Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/19

 says), he by no means neglected the formal analysis of character. Pierre et Jean itself is to a great extent a psychological story; Notre Cœur is nothing else, and one or two of the short sketches, such as L'Inutile beauté, are designed on a similar principle.

Maupassant no doubt believed that the "objective" novel found its best modern expression in Madame Bovary, that unforgettable work which, like the Lyrical Ballads and Waverley, lives by the double title of intrinsic merit and of the interest attaching to a literary revolution. Flaubert pointed out the road, Maupassant rarely quitted it; but his claim to be numbered among great writers is enforced by the fact that from the first he never slavishly imitated his master's gait, or paused, so to speak, at the same wayside inns. Of the six novels, the first, Une Vie, which appeared in 1883, naturally shows the most direct stamp of Flaubert's influence, in its gray pessimism and its uniformity of background. It is the life-history of a girl belonging to the petite noblesse, the only child of kind and rather foolish parents, married early to a worthless vicomte, who turns out to be a stingy profligate. After a very brief love-dream she finds herself deceived and outraged, and is tragically left a widow with one son. This child of tears proves xi