"We look at each other, astonished, immovable,
And both are so pale that it makes us fear."
* * * * * * *

"Alas! through all our senses slips life itself away."

This ending of the "Water's Edge" is less sinister than the
murder and the vision of horror which terminate the pantheistic
hymn of the "Rustic Venus." Considered as documents revealing the
cast of mind of him who composed them, these two lyrical essays
are especially significant, since they were spontaneous. They
explain why De Maupassant, in the early years of production,
voluntarily chose, as the heroes of his stories, creatures very
near to primitive existence, peasants, sailors, poachers, girls
of the farm, and the source of the vigor with which he describes
these rude figures. The robustness of his animalism permits him
fully to imagine all the simple sensations of these beings, while
his pessimism, which tinges these sketches of brutal customs with
an element of delicate scorn, preserves him from coarseness. It
is this constant and involuntary antithesis which gives unique
value to those Norman scenes which have contributed so much to
his glory. It corresponds to, those two contradictory tendencies
in literary art, which seek always to render life in motion with
the most intense coloring, and still to make more and more subtle
the impression of this life. How is one ambition to be satisfied
at the same time as the other, since all gain in color and
movement brings about a diminution of sensibility, and
conversely? The paradox of his constitution permitted to
Maupassant this seemingly impossible accord, aided as he was by