Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/29

Rh Schnaffs, the Prussian prisoner, is humorous and two-edged; but some more sombre stories of rustic vengeance on the invader, such as La Mére Sauvage, are rather strained and melodramatic in idea and handling.

The longest category, almost of course, includes stories concerned with love, or at any rate with sex. They are of every variety, scattered unconnectedly through the different volumes. Many are mere feuilletons, clever specimens of the ordinary Parisian pattern. Others, like Le Papa de Simon and L'Infirme, are delicate and altogether attractive pastels. There are deep notes of tragedy, as in Un Fils and the terrible La Femme de Paul. One or two, such as L'Ermite, and its counterpart Le Port, are outside the scope of art, and should join the erotomaniac monstrosities in a limbo of oblivion. But with these exceptions, or even without them, there is no story, however poor in substance or trivial in purpose, which does not exhibit Maupassant's wondrous deftness of touch and his genius for identification. Just as in the Norman series one shrewd stingy old farmer differs essentially from another, so these light ladies and Decameron-like lovers are no two of them cut from the same pattern. "When you pass a concierge smoking his pipe," said Flaubert, 2