Again and again he speaks for all ages and for all men; but now and then comes the revealing word. Do you remember how the Devil took him up into the high mountain and showed him all the Kingdom of the Earth? It is manifest from that phrase that he thought the world was flat, and if you went high enough you could oversee it all.'
'True, true,' cried Maupassant. 'I hadn't thought of it; yet he leads us all today and we follow humbly and at some distance.'
Maupassant was almost as patriotic as Kipling, but not so blinded by the herd-instinct.
'You know,' he said to me once, 'we Normans and Bretons dislike the English more than the Germans; you are our enemies, it was you who came and sacked our towns and took toll of our wealth. The German is far away from us while you are close, just there across a strip of sea.'
'I understand,' I replied, 'but the English have no fear, no dislike of you. How do you explain that?'
'Curious,' he declared. 'I think it must be because we were rich and you were poor before the modern industrial era. The rich always fear the poor and they have good reason for their instinctive dread.'
The explanation was ingenious and in part true, I imagine.
Very early in our acquaintance, in spite of his alertness of mind and sympathetic, companionable good humour, I began to realize the truth of Taine's word that Maupassant was a sort of taureau triste, 'a sad bull.'
Maupassant complained at first of his eyes; a year or so later he said that he often went blind for an hour: 'A terrifying experience,' he called it. About this time he confessed he had tried all the drugs; neuralgia plagued him and he took ether for it-'a temporary relief was better than nothing' — but with his sound good sense, he quickly saw that a drug only deferred the payment while increasing the debt. No wonder Flaubert begged him to be 'moderate' in everything, in muscular exertion, in writing even, and especially in yielding to fits of sadness that only left one depressed and drained (abruti).
Maupassant loved to ascribe all his malaise to overwork; more than once he boasted to me of having written fifteen hundred pages in one year, to say nothing of articles in the Gaulois and the Gil Blas. The pages hardly contained more than one hundred and fifty words each, or say two English novels in the year; hard work, but nothing extraordinary, unless one takes into the account his steadily diminishing stock of health, which began to strike me about this time.
One evening I shall always remember. He had had neuralgia in the morning, which had gradually yielded to food and drink, a glass of wonderful port completing the cure. We had been talking of the belief in God when Maupassant turned to the personal factor. 'What a strange being is man,' he cried, 'an imperial intelligence that watches the pains and miseries of its unfortunate fleshy partner. Plainly I note that I am getting steadily worse in health, that my bodily pains are increasing, that my hallucinations are becoming longer, my power of work diminishing. The supreme consolation comes from the certitude that when my state gets too bad, I'll put an end to it.
Meanwhile I won't whine, I've had great hours! Ah! Great hours!'
It was in 1889,1 think, that I first discovered why he was getting steadily worse in health. He broke an engagement with me, and when we next met a month later, I was still annoyed with him and showed it. To excuse himself, he blurted out that he had had an unexpected visitor from Paris and went on to confess that one's 'late loves were the most terrible.' 'She is exquisitely pretty,' he broke in, 'perfect physically: a flawless mistress, a perfumed altar of love, and has besides a wealth of passion that I never met before. I can't resist her, and the worst of it is, I can't resist showing off with her and bringing her to wonder. What vain fools we men are and how I pay for the excess afterwards. Really, for a week after an orgy with her I suffer like one of the damned, and even now, though she has been a month gone, I'm a prey to misery (inducible malaise). I wish she'd keep away: she drains me, exhausts my vitality, unnerves me.'
I thought it my duty to warn him. 'You are showing the surmenage everywhere,' I said. 'Your skin is leaden, your expression curious, troubled, fearful even. For God's sake, cut out all that orgy business: it's excusable at twenty or thirty but not at forty; it's your test and trial. You'll go under if your mind doesn't master your body. Take Shakespeare's great word to heart: even his Antony would not be 'the bellows and the fan to cool a harlot's lust'; it was doubtless his own confession.'
