himself was not aware, but which was so universal, that no contemporary
author during his life ever experienced the same. The "meteor" sent out
its light and its rays were prolonged without limit, in article after
article, volume on volume.

He was now rich and famous . . . . He is esteemed all the more as they
believe him to be rich and happy. But they do not know that this young
fellow with the sunburnt face, thick neck and salient muscles whom they
invariably compare to a young bull at liberty, and whose love affairs
they whisper, is ill, very ill. At the very moment that success came to
him, the malady that never afterwards left him came also, and, seated
motionless at his side, gazed at him with its threatening countenance. He
suffered from terrible headaches, followed by nights of insomnia. He had
nervous attacks, which he soothed with narcotics and anesthetics, which
he used freely. His sight, which had troubled him at intervals, became
affected, and a celebrated oculist spoke of abnormality, asymmetry of the
pupils. The famous young man trembled in secret and was haunted by all
kinds of terrors.

The reader is charmed at the saneness of this revived art and yet, here
and there, he is surprised to discover, amid descriptions of nature that
are full of humanity, disquieting flights towards the supernatural,
distressing conjurations, veiled at first, of the most commonplace, the
most vertiginous shuddering fits of fear, as old as the world and as
eternal as the unknown. But, instead of being alarmed, he thinks that the
author must be gifted with infallible intuition to follow out thus the
taints in his characters, even through their most dangerous mazes. The
reader does not know that these hallucinations which he describes so
minutely were experienced by Maupassant himself; he does not know that
the fear is in himself, the anguish of fear "which is not caused by the