James Fitzmaurice-Kelly

“ Maupassant does not prefer good to bad, one man to another; he never pauses to argue about the meaning of life, a senseless thing which has the one advantage of yielding materials for art; his one aim is to discover the hidden aspect of visible things, to relate what he has observed, to give an objective rendering of it, and he has seen so intensely and so serenely that he is the most exact transcriber in literature. ”

“ The peasants whom he had known as a boy figure in a score of tales; what he saw in Government offices is set down in L’Héritage; from Algiers he gathers the material for Maroca; he drinks the waters and builds up Mont-Oriol; he enters journalism, constructs Bel-ami, and, for the sake of precision, makes his brother, Hervé de Maupassant, sit for the infamous hero’s portrait; he sees fashionable society, and, though it wearied him intensely, he transcribes its life in Fort comme la mort and Notre cœur. Fundamentally he finds all men alike. ”

“ In every grade he finds the same ferocious, cunning, animal instincts at work: it is not a gay world, but he knows no other; he is possessed by the dread of growing old, of ceasing to enjoy; the horror of death haunts him like a spectre. ”