Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/31

Rh subject. If Boule de Suif had been a plain and respectable daily governess, if La Maison Tellier had been a well-conducted drapery establishment, if the legacy in L'Héritage had depended on official promotion, it would have been a wiser world, but these particular stories could not have been written. This is an artistic if not an ethical justification for their existence, and is all their author would have claimed. In Fort comme La Mort Olivier Bertin falls madly in love with the daughter of the woman whose lover he had been. The book is a haunting tragedy, and is saved from offence by the gravity with which the dreadful dilemma is approached, and by the device of leaving the girl in ignorance throughout. Sophocles, after all, trod on still more questionable ground, and his works have not, as yet, been seized by the police. At the same time it would be affectation to pretend that Maupassant never sisports himself outside even these liberal bounds. Some of the shorter stories are no doubt grivois and very little else. It is an explanation, if not an excuse, that these were mostly written in haste, as pot-boilers; and a Paris pot-boiler is likely to be deflected from the path of austerity. The truth is that