and his aunt (Madame de Harnois), whom Guy loved greatly. At four o'clock the carriage came for them, and on the way to the station they bought a quantity of white grapes to continue his usual regimen (cure). Francois tells how on reaching home Maupassant changed his clothes, put on a silk shirt to be more comfortable, dined on the wing of a chicken, some chicory, and a souffle of rice with cream flavored with vanilla, and drank a glass and a half of mineral water.
A little later Maupassant complained of pains in the back. Francois cured him with ventouses, gave him a cup of camomile, and Maupassant went to bed at eleven-thirty. Francois seated himself in an armchair in the next room and waited till his master should fall asleep. At twelve-thirty Francois went to his bedroom but left the door open. A moment after the garden bell rang: it was a telegram; but he found Maupassant sleeping with his mouth half open and went back to bed without waking him. He continues. 'It was about twofifteen when I heard a noise. I hurried into the little room at the head of the stairs and found Maupassant standing with his throat cut.'
'See what I've done, Francois,' he said. 'I've cut my throat; it's a pure case of madness!'
Francois called Raymond, the strong sailor, to help him, then sent for the doctor and helped to put the poor madman in a strait waistcoat.
In my first sketch of Maupassant, published in the first volume of my Contemporary Portraits, I was able to go a little deeper even than Francois. I reached the Hotel at Antibes early in January, 1892, when all the world was talking of poor Maupassant's breakdown in madness. At once I went across to Nice and from the accounts of eye- witnesses reconstituted the scene at and after the dejeuner of the first of January in his mother's villa, Les Ravenelles.
During the meal his mind had wandered and so justified his mother's fears and anxieties; after the meal he came out on the little half-moon terrace with the blue sky above and the purple dancing sea in front to mock his agony. I quote here what I wrote at the time.
How desperately he struggled for control; now answering some casual remark of his friends, now breaking out into a cold sweat of dread as he felt the rudder slipping from his hand; called back to sanity again by some laughing remark, or other blessed sound of ordinary life, and then, again, swept off his feet by the icy flood of sliding memory and dreadful thronging imaginings, with the awful knowledge behind knocking at his consciousness that he was already mad, mad — never to be sane again, mad-that the awful despairing effort to hold on to the slippery rock and not to slide down into the abyss was all in vain, that he was slipping, slipping in spite of himself, in spite of bleeding fingers, falling- falling…
Hell has no such horror! There in that torture chamber-did it last but a minute-he paid all debts, poor, hounded, haunted creature with wild beseeching eyes, choking in the grip of the foulest spectre that besets humanity…
He returned to Cannes by train and at two next morning Francois heard him ringing and hurried to his bedside, only to find his master streaming with blood and mad, crying wildly, 'Encore un homme au rancart! au rancart!' (Another man on the dust-heap).
Surely this phrase is De Maupassant's, and the remark that Francois puts in his mouth, 'It's a pure case of madness,' is only his own later summing up of the situation. 'Another man on the dust-heap' is the despairing soul-cry of De Maupassant.
It was found afterwards that De Maupassant had taken out his revolver, but Francois had already removed the cartridges, so De Maupassant put the revolver down and took up a sort of paper-knife which did not cut deeply enough and injured his face more than his neck.
The doctor got De Maupassant to bed and he slept while Francois and Raymond watched in the dim light and thought of the irreparable disaster.
In the morning they found the wire from the Jewess, the 'Vampire,' as Francois calls her again bitterly, while he wonders whether her evil influence, by means of the telegram Maupassant never saw, could have helped to bring about the supreme catastrophe.
Everyone knows that the great writer got rapidly worse, was taken to Paris to the asylum of Dr. Blanche, became more and more a mere animal till death took him a year and a half later on the third of July, 1893.
Maupassant's life story and tragic end are full of lessons for all artists. What I find in it is the moral I am continually emphasizing, that every power given to us is almost of necessity a handicap and a danger.
It was said of Byron, and is surely no less true of Maupassant, that he 'awoke one morning to find himself famous.' The publication of Boule de Suif put Maupassant in one day among the great masters of the short story. He was praised on all sides as an impeccable artist; it is scarcely to be wondered at that he afterwards neglected self-criticism and hardly ever bettered the workmanship he had shown in that early story. He wrote over two hundred short stories in the next ten years, but perhaps no single tale shows finer artistry.
Again: he was gifted with extraordinary virile power; the consequence was that he got syphilis before he was of age and brought himself to an untimely end because he was determined to show off his prowess as a lover.
When shall we artists and lovers learn that the most highly-powered engines require the strongest brakes?
But how dare I judge him? How inept all criticism appears when I think of his personal charm; the gladness in his eyes when we met; the clasp of his hand; his winged words in the evenings spent side by side; the unforgettable glint when a new thought was struck out; the thousand delights of his alert, clear intelligence; ah, my friend, my dear, dear friend! Gone forever! Guy, swallowed up and lost in the vague vast of uncreated night, lost forever!
I reread his last volume: it begins with a masterpiece: L'Inutile Beaute; at the end Un Cas de Divorce and Qui Sait. And now Un Cos de Divorce seems more characteristic to me and more terrible than Qui Sait, with deeper words, words wrung from the soul of a great lover-the man's adoration of the beauty of flowers, his passionate love of the orchid with its exquisite roseate flanks and ivory pistils giving forth an intoxicating perfume stronger far and sweeter than the scene of any woman's body.
And he watched the flower fade, wither and die, losing all loveliness, and instead of the seductive perfume, the vile odor of decay.
CHAPTER XXI
Early in December, 1889, Smith Elder, the publishers, sent me a copy of Asolando: Fancies and Facts, by Robert Browning. I spent the night reading it: good stuff but not a first-rate thing in the booklet. By the bye, where did he get the title? From Asolo, the little place in the hills looking down on Venice and mentioned in Sordetto? Or perhaps from asolare: to wander about? A few days later the news reached us that Browning had died in Venice, aged seventy-seven. For half a dozen years I had had the greatest love and admiration for glorious Robert Browning; indeed, until I met him at Lady Shrewsbury's at lunch, he was, after Carlyle, my hero. I had found a certain likeness between us: his best work was a thinker's and not a singer's; his poetic endowment was not extraordinary. When a youth he had worked through an English dictionary, and I had done the same thing, without knowing that he had set the example, forty years before. My friend Verschoyle had given me a Johnson's dictionary in two huge leather-bound volumes and I had gone through them in a little over a year, putting down in red ink at the bottom of each page all the words that were unfamiliar to me.
When this labour was finished I went again through the words in red ink, marking any I had forgotten in blue pencil. Finally, I went through these once more; yet there were still thirty words or so that had not stuck in my memory, but that I did not mind. The mere fact that I had felt the same need as Browning intensified my sympathy for him. Then, too, had he not written to the British public: 'Ye who love me not but one day will love'-my feeling from boyhood on, and only now at thirty-odd was I getting near the hope that one day I too should win their liking.
'Glorious Robert Browning,' I always called him to myself; but when we met I was disillusioned. I did my best to win him, time and again, and at length. At Lady Jeune's lunch, when he showed his disdain for Lowell, who was feted and honoured, I thought I had won him. When he saw that I too felt nothing but contempt for Lowell's
