It was in the early eighties that Blanche Macchetta, or Roosevelt, as she was before her marriage, made me intimate with Maupassant in Paris.
Blanche was an American who had come abroad to Milan to study singing; she was extraordinarily good-looking, a tall well-made blonde with masses of red-gold hair and classically perfect features. She had deserted music for matrimony, had married an Italian and lived in Italy for years, and yet spoke Italian with a strong American accent and could never learn the past participles of some of the irregular verbs. French she spoke in the same way, but more fluently and with a complete contempt, not only of syntax but also of the gender of substantives. Yet she was an excellent companion, full of life and gaiety, good-tempered and eager always to do anyone a good turn. She wrote a novel in English called The Copper Queen, and on the strength of it talked of herself as a femme de lettres and artist. She evidently knew Maupassant very well indeed and was much liked by him, for her praise of me made him friendly at once.
His appearance did not suggest talent: he was hardly middle height but markedly strong and handsome; the forehead square and rather high; the nose well cut and almost Grecian; the chin firm without being hard; the eyes well set and in color a greyish-blue; his hair and thick moustache were very dark and he wore besides a little spot of hair on his underlip. His manners were excellent, but at first he seemed reserved and unwilling to talk about himself or his achievements. He had already written La Maison Tellier, which I thought a better Boucle de Suif.
Let no one think my inability to trace De Maupassant's genius in his appearance or manner was peculiar; Frenchmen who had known him for years saw nothing in him, had no inkling of his talent. One day Zola told me that even when the "Medan" stories were being written, no one expected anything from Guy de Maupassant. It was naturally resolved that Zola's story should come first and the other five contributors were to be classed after being read. Maupassant was left to the very last; he read Boule de Suif. As soon as he had finished, all the six called out that it was a wonder and hailed him with French enthusiasm as a master-writer.
His reserve at first was almost impenetrable and he wore coat armour, as I called it to myself, of many youthful pretences. At one time he told me he was a Norman and had the Norman love of seafaring; at another he confessed that his family came from Lorraine and his name was evidently derived from mauvais passant. Now and then he would say he only wrote books to get money to go yachting, and almost ha the same breath he would tell how Flaubert corrected his first poems and stories and really taught him how to write, though manifestly he owed little to any teaching. Toward the end he had been so courted by princes that he took on a tincture of snobbism, and, it is said, wore the crown of a marquis inside his hat, though he had no shadow of a right to it, or indeed to the noble de which he always used. But at bottom, like most talented Frenchmen, he cared little for titles and constantly preached the nobility and necessity of work and of the daily task; in fact, he admired only the aristocracy of genius and the achievements of artists and men of science.
He dined with me and I told him I wanted to publish his stories in English and would pay for them at the highest French rate. He seemed surprised, but he had need of money and soon sent me stories, some of which I published later in the Fortnightly Review.
One winter Dilke lent me his villa at the Cap Brun near Toulon. I invited Percy Ffrench of Monivae, who had once been British ambassador at Madrid, to pay me a visit, and while he was living with me, we ran across Maupassant in Cannes. Ffrench spoke French as well as English and his praise of me and of my influence in England seemed to affect Maupassant; at any rate, he agreed to come to us on a visit for a few days. He stayed a week or so and I began to know him intimately.
One evening I remember I was praising L'Heritage to him. He told me what I had guessed, that the bureau life depicted in the story was taken from his experiences in the Ministry of the Marine in his early days in Paris. I suggested that the ending was too prolonged, that the story ended inevitably with the heroine's condemnation of the girls who proposed to do exactly what she had done. "Comme ces creatures sont infames" should have been the last word of the tale. He hesitated a little and then, "I believe you're right: that gives snap and emphasis to the Irony." After reflecting a little, he asked,
"Why don't you write stories?"
"I haven't the art," I replied carelessly, "and I love hie more than any transcript of it."
"You couldn't be so good a critic," he went on, "unless you were also a creator.
Get to work and we'll have the pleasure of criticizing you in turn."
"I'll think of it," I replied, and indeed from that day on the suggestion never left me. Could I be a writer? I had always known that I could be a good speaker and political thinker, but to write was to measure myself with the greatest; had I genius? If not, I'd be a fool to begin. Suddenly it came into my head that I might tell a tale or two and see what effect they'd have. But I didn't take the work seriously for some time; not indeed until the idea of a seat in Parliament became silly to me, but that's another story.
The better I knew Maupassant the more I got to like him. He was a typical Frenchman in many ways; kindly, good-humoured and fair-minded. He liked rowing, was very proud, indeed, of his strength and exceedingly surprised to find that my early English school training and the university life in the U.S.A. had made me, if not stronger, certainly more adroit, than he was.
