As his malady began to take a more definite form, he turned his steps
towards the south, only visiting Paris to see his physicians and
publishers. In the old port of Antibes beyond the causeway of Cannes,
his yacht, Bel Ami, which he cherished as a brother, lay at anchor and
awaited him. He took it to the white cities of the Genoese Gulf,
towards the palm trees of Hyères, or the red bay trees of Anthéor.
It was during one of these idle cruises on the open sea, outside of
Agay and Saint-Raphael that he wrote "Sur l'Eau."
It was on the sacred sea of the old poets and philosophers, on the sea
whose voice has rocked the thought of the world, that he cast into the
shadow that long lament, so heartrending and sublime, that posterity
will long shudder at the remembrance of it. The bitter strophes of
this lament seem to be cadenced by the Mediterranean itself and to be
in rhythm, like its melopoeia.
"Sur l'Eau" is the last Will and Testament, the general confession of
Maupassant. To those who come after him he leaves the legacy of his
highest thought; then he says farewell to all that he loved, to
dreams, to starlit nights, and to the breath of roses. "Sur l'Eau" is
the book of modern disenchantment, the faithful mirror of the latest
pessimism. The journal written on board ship, disconnected and hasty,
but so noble in its disorder, has taken a place forever beside Werther
and René, Manfred and Oberman.
He had for a long time, to his sorrow, seen his health failing under
the attacks of an obscure malady which left him with a sense of the
diminution of his powers and a gradual clouding of his intellect.
Symptoms of general paralysis set in, at first mistaken for neurotic
disturbances. He changed greatly. Those who met him as I did, thin and
shivering, on that rainy Sunday when they were celebrating the
inauguration of Flaubert's monument at Rouen would scarcely have
recognized him. I shall never forget, as long as I live, his face
wasted by suffering, his large eyes with a distressed expression,
which emitted dying gleams of protest against a cruel fate....
Maupassant retired to Cannes not far from his mother. He read medical
books and, in spite of what they taught, persisted in attributing his
sufferings to "rheumatism localized in the brain," contracted amid the
fogs on the Seine....
Vainly he endeavored to work, he became gloomy and the idea of suicide
impressed him more and more...
The months passed, however, and in June he was able to go to Divonne
to take a cure. After a very characteristic attack of optimism, he
suddenly appeared at Champel and astonished everyone by his frightful
eccentricities. One evening, however, he felt better, and read to the
poet Dorchain the beginning of his novel "The Angelus," which he
declared would be his masterpiece. When he had finished, he wept. "And
we wept also," writes Dorchain, "at seeing all that now remained of
genius, of tenderness and pity in this soul that would never again be
capable of expressing itself so as to impress other minds.... In his
accent, in his language, in his tears, Maupassant had, I know not
what, of a religious character, which exceeded his horror of life, and
his sombre terror of annihilation."
At the end of September he again visited Cannes, but the fatal day
predicted by the physician was at hand.