Perhaps he overshot the mark. By dint of hearing morality, art and
literature depreciated, and seeing him preoccupied with boating, and
listening to his own accounts of love affairs which he did not always
carry on in the highest class, many ended by seeing in him one of
those terrible Normans who, all through his novels and stories,
carouse and commit social crimes with such commanding assurance and
such calm unmorality.

He was undoubtedly a Norman, and, according to those who knew him
best, many of his traits of character show that atavism is not always
an idle word....

To identify Maupassant with his characters is a gross error, but is
not without precedent. We always like to trace the author in the hero
of a romance, and to seek the actor beneath the disguise. No doubt, as
Taine has said, "the works of an intelligence have not the
intelligence alone for father and mother, but the whole personality of
the man helps to produce them...."

That is why Maupassant himself says to us, "No, I have not the soul of
a decadent, I cannot look within myself, and the effort I make to
understand unknown souls is incessant, involuntary and dominant. It is
not an effort; I experience a sort of overpowering sense of insight
into all that surrounds me. I am impregnated with it, I yield to it, I
submerge myself in these surrounding influences."

That is, properly speaking, the peculiarity of all great novelists.
Who experiences this insight, this influence more than Balzac, or
Flaubert, in Madame Bovary? And so with Maupassant, who, pen in hand,
is the character he describes, with his passions, his hatreds, his