De Maupassant's dramatic instinct was supremely powerful. He
seems to select unerringly the one thing in which the soul of the
scene is prisoned, and, making that his keynote, gives a picture
in words which haunt the memory like a strain of music. The
description of the ride of Madame Tellier and her companions in a
country cart through a Norman landscape is an admirable example.
You smell the masses of the colza in blossom, you see the yellow
carpets of ripe corn spotted here and there by the blue coronets
of the cornflower, and rapt by the red blaze of the poppy beds
and bathed in the fresh greenery of the landscape, you share in
the emotions felt by the happy party in the country cart. And yet
with all his vividness of description, De Maupassant is always
sober and brief. He had the genius of condensation and the
reserve which is innate in power, and to his reader could convey
as much in a paragraph as could be expressed in a page by many of
his predecessors and contemporaries, Flaubert not excepted.

Apart from his novels, De Maupassant's tales may be arranged
under three heads: Those that concern themselves with Norman
peasant life; those that deal with Government employees
(Maupassant himself had long been one) and the Paris middle
classes, and those that represent the life of the fashionable
world, as well as the weird and fantastic ideas of the later
years of his career. Of these three groups the tales of the
Norman peasantry perhaps rank highest. He depicts the Norman
farmer in surprisingly free and bold strokes, revealing him in
all his caution, astuteness, rough gaiety, and homely virtue.

The tragic stage of De Maupassant's life may, I think, be set