e legatee of her uncle. The marriage of the elder Maupassants proved
a failure. They are both dead now, and the subject may be discussed to
the point of admitting that the father was not a domestic man; Guy
inherited his taste for Bohemian life, and Madame Laure de Maupassant,
after separating from her husband, was subject to nervous crises in
which she attempted her life by swallowing laudanum and by strangling
herself with her own hair. She was rescued both times, but she was an
invalid to the last. A loving mother, she overlooked the education of
Guy, and let it be said that no happier child ever lived. His early
days were passed at Etretat, at the Villa Verguies, and generally in
the open air.

The future writer adored the sea; he has written many tales of the
water, of yachts and river sports. He went to the seminary at Yvetot
and the lyceum of Rouen, but his education was desultory, his reading
principally of his own selection--like most men of individual
character. He was a farceur, fond of mystifications, of rough
practical jokes, of horseplay. His physique was more Flemish than
French--a deep chest, broad shoulders, heavy muscular arms and legs, a
small head, a bull-neck. He looked like the mate of a deep-sea ship
rather than a literary man. Add to this a craze for rowing, canoeing,
swimming, boxing, fencing, and running. An all-round athlete, as the
phrase goes, Guy, it is related, once paid a hulking chap to let
himself be kicked. So hard was Guy's kick, done in an experimental
humour, that the victim became enraged and knocked the kicker off his
pins. Flaubert, the apostle of the immobile, objected. Too many
flirtations, too much exercise! he admonishingly cried. A writer must
cultivate repose.

In sooth Maupassant went a terrific pace. He abused his constitution
from the beginning, seemingly tormented by seven restless devils. He
spent five hours a day at his office in the Ministry, in the afternoon
he rowed on the Seine, in the evening he wrote. After he had resigned
as a bureaucrat he worked from seven until twelve every morning, no
matter the excesses of the previous night; the afternoon he spent on
the river, retiring very late. "Toujours les femmes, petit cochon,"
wrote Flaubert in 1876, "il faut travailler." But it was precisely
work that helped to kill the man. Those six pages a day, while they
seldom showed erasures, were carefully written, and not until after
much thought. Guy was the type of the