yourself, old fellow, you are grotesque, and it hides itself."

This describes, in spite of reservation, the struggle between two
conflicting minds, that of yesterday, and that of to-day. But this
sensitiveness that Maupassant seeks to hide, is plain to all
clear-seeing people.

He soon begins to be filled with regrets and forebodings. He has a
desire to look into the unknown, and to search for the inexplicable.
He feels in himself that something is undergoing destruction; he is at
times haunted by the idea of a double. He divines that his malady is
on guard, ready to pounce on him. He seeks to escape it, but on the
mountains, as beside the sea, nature, formerly his refuge, now
terrifies him.

Then his heart expands. All the sentiments that he once reviled, he
now desires to experience. He now exalts in his books the passion of
love, the passion of sacrifice, the passion of suffering; he extols
self-sacrifice, devotion, the irresistible joy of ever giving oneself
up more and more. The hour is late, the night is at hand; weary of
suffering any longer, he hurriedly begs for tenderness and
remembrance.

Occasionally, the Maupassant of former days protests against the
bondage of his new personality; he complains that he no longer feels
absolutely as formerly that he has no contact with anything in the
world, that sweet, strong sensation that gives one strength. "How
sensible I was," he says, "to wall myself round with indifference! If
one did not feel, but only understand, without giving fragments of
oneself to other beings! ... It is strange to suffer from the