to visit unknown races. He has lost his magnificent serenity....

* * * * *

As his malady began to take a more definite form, he turned his steps
towards the south, only visiting Paris to see his physicians and
publishers. In the old port of Antibes beyond the causeway of Cannes,
his yacht, Bel Ami, which he cherished as a brother, lay at anchor and
awaited him. He took it to the white cities of the Genoese Gulf,
towards the palm trees of Hyeres, or the red bay trees of Antheor.

It was during one of these idle cruises on the open sea, outside of
Agay and Saint-Raphael that he wrote "Sur l'Eau."

It was on the sacred sea of the old poets and philosophers, on the sea
whose voice has rocked the thought of the world, that he cast into the
shadow that long lament, so heartrending and sublime, that posterity
will long shudder at the remembrance of it. The bitter strophes of
this lament seem to be cadenced by the Mediterranean itself and to be
in rhythm, like its melopoeia.

"Sur l'Eau" is the last Will and Testament, the general confession of
Maupassant. To those who come after him he leaves the legacy of his
highest thought; then he says farewell to all that he loved, to
dreams, to starlit nights, and to the breath of roses. "Sur l'Eau" is
the book of modern disenchantment, the faithful mirror of the latest
pessimism. The journal written on board ship, disconnected and hasty,
but so noble in its disorder, has taken a place forever beside Werther
and Rene, Manfred and Oberman.