formula, he narrated to his contemporaries, bewildered by the lyrical
deformities of romanticism, stories of human beings, simple and
logical, like those which formerly delighted our parents.

The French reader who wished to be amused was at once at home, on the
same footing with him.... More spontaneous than the first troubadours,
he banished from his writings abstract and general types,
"romanticized" life itself, and not myths, those eternal legends that
stray through the highways of the world.

Study closely these minstrels in recent works; read M. Joseph Bedier's
beautiful work, Les Fabliaux, and you will see how, in Maupassant's
prose, ancestors, whom he doubtless never knew, are brought to life.

The Minstrel feels neither anger nor sympathy; he neither censures,
nor moralizes; for the self-satisfied Middle Ages cannot conceive the
possibility of a different world. Brief, quick, he despises aims and
methods, his only object is to entertain his auditors. Amusing and
witty, he cares only for laughter and ridicule....

But Maupassant's stories are singularly different in character. In the
nineteenth century the Gallic intellect had long since foundered amid
vileness and debauchery. In the provinces the ancient humor had
disappeared; one chattered still about nothing, but without point,
without wit; "trifling" was over, as they call it in Champagne. The
nauseating pabulum of the newspapers and low political intrigue had
withered the French intellect, that delicate, rare intellect, the last
traces of which fade away in the Alsatian stories of Erckman-Chatrian,
in the Provencal tales of Alphonse Daudet, in the novels of Emile
Pouvillon. Maupassant is not one of them. He knows nothing about