THE HORRIBLE
MADAME PARISSE
MADEMOISELLE FIFI
A DUEL



GUY DE MAUPASSANT
A STUDY BY POL. NEVEUX

"I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a
thunderbolt." These words of Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia on the
occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid solemnity,
not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which, for ten
years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the fertility
of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances and travels, only to
sink prematurely into the abyss of madness and death. . . . .

In the month of April, 1880, an article appeared in the "Le Gaulois"
announcing the publication of the Soirees de Medan. It was signed by a
name as yet unknown: Guy de Maupassant. After a juvenile diatribe against
romanticism and a passionate attack on languorous literature, the writer
extolled the study of real life, and announced the publication of the new
work. It was picturesque and charming. In the quiet of evening, on an
island, in the Seine, beneath poplars instead of the Neapolitan cypresses
dear to the friends of Boccaccio, amid the continuous murmur of the
valley, and no longer to the sound of the Pyrennean streams that murmured
a faint accompaniment to the tales of Marguerite's cavaliers, the master
and his disciples took turns in narrating some striking or pathetic
episode of the war. And the issue, in collaboration, of these tales in