England, if half one hears is true, than in France. Here the women are generally normal. But it's seldom they feel intensely: however, some do, thank God.'
Naturally I spent a great deal of thought on his abnormality.
I soon noticed that he did not admire girls as I did. He seemed to prefer women and to keep to one or two. I half came to the conclusion that he husbanded his powers more than most men. But this he denied absolutely.
'Temptation is there to be yielded to,' he declared. 'I deny myself nothing that suits or pleases me in life; why should I?'
He was as much given to the pursuit of the unknown as anyone could be. I remember once, when we were talking of hunting big game in America or in Africa, he broke in, declaring that woman is the only game in the wide world worth pursuing. The mere hope of meeting her here or there, in the train going to Cannes or out walking-the Hoped-for One, the Desired- alone gives interest and meaning to life. 'The only woman I really love,' he went on, with a certain exaltation, 'is the Unknown who haunts my imagination- seduction in person, for she possesses all the incompatible perfections I've never yet found in any one woman. She must be intensely sensuous, yet selfcontrolled; soulful, yet a coquette: to find her, that's the great adventure of life and there's no other.'
I was astonished to discover that he was vainer of his amatory performances than even of his stories. 'Who knows,' he'd say, 'whether these tales of mine are going to live or not? It's impossible to tell; you may be among the greatest today but the very next generation may turn away from you. Fame is all chance, the toss of a com, but love, a new sensation, is something saved from oblivion.'
I would not accept this for a moment. 'The sensation is fleeting,' I cried, 'but the desire of fame seems to me the highest characteristic of humanity and in our lifetime we can be certain of enduring reputation and an influence that lives beyond the grave.'
Maupassant shook his head, smiling. 'Tout passe; there is no certainty.'
'We know,' I went on, 'the whole road humanity has travelled for tens of thousands of years. The foetus in the womb shows our progress from the tadpole to the man, and we know the millenniums of growth from the human child to the thinker and poet, the God-man of today. The same process is still going on in each of us; have you become more pitiful than others, largerhearted, more generous, more sympathetic, more determined to realize the highest in yourself? Put this in your book and it is sure to live with an everwidening popularity. Goethe was right:
Wer immer strebend sich bemuht
Den konnen wir erlosen.
'And Rabelais?' he retorted sarcastically, 'and Voltaire? How do they fit in your moral Pantheon?'
'Voltaire defended Galas,' I replied, 'and Rabelais would be as easy to praise as Pascal, but your objection has a modicum of truth in it. It is the extraordinary, whether good or evil, that is certain to survive. We remember the name of the Marquis de Sade because of his monstrous, revolting cruelty as surely as that of St. Francis. There's lots of room for scepticism everywhere in life. I was only stating the rule which gives ground enough for hope and encourages to the highest achievement. Three or four of your stories will be read a thousand years hence.'
'We can hardly understand Villon,' he retorted, 'and the speech of the He de France in the twelfth century is another language to us.'
'But printing has changed all that,' I replied. 'It immobilizes language, though it admits the addition of new words and new ideas. Your French will endure as Shakespeare's English endures.'
'You don't altogether convince me,' Maupassant replied, 'though there's a good deal of truth in your arguments; but if you were not a writer yourself, you would not be so interested in fame and posthumous renown.'
There he had me and I could only laugh.
A day or two later Ffrench came to tell me how magnificently endowed Maupassant was as a lover. I asked Ffrench whether he thought the abnormality a sign of health.
'Of course,' he cried. 'Proof of extraordinary strength,' but somehow or other I was not so sure.
It was in 1885 or 1886, I think, that he sent me his Horla with an interesting letter.
'Most critics will think I have gone mad,' he wrote, 'but you'll know better.
I'm perfectly sane, but the story interested me strangely: there are so many thoughts in our minds that we cannot explain, fears in us that are instinctive and form, so to speak, the background of our being.'
Le Horla made a tremendous impression on me; the title was composed from le hors-la, the being not ourselves in life. It was the first of Maupassant's stories which was quite beyond me. I couldn't have written anything like it.
And asking myself, 'Why?' I came to the conclusion, inspired perhaps by mere vanity, that I was too healthy, too normal, if you will, and that set me thinking.
When next I saw him: 'That Horla of yours is astonishing,' I began. 'To fear as you must have feared in order to write that dreadful tale is evidence enough to me that your nerves are all jangled and out of tune.'
Maupassant laughed at me. 'I've never been in better health,' he declared,
'never in my life.'
I had studied all venereal diseases in Vienna and I had just been reading a new German book on syphilis in which, for the first time, I found the fact stated that it often kills its victims by paralysis between forty and fifty, when the vital forces have begun to decline. Suddenly the thought came into my head and I put the question to Maupassant: 'Have you ever had syphilis?'
'All the infantile complaints,' he said laughing. 'Everyone has it in youth, haven't they? But it's twelve or fifteen years now since I've seen a trace of it. I was completely cured long years ago.'
I told him what the German specialist had discovered, but he wouldn't give any credence to it. 'I dislike everything German, as you know,' he said. 'Then' science even is exaggerated.'
'But the other day,' I reasoned, 'you complained of pains in your limbs and took a very hot bath; that's not a sign of health.'
'Let's go for a long walk,' he replied. 'You'll soon find I'm not decrepit.'
We had our walk and I put my doubts and fears out of mind for the moment, but whenever I though of Le Horla I became suspicious. There were chapters, too, in some of his other books which disquieted me.
It was in the spring of 1888, I believe, that I met him at Cannes, where he had come in his yacht Bel-Ami from Marseilles. We dined together and he told me that he had had wonderful experiences in Algeria and the north of Africa. He had pushed to Kairouan, the Holy City, it appeared, and admired its wonderful mosque, but he had brought back little, save the fact that each Arab had three or four concubines besides his wife, and that all the women are usually wretchedly unhappy, with jealousy as a sort of continual madness.
He told me of a Jewess who kept a house with her two daughters and said he'd like to write the story of one of them and make her fall in love with a French officer because he took her out driving and was kind to her.
'Any evidence of affection, as apart from passion,' he remarked, 'has a curious weight, especially with such women. They are far prouder of tenderness than of desire.'
'Long novels,' he confessed once casually, 'are much easier to write than nouvelles or contes. Pierre et Jean, for example, I finished in less than three months and it didn't tire me at all, whereas La Maison Tellier cost me more time and a far greater exertion.'
Perhaps its was the preference in both writers for the short story that made me always couple Kipling with de Maupassant in my thoughts, but I must admit at once that Kipling was by far the more interesting companion. Draw him out, show him interest, and he could tell a tale by word of mouth as well as he ever wrote one. Unlike most able Frenchmen, Maupassant was not gifted as a talker, perhaps because he never let himself go to the inspiration of the moment; but now and then he would surprise you by width of vision or Tightness of judgment, showing a mind, as Meredith said, that had 'travelled.'
We were all talking of Napoleon one night when I told how he had astonished me. I said once that Jesus had been the first to discover the soul and speak from it and to it, notably in the ineffable Suffer little children to come unto me. Years later I found that Napoleon had used the very same phrase: 'Jesus discovered the soul.'
'I don't like Napoleon,' said de Maupassant, 'though everyone must admire his intelligence, but I always think Jesus the wisest of men; how he came to such heights of thought in such surroundings is one of the wonders of the world to me. He had no mark upon him of his age; he was for all time.'
'It is curious,' I agreed, 'indeed, almost impossible to frame him in his tune.
