re-reading him, we find traces everywhere of his final malady.
But it is exact to say that this wounded genius was, by a
singular circumstance, the genius of a robust man. A physiologist
would without doubt explain this anomaly by the coexistence of a
nervous lesion, light at first, with a muscular, athletic
temperament. Whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable. The
skilled and dainty pessimism of De Maupassant was accompanied by
a vigor and physique very unusual. His sensations are in turn
those of a hunter and of a sailor, who have, as the old French
saying expressively puts it, "swift foot, eagle eye," and who are
attuned to all the whisperings of nature.

The only confidences that he has ever permitted his pen to tell
of the intoxication of a free, animal existence are in the
opening pages of the story entitled "Mouche," where he recalls,
among the sweetest memories of his youth, his rollicking canoe
parties upon the Seine, and in the description in "La Vie
Errante" of a night spent on the sea,--"to be alone upon the
water under the sky, through a warm night,"--in which he speaks
of the happiness of those "who receive sensations through the
whole surface of their flesh, as they do through their eyes,
their mouth, their ears, and sense of smell."

His unique and too scanty collection of verses, written in early
youth, contains the two most fearless, I was going to say the
most ingenuous, paeans, perhaps, that have been written since the
Renaissance: "At the Water's Edge" (Au Bord de l'Eau) and the
"Rustic Venus" (La Venus Rustique). But here is a paganism whose
ardor, by a contrast which brings up the ever present duality of
his nature, ends in an inexpressible shiver of scorn: