published two years later and is based on a combination of the
motifs which inspired "Une Vie" and "Bel-Ami," will reconsider
former hasty judgments, and feel, too, that beneath the triumph
of evil which calls forth Maupassant's satiric anger there lies
the substratum on which all his work is founded, viz: the
persistent, ceaseless questioning of a soul unable to reconcile
or explain the contradiction between love in life and inevitable
death. Who can read in "Bel-Ami" the terribly graphic description
of the consumptive journalist's demise, his frantic clinging to
life, and his refusal to credit the slow and merciless approach
of death, without feeling that the question asked at Naishapur
many centuries ago is still waiting for the solution that is
always promised but never comes?

In the romances which followed, dating from 1888 to 1890, a sort
of calm despair seems to have settled down upon De Maupassant's
attitude toward life. Psychologically acute as ever, and as
perfect in style and sincerity as before, we miss the note of
anger. Fatality is the keynote, and yet, sounding low, we detect
a genuine subtone of sorrow. Was it a prescience of 1893? So much
work to be done, so much work demanded of him, the world of
Paris, in all its brilliant and attractive phases, at his feet,
and yet--inevitable, ever advancing death, with the question of
life still unanswered.

This may account for some of the strained situations we find in
his later romances. Vigorous in frame and hearty as he was, the
atmosphere of his mental processes must have been vitiated to
produce the dainty but dangerous pessimism that pervades some of
his later work. This was partly a consequence of his honesty and