or Cesaire, the son of Old Amable in the novel of that name,
--this degraded type abounds in Maupassant's stories, evoked with
a ferocity almost jovial where it meets the robustness of
temperament which I have pointed out, a ferocity which gives them
a reality more exact still because the half-civilized person is
often impulsive and, in consequence, the physical easily
predominates. There, as elsewhere, the degenerate is everywhere a
degenerate who gives the impression of being an ordinary man.

There are quantities of men of this stamp in large cities. No
writer has felt and expressed this complex temperament with more
justice than De Maupassant, and, as he was an infinitely careful
observer of milieu and landscape and all that constitutes a
precise middle distance, his novels can be considered an
irrefutable record of the social classes which he studied at a
certain time and along certain lines. The Norman peasant and the
Provencal peasant, for example; also the small officeholder, the
gentleman of the provinces, the country squire, the clubman of
Paris, the journalist of the boulevard, the doctor at the spa,
the commercial artist, and, on the feminine side, the servant
girl, the working girl, the demigrisette, the street girl, rich
or poor, the gallant lady of the city and of the provinces, and
the society woman--these are some of the figures that he has
painted at many sittings, and whom he used to such effect that
the novels and romances in which they are painted have come to be
history. Just as it is impossible to comprehend the Rome of the
Caesars without the work of Petronius, so is it impossible to
fully comprehend the France of 1850-90 without these stories of
Maupassant. They are no more the whole image of the country than
the "Satyricon" was the whole image of Rome, but what their