th writers who in striving to present life as a whole
purposely omit episodes that reveal the influence of the senses. "As
well," he says, "refrain from describing the effect of intoxicating
perfumes upon man as omit the influence of beauty on the temperament of
man."

De Maupassant's dramatic instinct was supremely powerful. He seems to
select unerringly the one thing in which the soul of the scene is
prisoned, and, making that his keynote, gives a picture in words which
haunt the memory like a strain of music. The description of the ride of
Madame Tellier and her companions in a country cart through a Norman
landscape is an admirable example. You smell the masses of the colza in
blossom, you see the yellow carpets of ripe corn spotted here and there
by the blue coronets of the cornflower, and rapt by the red blaze of
the poppy beds and bathed in the fresh greenery of the landscape, you
share in the emotions felt by the happy party in the country cart. And
yet with all his vividness of description, De Maupassant is always
sober and brief. He had the genius of condensation and the reserve
which is innate in power, and to his reader could convey as much in a
paragraph as could be expressed in a page by many of his predecessors
and contemporaries, Flaubert not excepted.

Apart from his novels, De Maupassant's tales may be arranged under
three heads: Those that concern themselves with Norman peasant life;
those that deal with Government employees (Maupassant himself had long
been one) and the Paris middle classes, and those that represent the
life of the fashionable world, as well as the weird and fantastic ideas
of the later years of his career. Of these three groups the tales of
the Norman peasantry perhaps rank highest. He depicts the Norman farmer
in surprisingly free and bold strokes, revealing him in all his
caution, astuteness, rough gaiety, and homely virtue.

The tragic stage of De Maupassant's life may, I think, be set down as
beginning just before the drama of "Musotte" was issued, in conjunction
with Jacques Normand, in 1891. He had almost given up the hope of
interpreting his puzzles, and the struggle between the falsity of the
life which surrounded him and the nobler visions which possessed him
was wearing him out. Doubtless he resorted to unwise methods for the
dispelling of physical lassitude or for surcease from troubling mental
problems. To this period belong such weird and horrible fancies as are
cont