ted and followed the progress of Flaubert's
pupil. When Une Vie appeared, the Russian novelist pronounced it
incomparably the best work of its author--perhaps the best French
novel since Hugo's Les Miserables. He wrote this in an article
entitled Guy de Maupassant and the Art of Fiction. It was doubtless
the Norman's clear, robust vision that appealed to Tolstoy, who, at
that period was undergoing a change of heart; else how could he call
Les Miserables the greatest novel of France, he the writer of Anna
Karenina--the antipodes of that windy apotheosis of vapid
humanitarianism, the characteristic trait of Hugo's epic of pity and
unreality.

But Maupassant affected Tolstoy as he had affected Turgenieff. Guy has
told us of his first meeting with the latter, an artist superior to
Tolstoy. "The first time I saw Turgenieff was at Gustave Flaubert's--a
door opened; a giant came in, a giant with a silver head, as they
would say in a fairy tale." This must have been in 1876, for in a
letter dated January 24, 1877, Turgenieff writes: "Poor Maupassant is
losing all his hair. He came to see me. He is as nice as ever, but
very ugly just at present." In 1880 the young man published a volume
of poetry, Des Vers. He was thirty years old (born August 5, 1850).

The literary apprenticeship of Guy to Gustave Flaubert is a
thrice-told tale, and signifies only this: If the pupil had not been
richly endowed all the lessons of Flaubert would have availed him
little. Perhaps the anecdote has been overdone; Maupassant has related
it in the preface to Pierre et Jean, and in the introduction to the
George Sand-Flaubert correspondence--now at the head of the edition of
Bouvard et Pecuchet. There are letters of Flaubert to his disciple
full of his explosive good nature, big heart, irascibility and
generous outpouring on the subject of his art. The thing that
surprises a close student of this episode and its outcome is that
Maupassant was in reality so unlike his master. And when I further
insist that the younger man appropriated whole scenes from Flaubert
for his longer stories, especially from L'Education Sentimentale, I
feel that I am uttering a paradox.

What I mean is this: Maupassant's temperament was utterly different
from Flaubert's. They were both prosecuted for certain things they
wrote, Guy for a poem in 1880, at Estampes; there had been a detraque
nervous system in both cases. Yet, similar in ideals and physical
peculiarities as wer