It was from him I first heard the French proverb, ban animal, bon homme. His physical vigour was extraordinary; he told, for instance, of rowing all the night through after being the whole day on the Seine. Horseplay always appealed to him, too, even when he happened to be the victim. One morning on the river at Argenteuil, when he rose to take another's place at an oar and stepped on the gunwale of the stout boat to pass on to his thwart, the steersman, seeing the opportunity, threw himself on the gunwale at the exact moment and Maupassant was tossed into the water. "I couldn't help laughing," he said. "It was so perfectly timed."
"Had you a change of clothes?" I asked.
"Oh, no!" he crowed. "I simply rowed hard till I got hot and the clothes dried on me. In those days I never caught cold…" It was this abounding physical vigour, I think, that inspired his kindly judgments of his contemporaries and rivals: he found genius even in Bourget. The only person I ever heard him criticize unfairly was E. de Goncourt: he always spoke derisively of his ecriture artiste. "The people who have nothing to say are naturally very careful how they say it," was one of his remarks. "It's when the two powers are found together, a deep, true vision of life and a love of words, as in Flaubert, that you get the great master." Goncourt was even more prejudiced; after Maupassant's death he denied vehemently that he was a great writer.
As soon as Maupassant found that I was muscularly very strong, fully his equal indeed, he began to talk of amatory performances. He was curiously vain, like many Frenchmen, and not of his highest powers.
"Most people," he said, "are inclined to think that the lower classes, working men and especially sailors, are better lovers than those who live sedentary lives. I don't believe that; the writer or artist who takes exercise and keeps himself in good health is a better performer in love's list than the navvy or ploughman. It needs brains," was his thesis, "to give another the greatest possible amount of pleasure."
We all three discussed the matter at great length. I told him I thought youth was the chief condition of success, but to our surprise he would not agree to that, and clinched the matter by talking of a dozen consecutive embraces as nothing out of the common. Laughingly, I reminded him of Monsieur Six-fois in Casanova, but he would not accept even that authority.
"Six-fois," he cried contemptuously. "I've done it six fois in an hour." I cannot but think that some such statement as this grew into the story told me in Nice in 1923 by my friend George Maurevert, the writer, that Maupassant, excited by Flaubert's disbelief, went once with a huissier as witness to a brothel in Paris and had six girls in an hour. Flaubert was singularly ascetic, yet very much interested in Maupassant's astounding virility.
Believe this story or not as you please, but no one should take it as a libel on Maupassant-still less on contemporary French manners-for Lumbrose tells in his book how Bourget and Maupassant paid a visit to a low brothel in Rome, where Bourget sat in a corner, he says, and was mocked by Maupassant, who went off with a girl.
Time and again Maupassant told me he could go on embracing as long as he wished.
"A dangerous power," I said, thinking he was merely bragging.
"Why dangerous?" he asked.
"Because you could easily get to exhaustion and nervous breakdown," I replied. "But you must be speaking metaphorically."
"Indeed I'm not," he insisted, "and as for exhaustion, I don't know what you mean; I'm as tired after two or three times as I am after twenty."
"Twenty!" I exclaimed, laughing. "Poor Casanova is not in it."
"I've counted twenty and more," Maupassant insisted.
I could do nothing but shrug my shoulders. "Surely you know," he went on after a pause, "that in two or three times you exhaust your stock of semen so that you can go on afterwards without further loss?"
"There would be increased nerve exhaustion, surely," I countered.
"I don't feel it," he answered.
As we separated for the night, Ffrench declared that the whole thing was French braggartism. "They love to show off," he insisted.
But I could not be so sure; Maupassant had made an impression on me of veracity and he was certainly very strong.
On reflection, the idea came to me that perhaps he had begun to care for women very late in life and that in boyhood he had never practiced selfabuse and so had arrears to make up. I determined to ask him when I got a good chance, and a day or two later, when Ffrench happened to be out somewhere and Maupassant and I went for a walk to Toulon, I put the question to him.
"No, no," he replied. "I learned to excite myself by chance. When I was about twelve a sailor one day practiced the art before me, and afterwards, like most healthy boys, I played with myself occasionally. But I did not yield to my desires often."
"Was it religion restrained you?" I asked.
"Oh, dear, no!" he cried. "I was never religious; even as a boy religion was repulsive to me. When I was about sixteen I had a girl, and the delight she gave me cured me of self-abuse. I believe that my experiences were fairly normal, save that I learned from E- that I could go on longer than most men.
"I suppose I am a little out of the common sexually," he resumed, "for I can make my instrument stand whenever I please."
"Really?" I exclaimed, too astonished to think.
"Look at my trousers," he remarked, laughing, and there on the road he showed me that he was telling the truth.
"What an extraordinary power," I cried. "I thought I was abnormal in that way, for I always get excited in a moment, and I have heard men say that they needed some time to get ready for the act; but your power is far beyond anything I have ever seen or heard of."
"That is the worst of it," he remarked quietly. "If you get a reputation, some of them practically offer themselves. But one often meets women who don't care much for the act. I suppose you meet that sort oftener in 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.
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.
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 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.