He had for a long time, to his sorrow, seen his health failing under
the attacks of an obscure malady which left him with a sense of the
diminution of his powers and a gradual clouding of his intellect.
Symptoms of general paralysis set in, at first mistaken for neurotic
disturbances. He changed greatly. Those who met him as I did, thin and
shivering, on that rainy Sunday when they were celebrating the
inauguration of Flaubert's monument at Rouen would scarcely have
recognized him. I shall never forget, as long as I live, his face
wasted by suffering, his large eyes with a distressed expression,
which emitted dying gleams of protest against a cruel fate....

Maupassant retired to Cannes not far from his mother. He read medical
books and, in spite of what they taught, persisted in attributing his
sufferings to "rheumatism localized in the brain," contracted amid the
fogs on the Seine....

Vainly he endeavored to work, he became gloomy and the idea of suicide
impressed him more and more....

The months passed, however, and in June he was able to go to Divonne
to take a cure. After a very characteristic attack of optimism, he
suddenly appeared at Champel and astonished everyone by his frightful
eccentricities. One evening, however, he felt better, and read to the
poet Dorchain the beginning of his novel "The Angelus," which he
declared would be his masterpiece. When he had finished, he wept. "And
we wept also," writes Dorchain, "at seeing all that now remained of
genius, of tenderness and pity in this soul that would never again be
capable of expressing itself so as to impress other minds.... In his
accent, in his language, in his tears, Maupassant had, I know not
what, of a religious character, which exceeded his horror of life, and