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Updated: May 5, 2025
But the catastrophe never occurs. It was necessary to stand poised upon the brink of the precipice to realize the depth of the abyss and feel the terror of the fall. Closely allied to this phase of Maupassant's nature was the peculiar feeling of loneliness that every now and then breaks irresistibly forth in the course of some short story.
While Balzac makes defile before us an endless stream of human figures, Turgenev's characters reveal themselves as wider apart in the range of their spirit, as more mysteriously alive in their inevitable essence, than do Meredith's or Flaubert's, than do Thackeray's or Maupassant's.
Did you ever read de Maupassant's 'Diamond Necklace?" "I never did." "I'd advise you to. Also Walton." "Is he a jeweler?" "Lord, no! But I beg your pardon. Let us keep to the subject. So you don't dare tell your friend the diamond cross is gone?" "Oh, yes, she knows it." "Then why the worry, except about getting it back?" "Well, there are complications. You see her husband " "Oh, ho!"
Some of Maupassant's short stories are sermons more forcible than any moral dissertation could ever be. Of De Maupassant's sustained efforts "Une Vie" may bear the palm. This romance has the distinction of having changed Tolstoi from an adverse critic into a warm admirer of the author.
It may be remarked that it does not differ very greatly from the ideal honesty of the respectable majority, from the honesty of law-givers, of warriors, of kings, of bricklayers, of all those who express their fundamental sentiment in the ordinary course of their activities, by the work of their hands. The work of Maupassant's hands is honest.
If Rudyard Kipling, for instance, had written his short stories in France, they would have been praised as cool, clever little works of art, rather cruel, and very nervous and feminine; Kipling's short stories would have been appreciated like Maupassant's short stories. In England they were not appreciated but believed.
Henry James welcomed its first appearance: "Pierre et Jean is, so far as my judgment goes, a faultless production.... It is the best of M. de Maupassant's novels, mainly because M. de Maupassant has never before been so clever.
And, as though we were still in the pastoral times of peace, in the square of one of these villages a horse-fair was in progress, blue-smocked peasants were trotting chunky ponies over the stones. It was like a picture from one of De Maupassant's tales. In other villages the shawled women sat knitting behind piles of beets and cabbages and apples, their farm-carts atilt in the sun.
We are at liberty then to quarrel with Maupassant's attitude towards our world in which, like the rest of us, he has that share which his senses are able to give him. But we need not quarrel with him violently. His determinism, barren of praise, blame and consolation, has all the merit of his conscientious art.
It sent her back into depths of loneliness, and reminded her how cut off she was from the great majority of her fellows, after all. And then Guy de Maupassant's dreadful "Solitude" came to her memory. He cannot convey to others his real impressions or emotion, try as he may.
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