Short Fiction

xml:lang="fr">petit employé and small shopkeeper, usually in Paris, and the miscellaneous, in which the upper walks of life are represented and the fantastic, the whimsical, the weird, and even the supernatural, figure as well as the unexpurguted. These last things range from “Le Horla” (which is not a specimen of the author’s best vein⁠—the only occasion on which he has the weakness of imitation is when he strikes us as emulating Edgar Poe), to “Miss Harriet,” and from “Boule de Suif” (a triumph) to that almost inconceivable little growl of Anglophobia, “Décourerte”⁠—inconceivable I mean in its irresponsibility and ill-nature on the part of a man of M. de Maupassant’s distinction; passing by such little perfections as “Petit Soldat,” “L’Abandonné,” “Le Collier” (the list is too long for complete enumeration), and such gross imperfections (for it once in a while befalls our author to go woefully astray), as “La Femme de Paul,” “Cháli,” “Les Soeurs Rondoli.” To these might almost be added as a special category the various forms in which M. de Maupassant relates adventures in railway carriages. Numerous, to his imagination, are the pretexts for enlivening fiction afforded by first, second and third class compartments; the accidents (which have nothing to do with the conduct of the train), that occur there constitute no inconsiderable part of our earthly transit.

It is surely by his Norman peasant that his tales will live; he knows this worthy as if he had made him, understands him down to the ground, puts him on his feet with a few of the freest, most plastic touches. M. de Maupassant does not admire him, and he is such a master of the subject that it would ill become an outsider to suggest a revision of judgment. He is a part of the contemptible furniture of the world, but on the whole, it would appear, the most grotesque part of it. His caution, his canniness, his natural astuteness, his stinginess, his general grinding sordidness, are as unmistakable as that quaint and brutish dialect in which he expresses himself and on which our author plays like a virtuoso. It would be impossible to demonstrate with a finer sense of the humor of the thing the fatuities and densities of his ignorance, the bewilderments of his opposed appetites, the overreachings of his caution. His existence has a gay side, but it is apt to be the merciless gaiety commemorated in “Farce Normande,” an anecdote which, like many of M. de Maupassant’s anecdotes, it is easier to refer the reader to than to repeat. If it is most convenient to place “La Maison Tellier” among the tales of the peasantry, there is no doubt that it stands at the head of the list. It is absolutely unadapted to the perusal of ladies and young persons, but it shares this peculiarity with most of its fellows, so that to ignore it on that account would be to imply that we must forswear M. de Maupassant altogether, which is an incongruous and insupportable conclusion. Every good story is of course both a picture and an idea, and the more they are interfused the better the problem is solved. In “La Maison Tellier” they fit each other to perfection; the capacity for sudden innocent delights latent in natures which have lost their innocence is vividly illustrated by the singular scenes to which our acquaintance with Madame and her staff (little as it may be a thing to boast of), successively introduces us. The breadth, the freedom and brightness of all this give the measure of the author’s talent and of that large, keen way of looking at life which sees the pathetic and the droll, the stuff of which the whole piece is made, in the queerest and humblest patterns. The tone of “La Maison Tellier” and the few compositions which closely resemble it expresses M. de Maupassant’s nearest approach to geniality. Even here, however, it is the geniality of the showman exhilarated by the success with which he feels that he makes his mannequins (and especially his womankins) caper and squeak, and who after the performance tosses them into their box with the irreverence of a practiced hand. If the pages of the author of Bel-Ami may be searched almost in vain for a manifestation of the sentiment of respect, it is naturally not by Mme. Tellier and her charges that we must look most to see it called forth; but they are among the things that please him most.

Sometimes there is a sorrow, a misery, or even a little heroism, that he handles with a certain tenderness (Une Vie is the capital example of this), without insisting on the poor, the ridiculous or, as he is fond of saying, the bestial side of it. Such an attempt, admirable in its sobriety and delicacy, is the sketch, in “L’Abandonné,” of the old lady and gentleman, Mme. de Cadour and M. d’Apreval, who, staying with the husband of the former at a little watering-place on the Normandy coast, take a long, hot walk on a summer’s day, on a straight, white road, into the interior, to catch a clandestine glimpse of a young farmer, their illegitimate son. He has been pensioned, he is ignorant of his origin, and is a commonplace and unconciliatory rustic. They look at him, in his dirty farmyard, and no sign passes between them; then they turn away and crawl back, in melancholy silence, along the dull French road. The manner in which this dreary little occurrence is related makes it as large as a chapter of history. There is tenderness in “Miss Harriet,” which sets forth how an English old maid, fantastic, hideous, sentimental and tract-distributing, with a smell of india-rubber, fell in love with an irresistible French painter and drowned herself in the well because she saw him kissing the maidservant; but the figure of the lady grazes the farcical. Is it because we know Miss Harriet (if we are not mistaken in the type the author has had in