praises Michele de Burne.

Ysolde replaces Macette. In "l'Ostel de Courtoisie," Maupassant
cultivates the usual abstractions of the modern Round Table:
Distinction and Moderation; Fervor and Delicacy. We see him inditing
love sonnets and becoming a knight of chivalry. The apologist of
brutal pleasures has become a devotee of the "culte de la Dame."

Everywhere he was sought after, feted, petted.... But Maupassant never
let himself be carried away by the tinsel of his prestige, nor the
puerility of his enchantment. He despised at heart the puppets that
moved about him as he had formerly despised his short stories and his
petit bourgeois. "Ah," he cries, "I see them, their heads, their
types, their hearts and their souls! What a clinic for a maker of
books! The disgust with which this humanity inspires me makes me
regret still more that I could not become what I should most have
preferred--an Aristophanes, or a Rabelais." And he adds: "The world
makes failures of all scientists, all artists, all intelligences that
it monopolizes. It aborts all sincere sentiment by its manner of
scattering our taste, our curiosity, our desire, the little spark of
genius that burns in us."

Maupassant had to bend to the conditions of his new life. Being well
bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and
conventionality, and bowed before the idols of the cave he had
entered....

If Maupassant never became the slave of worldly ideas, the creature of
instinct that was part of his being acquired the refined tastes of the
salons, and the manners of the highest civilization.