In 1890 his love recognizes a profound change in him. 'He is living,' she says,
'hi a state of spiritual exaltation that brings with it hallucinations.' In August he writes from Nice telling her that he needs her: 'I am troubled by such strange ideas, oppressed by such mysterious anguish, shaken by such confused sensations that I feel like crying, 'Help, help!' 'The confused echoes of days I have lived torture me now and again, or excite me to a sort of madness'; and then he talks of the wild regrets he feels 'for the days that are no more' (des regrets pour un temps qui jut et qui ne sera plus jamais, jamais). 'I have the feeling,' he goes on, 'that my end is near and wholly unexpected. Come to me, come!'
It was this appeal, this cry of supreme distress, that brought about her final fatal visit.
Again and again she notes the constant preoccupation of his thought with the idea of death, even at a time when she was filled with a sense of his abounding health and vigour. Towards the end she declares that 'his reason never seemed shaken; his sensations had altered, it is true, but not his judgment!'
She is always an advocate of the angel, always sees the best in her lover, and when all is over and long past, further off than far away, her words still ring pathetically sincere; the heart's cry for the golden days, 'the days that are no more!'
'Only two years before, how full of life he was, and how strong, and I was young and in love with him. Oh, the sad, painful years I have lived since.'
I think no one will deny that if Maupassant had told this woman the truth, she would have helped him to exercise self-restraint. Not once does she dwell on the physical side of their affection. It is the joys of his companionship she recalls, the delights of their spiritual intimacy. It is always he who calls and she who comes.
Maupassant's fate is not so worthy of pity, for he was warned again and again, and we mortals can hardly complain, even of those catastrophes that are unexpected and difficult, if not impossible, to foresee. Even his valet, Francois, had warned him.
Three or four years before the end Maupassant knew that the path of senseindulgence for him led directly to madness and untimely death.
He could trace the progress of his malady in body and in mind from Le Horla, in the beginning, to Qui salt with its unholy terror, the last story he ever wrote. Even in his creative work he was warned after every excess and in fifty different ways. First an orgy brought on fits of partial blindness, then acute neuralgic pains and periods of sleeplessness, while his writing showed terrifying fears; and all this disease had to be cured by rest and dieting, baths and frictions, and, above all, by constant change of scene. Then came desperate long-continued depression broken by occasional exaltations and excitements; later still, periods of hallucination, during which his mind wandered and which he recalled afterwards with humiliation and shame; and always, always the indescribable mental agony he spoke of as inducible malaise. Finally he lost control of his limbs, saw phantoms on the highway and was terrified by visions that gave him the certainty of madness, which could only be faced by the fixed resolve to put an end to himself, if the punishments became more than he could bear.
Yet he prayed again and again for the fatal caresses. It is possible that syphilis had weakened his moral fibre; many of us between forty and fifty have come to nervous breakdown and by resolute abstinence, careful exercise and change of scene have won back to health and sanity. But it was the young Maupassant of the boating on the Seine and the heedless insane indulgences with Mimi and Musette that weighted the dice against him.
I have said that it took sheer good fortune for a miracle of genius such as Shakespeare to grow to full height and give the best in him; had it not been for Lord Southampton's gift of a thousand pounds we should never have seen Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth or The Tempest. It requires a miracle of genius, and extraordinary bodily strength to boot, in a Frenchman to reach healthful old age as Hugo did and at seventy write on the art and joy of being a grandfather. But Maupassant, like Shakespeare, was first and last a lover, and that's the heaviest of all handicaps.
His valet Francois has told us more of the truth about the last stage than any other observer. He noticed at once that Maupassant's inamorata was extremely pretty and beautifully dressed. 'C'est une bourgeoise du plus grand chic; elle a tout a fait le genre de ces grandes dames qui ont ete elevees soil aux Oiseaux, soit au Sacre- Coeur. Elle en a garde les bonnes et rigides manieres.' (She's a woman of the greatest distinction, the perfect type of those noble ladies who have been brought up in some famous convent such as the Holy Heart. She has all their charm of manner and their high-bred aloofness.) As he saw the effect of her intimacy with his master, whom he loved, he grew to hate and dread her visits. Time and again he was tempted to tell the 'Vampire,' as he called her, to keep away.
On the twentieth of September, 1891, about two o'clock in the afternoon, he heard the bell and at the door found the woman 'who had already done my master so much harm. She passed me, as she always did, without speaking, with impassive marble face.'
After the catastrophe, he regrets he did not tell her what she was doing and slam the door in her face. He did not know that in August Maupassant had written to her, begging her to come-a piteous last appeal which I have already quoted.
'In the evening Maupassant seemed broken (accable) and didn't speak of the visit. In spite of the constant care, he hadn't recovered a month later. Early in November they went from Paris to Cannes to the Chalet de l'Isere.'
Maupassant was still suffering from tortured nerves (malaise indicible). On the fifth of December he wrote to his lawyer: 'I am so ill that I fear I shall not live more than a few days.'
Every two or three days he went across to Nice to lunch with his mother at the villa Les Ravenelles and Francois went with him to prepare his meal, for he knew exactly how to cook so that his master would get the most nourishment with the least chance of indigestion.
On the twenty-fourth of December he paid his mother a long visit and promised to spend Christmas day with her; he was getting better slowly and wanted above all things to get to work once more and finish a sketch he had begun of Turgenev. He begged his mother to read all Turgenev s novels and send him a page or two on each; she promised she would.
But on Christmas day he put her off: two ladies, two sisters-one married, the other unmarried-had come to see him and he went with them and spent the day on the island Ste. Marguerite in the Bay of Cannes. We all know who the married one was. Francois does not tell us anything of this change of plan, but he records that in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth, Maupassant went out for a walk towards Grasse and returned ten minutes later. Francois was dressing himself but Maupassant called him loudly, imperiously, to tell him that 'he had met on the road a shade, a phantom!' 'He was evidently,' continued Francois, 'the victim of an hallucination and was afraid, though he wouldn't confess it.'
'On the twenty-seventh at breakfast he coughed a little and in all seriousness declared that he had swallowed a morsel of sole and it had gone into his lungs and he might die of it.'
This day he wrote again to his solicitors that 'he was going from bad to worse and believed that he would be dead within a couple of days.' As he went out for a sail on his yacht in the afternoon, the sailor Raymond remarked that he could not lift his leg properly to get on board: now he put it too high, and again too low. Francois remarks that he had already noticed this same symptom of paralytic weakness.
On the first of January Maupassant couldn't shave himself, told Francois that there was a sort of mist before his eyes; but at breakfast he ate two eggs and drank some tea and feeling better, set off for Nice, as otherwise 'my mother will think I'm very ill.' Francois went with him.
Curiously enough the reports of this last day's happenings differ widely. His mother says that they talked the whole afternoon and that she remarked nothing abnormal in him, except a sort of exaltation or subdued excitement.
In the middle of dinner alone together (tete a tete) he talked wildly (divaguait).
'In spite of my entreaties, my tears, instead of sleeping there in Les Ravenelles, he would go back to Cannes. I begged him to stay,' she says,
'went on my knees to him in spite of the weakness of my old bones; he would follow his own plan (il suivait sa vision obstinee). I saw him disappear in the night, excited, mad, wandering in mind, going I didn't know where, my poor child' (Et je vis s'enfoncer dans la nuit… exalte, fou, divaguante, allant je ne sais ou, mon pauvre enfant).
Most of this is inexact, a fiction of memory, not fact. Francois gives us the truth more nearly: he tells us that he prepared Maupassant's dejeuner and there were present, besides his mother, his brother's wife, and his niece
