Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/306

Rh cramped and ill at ease in a morning coat or a frock-coat. It was this which when he was about twenty-eight gave a somewhat common and clumsy appearance to the man who, ten years later, desired so much to figure as a man of fashion, and to enjoy and to define social success.

Maupassant, whom I knew intimately enough towards the close of his life to be able to judge him, disliked portraits and their reproductions because he did not feel himself to be a "literary man" in the trivial and vulgar sense of the term, and he would have blushed to pride himself on those things which give the greatest satisfaction