On various occasions he was pleased with himself at the fertility that
had developed in him amid those rich soils where a frenzy mounts to
your brain through the senses of smell and sight. He even feels the
influence of the seasons, and writes from Provence: "The sap is rising
in me, it is true. The spring that I find just awakening here stirs
all my plant nature, and causes me to produce those literary fruits
that ripen in me, I know not how."
The "meteor" is at its apogee. All admire and glorify him. It is the
period when Alexandre Dumas, fils, wrote to him thrice: "You are the
only author whose books I await with impatience."
The day came, however, when this dominant impassivity became stirred,
when the marble became flesh by contact with life and suffering. And
the work of the romancer, begun by the novelist, became warm with a
tenderness that is found for the first time in Mont Oriol....
But this sentimental outburst that astonished his admirers quickly
dies down, for the following year, there appeared the sober Pierre et
Jean, that admirable masterpiece of typical reality constructed with
"human leaven," without any admixture of literary seasoning, or
romantic combinations. The reader finds once more in his splendid
integrity the master of yore.
But his heart has been touched, nevertheless. In the books that
follow, his impassivity gives way like an edifice that has been slowly
undermined. With an ever-growing emotion he relates under slight
disguises all his physical distress, all the terrors of his mind and
heart.
What is the secret of this evolution? The perusal of his works gives
us a sufficient insight into it.
The Minstrel has been received in country houses; has been admitted to
"the ladies' apartments." He has given up composing those hurried
tales which made his fame, in order to construct beautiful romances of
love and death.... The story teller has forsaken rustics and peasants,
the comrades of the "Repues franches," for the nobility and the
wealthy. He who formerly frequented Mme. Tellier's establishment now
praises Michèle de Burne.
Ysolde replaces Macette. In "l'Ostel de Courtoisie," Maupassant
cultivates the usual abstractions of the modern Round Table:
Distinction and Moderation; Fervor and Delicacy. We see him inditing
love sonnets and becoming a knight of chivalry. The apologist of
brutal pleasures has become a devotee of the "culte 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....