constantly preached the nobility and necessity of work and of the daily task; in fact, he admired only the aristocracy of genius and the achievements of artists and men of science.
He dined with me and I told him I wanted to publish his stories in English and would pay for them at the highest French rate. He seemed surprised, but he had need of money and soon sent me stories, some of which I published later in the Fortnightly Review.
One winter Dilke lent me his villa at the Cap Brun near Toulon. I invited Percy Ffrench of Monivae, who had once been British ambassador at Madrid, to pay me a visit, and while he was living with me, we ran across Maupassant in Cannes. Ffrench spoke French as well as English and his praise of me and of my influence in England seemed to affect Maupassant; at any rate, he agreed to come to us on a visit for a few days. He stayed a week or so and I began to know him intimately.
One evening I remember I was praising L'Heritage to him. He told me what I had guessed, that the bureau life depicted in the story was taken from his experiences in the Ministry of the Marine in his early days in Paris. I suggested that the ending was too prolonged, that the story ended inevitably with the heroine's condemnation of the girls who proposed to do exactly what she had done. 'Comme ces creatures sont infames' should have been the last word of the tale. He hesitated a little and then, 'I believe you're right: that gives snap and emphasis to the Irony.' After reflecting a little, he asked,
'Why don't you write stories?'
'I haven't the art,' I replied carelessly, 'and I love hie more than any transcript of it.'
'You couldn't be so good a critic,' he went on, 'unless you were also a creator.
Get to work and we'll have the pleasure of criticizing you in turn.'
'I'll think of it,' I replied, and indeed from that day on the suggestion never left me. Could I be a writer? I had always known that I could be a good speaker and political thinker, but to write was to measure myself with the greatest; had I genius? If not, I'd be a fool to begin. Suddenly it came into my head that I might tell a tale or two and see what effect they'd have. But I didn't take the work seriously for some time; not indeed until the idea of a seat in Parliament became silly to me, but that's another story.
The better I knew Maupassant the more I got to like him. He was a typical Frenchman in many ways; kindly, good-humoured and fair-minded. He liked rowing, was very proud, indeed, of his strength and exceedingly surprised to find that my early English school training and the university life in the U.S.A. had made me, if not stronger, certainly more adroit, than he was.
It was from him I first heard the French proverb, ban animal, bon homme. His physical vigour was extraordinary; he told, for instance, of rowing all the night through after being the whole day on the Seine. Horseplay always appealed to him, too, even when he happened to be the victim. One morning on the river at Argenteuil, when he rose to take another's place at an oar and stepped on the gunwale of the stout boat to pass on to his thwart, the steersman, seeing the opportunity, threw himself on the gunwale at the exact moment and Maupassant was tossed into the water. 'I couldn't help laughing,' he said. 'It was so perfectly timed.'
'Had you a change of clothes?' I asked.
'Oh, no!' he crowed. 'I simply rowed hard till I got hot and the clothes dried on me. In those days I never caught cold…' It was this abounding physical vigour, I think, that inspired his kindly judgments of his contemporaries and rivals: he found genius even in Bourget. The only person I ever heard him criticize unfairly was E. de Goncourt: he always spoke derisively of his ecriture artiste. 'The people who have nothing to say are naturally very careful how they say it,' was one of his remarks. 'It's when the two powers are found together, a deep, true vision of life and a love of words, as in Flaubert, that you get the great master.' Goncourt was even more prejudiced; after Maupassant's death he denied vehemently that he was a great writer.
As soon as Maupassant found that I was muscularly very strong, fully his equal indeed, he began to talk of amatory performances. He was curiously vain, like many Frenchmen, and not of his highest powers.
'Most people,' he said, 'are inclined to think that the lower classes, working men and especially sailors, are better lovers than those who live sedentary lives. I don't believe that; the writer or artist who takes exercise and keeps himself in good health is a better performer in love's list than the navvy or ploughman. It needs brains,' was his thesis, 'to give another the greatest possible amount of pleasure.'
We all three discussed the matter at great length. I told him I thought youth was the chief condition of success, but to our surprise he would not agree to that, and clinched the matter by talking of a dozen consecutive embraces as nothing out of the common. Laughingly, I reminded him of Monsieur Six-fois in Casanova, but he would not accept even that authority.
'Six-fois,' he cried contemptuously. 'I've done it six fois in an hour.' I cannot but think that some such statement as this grew into the story told me in Nice in 1923 by my friend George Maurevert, the writer, that Maupassant, excited by Flaubert's disbelief, went once with a huissier as witness to a brothel in Paris and had six girls in an hour. Flaubert was singularly ascetic, yet very much interested in Maupassant's astounding virility.
Believe this story or not as you please, but no one should take it as a libel on Maupassant-still less on contemporary French manners-for Lumbrose tells in his book how Bourget and Maupassant paid a visit to a low brothel in Rome, where Bourget sat in a corner, he says, and was mocked by Maupassant, who went off with a girl.
Time and again Maupassant told me he could go on embracing as long as he wished.
'A dangerous power,' I said, thinking he was merely bragging.
'Why dangerous?' he asked.
'Because you could easily get to exhaustion and nervous breakdown,' I replied. 'But you must be speaking metaphorically.'
'Indeed I'm not,' he insisted, 'and as for exhaustion, I don't know what you mean; I'm as tired after two or three times as I am after twenty.'
'Twenty!' I exclaimed, laughing. 'Poor Casanova is not in it.'
'I've counted twenty and more,' Maupassant insisted.
I could do nothing but shrug my shoulders. 'Surely you know,' he went on after a pause, 'that in two or three times you exhaust your stock of semen so that you can go on afterwards without further loss?'
'There would be increased nerve exhaustion, surely,' I countered.
'I don't feel it,' he answered.
As we separated for the night, Ffrench declared that the whole thing was French braggartism. 'They love to show off,' he insisted.
But I could not be so sure; Maupassant had made an impression on me of veracity and he was certainly very strong.
On reflection, the idea came to me that perhaps he had begun to care for women very late in life and that in boyhood he had never practiced selfabuse and so had arrears to make up. I determined to ask him when I got a good chance, and a day or two later, when Ffrench happened to be out somewhere and Maupassant and I went for a walk to Toulon, I put the question to him.
'No, no,' he replied. 'I learned to excite myself by chance. When I was about twelve a sailor one day practiced the art before me, and afterwards, like most healthy boys, I played with myself occasionally. But I did not yield to my desires often.'
'Was it religion restrained you?' I asked.
'Oh, dear, no!' he cried. 'I was never religious; even as a boy religion was repulsive to me. When I was about sixteen I had a girl, and the delight she gave me cured me of self-abuse. I believe that my experiences were fairly normal, save that I learned from E- that I could go on longer than most men.
'I suppose I am a little out of the common sexually,' he resumed, 'for I can make my instrument stand whenever I please.'
'Really?' I exclaimed, too astonished to think.
'Look at my trousers,' he remarked, laughing, and there on the road he showed me that he was telling the truth.
'What an extraordinary power,' I cried. 'I thought I was abnormal in that way, for I always get excited in a moment, and I have heard men say that they needed some time to get ready for the act; but your power is far beyond anything I have ever seen or heard of.'
'That is the worst of it,' he remarked quietly. 'If you get a reputation, some of them practically offer themselves. But one often meets women who don't care much for the act. I suppose you meet that sort oftener in