'What a great phrase,' cried Maupassant, 'the bellows and the fan, great…
'I know all that,' he went on, 'but then I say to myself, I'm beaten anyhow, growing steadily worse; one more gaudy night will be so much to the good.
You can't imagine her myriad seductiveness. She uses a perfume that makes me drunk at first like ether; in an hour it has vanished but the still more intoxicating subtle scent of her body has taken its place; and her bodily beauty, and the ineffable charm of her withholding, and her giving drive me crazy. Never before have I experienced such pleasure or given it.
'Man! she's an aphrodisiac. As soon as my state of depression and misery begins to lighten, I want her. My thoughts turn to her; my mind, my body ache for her. Of course I make all sorts of good resolutions: I will be moderate and restrain myself; but when she is there I feel in me the strength of ten and the desire of conquest, the mad longing to reach an intenser thrill than ever before overpowers me, and her intense response carries me away, and-once more I fall into the depths.'
He was assuredly a great lover, one of the most gifted of whom we have any record, and though in talk with me he usually dwelt most on the physical side of the passion, his letters to his mistress show that he was devoted to her spiritually as well, and that she was his heart's mate and complement. There is no greater love story in all literature; it ranks with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and some of Maupassant's phrases are as intense as the best of Shakespeare. Surely it deserves to be recorded and given its due importance.
Now who was she, this incomparable mistress? A Jewess, well off, ten years or so younger than Maupassant and married to a man who would not have forgiven her unfaith had he even suspected it. The lovers had to meet at long intervals and on the sly. Ten years after Maupassant's death she wrote of him and their love in La Grande Revue and it is plain, I think, from those pages, that if Maupassant had told her the effect of then' love-orgies on his health, she would not only have refused to be a party to injuring him, but would have sought to help him to self- control.
Her affection for him seems both deep and high; she delights to record all his good qualities: his love and admiration of his mother; his kindness even to shameless beggars; his interest in other men and women, particularly in all curious, uncommon types; his constant desire to be fair and honest. Of course she dwells on his love for her and gives one extract from his letters to her twice. Here it is in French, a superb expression of love's humility and that sacred adoration of love that will yet redeem this sordid existence of ours.
Comme je vous aimais! Et comme j'aurais voulu m'agenouiller tout a coup devant vous, m'agenouiller la, dans la poussiere, sur le bord du trottoir, et baiser vos belles mains, vos petits pieds, le bas de votre robe, les baiser en pleurant.
It is easy to English it:
'How I love you! How I wished to throw myself on my knees before you, there in the dust of the sidewalk, and kiss your lovely hands, and your little feet, the hem of your dress-kiss them all with hot tears.'
This Madame X has more in her than facile appreciation. Maupassant confesses once that he is a 'romance- writer, even in his embracings.' She adds finely, 'I would rather say that he remained a lover even in his romances… And what a wonderful lover he was,' she goes on.
Every meeting was a new birth of love, thanks to his genius. Through him I have lived such wonderful enchanting hours that I shudder to think what life would have meant, had I not met and loved him. His letters, and they were many, came at odd moments, most of them were dated at night; often I had only just left him when a letter from him would come, so ardent, so passionate, so tender, that I could hardly refrain from hastening back to him.
Here's the end of one of those love letters that shows, I think, marvellous intensity of feeling, perhaps the most astonishing and convincing expression known to me of the deepest human passion.
A few hours ago, you were there in my arms. Now I'm alone. But you remain with me. All the peculiarities of your personality live in me with such overwhelming unity that I seem to see your voice, to breathe your beauty, to hear the perfume of you… I kiss your white hands and my lips dwell on your scarlet mouth…
Surely this man reached undream'd of heights!
Some of us knew beforehand that Maupassant was richly affectionate, a born lover if ever there was one, but these golden words are the best proof of his astonishing genius. Alas! His fall was the more appalling.
