Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/33

 find no other comparison for the sterile and lonely moon, which has inspired so many. Those to whom this diathesis is distasteful must read something else; in summarizing it, one is tempted to parody De Quincey's famous topsy-turvydom, and to represent Maupassant as seriously warning the world that a man may begin by merely murdering a lawless couple in the interests of morality, but may proceed to a crusade on behalf of public decorum, and end by lapsing into the lowest depths of continence and celibacy. Of course a creed such as this could not fail to leave one side of life incomprehensible to him. An ascetic passion, the glow of renunciation, a maiden purity not based on ignorance, lay beyond the scope of his imagination, and all his admiration for a greater than himself, Turgenev, could never have enabled him to create a Helene or a Lisaveta Michailovna. Very different from these tender Russian master-pieces is Notre Cœr, a study of the human heart in the conventional sense of the word, and perhaps the most mature and careful of Maupassant's novels. André Mariolle, its leading gentleman, for hero he shall not be called, is that least attractive of creatures, a sentimental sensualist. The story of three hundred pages is entirely devoted to the relations between him and the fascinating widow xxv