situation at once insupportable and inevitable. The spell of this
grief and trouble exerts such a power upon the writer that he
ends stories commenced in pleasantry with some sinister drama.
Let me instance "Saint-Antonin," "A Midnight Revel," "The Little
Cask," and "Old Amable." You close the book at the end of these
vigorous sketches, and feel how surely they point to constant
suffering on the part of him who executed them.

This is the leading trait in the literary physiognomy of
Maupassant, as it is the leading and most profound trait in the
psychology of his work, viz, that human life is a snare laid by
nature, where joy is always changed to misery, where noble words
and the highest professions of faith serve the lowest plans and
the most cruel egoism, where chagrin, crime, and folly are
forever on hand to pursue implacably our hopes, nullify our
virtues, and annihilate our wisdom. But this is not the whole.

Maupassant has been called a literary nihilist--but (and this is
the second trait of his singular genius) in him nihilism finds
itself coexistent with an animal energy so fresh and so intense
that for a long time it deceives the closest observer. In an
eloquent discourse, pronounced over his premature grave, Emile
Zola well defined this illusion: "We congratulated him," said he,
"upon that health which seemed unbreakable, and justly credited
him with the soundest constitution of our band, as well as with
the clearest mind and the sanest reason. It was then that this
frightful thunderbolt destroyed him."

It is not exact to say that the lofty genius of De Maupassant was
that of an absolutely sane man. We comprehend it to-day, and, on