[Illustration: Guy de Maupassant]


GUY DE MAUPASSANT

A Study by Pol. Neveux

"I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a
thunderbolt." These words of Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia on
the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid
solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which,
for ten years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the
fertility of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances and
travels, only to sink prematurely into the abyss of madness and
death....

In the month of April, 1880, an article appeared in the "Le Gaulois"
announcing the publication of the Soirees de Medan. It was signed by a
name as yet unknown: Guy de Maupassant. After a juvenile diatribe
against romanticism and a passionate attack on languorous literature,
the writer extolled the study of real life, and announced the
publication of the new work. It was picturesque and charming. In the
quiet of evening, on an island in the Seine, beneath poplars instead
of the Neapolitan cypresses dear to the friends of Boccaccio, amid the
continuous murmur of the valley, and no longer to the sound of the
Pyrennean streams that murmured a faint accompaniment to the tales of
Marguerite's cavaliers, the master and his disciples took turns in
narrating some striking or pathetic episode of the war. And the issue,
in collaboration, of these tales in one volume, in which the master