newspapers, and, later, with the approval and by the advice of
Flaubert, he published, in the "Republique des Lettres," poems signed
by his name.

These poems, overflowing with sensuality, where the hymn to the Earth
describes the transports of physical possession, where the impatience
of love expresses itself in loud melancholy appeals like the calls of
animals in the spring nights, are valuable chiefly inasmuch as they
reveal the creature of instinct, the fawn escaped from his native
forests, that Maupassant was in his early youth. But they add nothing
to his glory. They are the "rhymes of a prose writer" as Jules
Lemaitre said. To mould the expression of his thought according to the
strictest laws, and to "narrow it down" to some extent, such was his
aim. Following the example of one of his comrades of Medan, being
readily carried away by precision of style and the rhythm of
sentences, by the imperious rule of the ballad, of the pantoum or the
chant royal, Maupassant also desired to write in metrical lines.
However, he never liked this collection that he often regretted having
published. His encounters with prosody had left him with that
monotonous weariness that the horseman and the fencer feel after a
period in the riding school, or a bout with the foils.

Such, in very broad lines, is the story of Maupassant's literary
apprenticeship.

The day following the publication of "Boule de Suif," his reputation
began to grow rapidly. The quality of his story was unrivalled, but at
the same time it must be acknowledged that there were some who, for
the sake of discussion, desired to place a young reputation in
opposition to the triumphant brutality of Zola.