God.  The man who wrote in English found the theme of his minor masterpieces in the conflict of which the battle-ground is the human heart.  The man who wrote in French began by caring little or nothing for the heart or the soul or the mind, and by concentrating all his skill upon a record of the deeds of the human body.  The one has left us ‘Markheim’ and the ’Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,’ while the other made his first bid for fame with ’Boule de suif.’

In the preface of ‘Pierre et Jean,’ Maupassant has recorded how he acquired from Louis Bouilhet the belief that a single lyric, a scant hundred lines, would give immortality to a poet if only the work were fine enough, and that for the author who sought to escape oblivion there was only one course to pursue—­to learn his trade thoroly, to master every secret of the craft, to do his best always, in the hope that some fortunate day the Muse would reward his unfailing devotion.  And from Flaubert, the author of that merciless masterpiece ‘Madame Bovary,’ the young man learned the importance of individuality, of originality, of the personal note which should be all his own, and which should never suggest or recall any one else’s.  Flaubert was kindly and encouraging, but he was a desperately severe taskmaster.  At Flaubert’s dictation Maupassant gave up verse for prose; and for seven years he wrote incessantly and published nothing.  The stories and tales and verses and dramas of those seven years of apprenticeship were ruthlessly criticized by the author of ‘Salammbo,’ and then they were destroyed unprinted.  In all the long history of literature there is no record of any other author who served so severe a novitiate.

Douglas Jerrold once said of a certain British author who had begun to publish very young that “he had taken down the shutters before he had anything to put up in the shop window.”  From being transfixt by such a jibe Maupassant was preserved by Flaubert.  When he was thirty he contributed that masterpiece of ironic humor ‘Boule de suif,’ to the ‘Soirees de Medan,’ a volume of short-stories put forth by the late Emile Zola, with the collaboration of a little group of his friends and followers.  On this first appearance in the arena of letters Maupassant stept at once to a foremost place.  That was in 1880; and in 1892 his mind gave way and he was taken to the asylum, where he soon died.  In those twelve years he had published a dozen volumes of short-stories and half a dozen novels.  Of the novel he might have made himself master in time; of the short-story he proved himself a master with the very earliest of all his tales.