has a
desire to look into the unknown, and to search for the inexplicable. He
feels in himself that something is undergoing destruction; he is at times
haunted by the idea of a double. He divines that his malady is on guard,
ready to pounce on him. He seeks to escape it, but on the mountains, as
beside the sea, nature, formerly his refuge, now terrifies him.
Then his heart expands. All the sentiments that he once reviled, he now
desires to experience. He now exalts in his books the passion of love,
the passion of sacrifice, the passion of suffering; he extols self-sacrifice,
devotion, the irresistible joy of ever giving oneself up more and more.
The hour is late, the night is at hand; weary of suffering any longer, he
hurriedly begs for tenderness and remembrance.
Occasionally, the Maupassant of former days protests against the
bondage of his new personality; he complains that he no longer feels
absolutely as formerly that he has no contact with anything in the world,
that sweet, strong sensation that gives one strength. "How sensible I
was," he says, "to wall myself round with