and meditation. He traveled extensively in Algeria, Italy, England,
Britany, Sicily, Auvergne, and from each voyage he brought back
a new volume. He cruised on his private yacht "Bel Ami", named
after one of his earlier masterpieces. This feverish life did not
prevent him from making friends among the literary celebrities of
his day: Dumas fils had a paternal affection for him; at Aix-les-Bains
he met Taine and fell under the spell of the philosopher-historian.
Flaubert continued to act as his literary Godfather. His friendship
with the Goucourts was of short duration; his frank and practical
nature reacted against the ambiance of gossip, scandal, duplicity
and invidious criticism that the two brothers had created around
them in the guise of an Eighteenth Century style salon. He hated
the human comedy, the social farce.

In his latter years he developed an exaggerated love for solitude,
a predilection for self-preservation and still worse, a constant
fear of death and mania of persecution, which ran like a black
thread through all his writings and brought on gradually the final
tragic catastrophe.--He became insane in 1891 and died in 1893
without having recovered his mind.

Life, movement, penetrating[*] observation, and hypersensitiveness,
both artistic and physical, are the dominant traits of this literary
phenomenon. His rise to fame was as vertiginous as his fall and
decay. As a novelist he may have his equals and superiors, but
as a short story-writer, with the exception of Charles Nodier and
Alphonse Daudet, he had none.--

The Happy Hour Library