bureaucratic servility is less intolerable. The daily duties are
certainly scarcely more onerous and he had as chiefs, or colleagues,
Xavier Charmes and Leon Dierx, Henry Roujon and Rene Billotte, but his
office looked out on a beautiful melancholy garden with immense plane
trees around which black circles of crows gathered in winter.

Maupassant made two divisions of his spare hours, one for boating, and
the other for literature. Every evening in spring, every free day, he
ran down to the river whose mysterious current veiled in fog or
sparkling in the sun called to him and bewitched him. In the islands
in the Seine between Chatou and Port-Marly, on the banks of
Sartrouville and Triel he was long noted among the population of
boatmen, who have now vanished, for his unwearying biceps, his cynical
gaiety of goodfellowship, his unfailing practical jokes, his broad
witticisms. Sometimes he would row with frantic speed, free and
joyous, through the glowing sunlight on the stream; sometimes, he
would wander along the coast, questioning the sailors, chatting with
the ravageurs, or junk gatherers, or stretched at full length amid the
irises and tansy he would lie for hours watching the frail insects
that play on the surface of the stream, water spiders, or white
butterflies, dragon flies, chasing each other amid the willow leaves,
or frogs asleep on the lily-pads.

The rest of his life was taken up by his work. Without ever becoming
despondent, silent and persistent, he accumulated manuscripts, poetry,
criticisms, plays, romances and novels. Every week he docilely
submitted his work to the great Flaubert, the childhood friend of his
mother and his uncle Alfred Le Poittevin. The master had consented to
assist the young man, to reveal to him the secrets that make
chefs-d'oeuvre immortal. It was he who compelled him to make copious