Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/16

Rh curb was tightly applied. But Maupassant never ceased to be grateful to l'irréprochable maître que j'admire avant tous, and it is pretty evident that the elder man's literary influence was exercised almost entirely for good.

As a matter of course, Maupassant first tried his wings in verse. Flaubert, when recommending Des Vers to the good offices of his own publisher, wrote, "His verses are not tiresome, which is the prime consideration for the public, and he really is a poet, without any stars and dicky-birds." There certainly are no stars, and prudish readers might complain that there is a certain amount of mud. One or two of the poems merely celebrate facile amours: Fin d'amour and La dernière escapade are feuilletons in rhyme: Propos de rues is a sort of Horatian dialogue, and Venus Rustique, the most ambitious attempt, for which Flaubert had a word of praise, possesses some of the eerieness of Baudelaire, and might not have been disclaimed by Mr. Swinburne or Arthur O'Shaughnessy. But in the same year 1880, the plant which had been so long maturing, and which had been so rigidly pruned, bore its first real fruit in its true form of prose. The incomparable Boule de suif, which appeared with Zola's