My life and loves Vol. 2

by Frank Harris

  "But printing has changed all that," I replied. "It immobilizes language, though it admits the addition of new words and new ideas. Your French will endure as Shakespeare's English endures."

  "You don't altogether convince me," Maupassant replied, "though there's a good deal of truth in your arguments; but if you were not a writer yourself, you would not be so interested in fame and posthumous renown."

  There he had me and I could only laugh.

  A day or two later Ffrench came to tell me how magnificently endowed Maupassant was as a lover. I asked Ffrench whether he thought the abnormality a sign of health.

  "Of course," he cried. "Proof of extraordinary strength," but somehow or other I was not so sure.

  It was in 1885 or 1886, I think, that he sent me his Horla with an interesting letter.

  "Most critics will think I have gone mad," he wrote, "but you'll know better.

  I'm perfectly sane, but the story interested me strangely: there are so many thoughts in our minds that we cannot explain, fears in us that are instinctive and form, so to speak, the background of our being."

  Le Horla made a tremendous impression on me; the title was composed from le hors-la, the being not ourselves in life. It was the first of Maupassant's stories which was quite beyond me. I couldn't have written anything like it.

  And asking myself, "Why?" I came to the conclusion, inspired perhaps by mere vanity, that I was too healthy, too normal, if you will, and that set me thinking.

  When next I saw him: "That Horla of yours is astonishing," I began. "To fear as you must have feared in order to write that dreadful tale is evidence enough to me that your nerves are all jangled and out of tune."

  Maupassant laughed at me. "I've never been in better health," he declared,

  "never in my life."

  I had studied all venereal diseases in Vienna and I had just been reading a new German book on syphilis in which, for the first time, I found the fact stated that it often kills its victims by paralysis between forty and fifty, when the vital forces have begun to decline. Suddenly the thought came into my head and I put the question to Maupassant: "Have you ever had syphilis?"

  "All the infantile complaints," he said laughing. "Everyone has it in youth, haven't they? But it's twelve or fifteen years now since I've seen a trace of it. I was completely cured long years ago."

  I told him what the German specialist had discovered, but he wouldn't give any credence to it. "I dislike everything German, as you know," he said. "Then' science even is exaggerated."

  "But the other day," I reasoned, "you complained of pains in your limbs and took a very hot bath; that's not a sign of health."

  "Let's go for a long walk," he replied. "You'll soon find I'm not decrepit."

  We had our walk and I put my doubts and fears out of mind for the moment, but whenever I though of Le Horla I became suspicious. There were chapters, too, in some of his other books which disquieted me.

  It was in the spring of 1888, I believe, that I met him at Cannes, where he had come in his yacht Bel-Ami from Marseilles. We dined together and he told me that he had had wonderful experiences in Algeria and the north of Africa. He had pushed to Kairouan, the Holy City, it appeared, and admired its wonderful mosque, but he had brought back little, save the fact that each Arab had three or four concubines besides his wife, and that all the women are usually wretchedly unhappy, with jealousy as a sort of continual madness.

  He told me of a Jewess who kept a house with her two daughters and said he'd like to write the story of one of them and make her fall in love with a French officer because he took her out driving and was kind to her.

  "Any evidence of affection, as apart from passion," he remarked, "has a curious weight, especially with such women. They are far prouder of tenderness than of desire."

  "Long novels," he confessed once casually, "are much easier to write than nouvelles or contes. Pierre et Jean, for example, I finished in less than three months and it didn't tire me at all, whereas La Maison Tellier cost me more time and a far greater exertion."

  Perhaps its was the preference in both writers for the short story that made me always couple Kipling with de Maupassant in my thoughts, but I must admit at once that Kipling was by far the more interesting companion. Draw him out, show him interest, and he could tell a tale by word of mouth as well as he ever wrote one. Unlike most able Frenchmen, Maupassant was not gifted as a talker, perhaps because he never let himself go to the inspiration of the moment; but now and then he would surprise you by width of vision or Tightness of judgment, showing a mind, as Meredith said, that had "travelled."

  We were all talking of Napoleon one night when I told how he had astonished me. I said once that Jesus had been the first to discover the soul and speak from it and to it, notably in the ineffable Suffer little children to come unto me. Years later I found that Napoleon had used the very same phrase: "Jesus discovered the soul."

  "I don't like Napoleon," said de Maupassant, "though everyone must admire his intelligence, but I always think Jesus the wisest of men; how he came to such heights of thought in such surroundings is one of the wonders of the world to me. He had no mark upon him of his age; he was for all time."

  "It is curious," I agreed, "indeed, almost impossible to frame him in his tune.

  Again and again he speaks for all ages and for all men; but now and then comes the revealing word. Do you remember how the Devil took him up into the high mountain and showed him all the Kingdom of the Earth? It is manifest from that phrase that he thought the world was flat, and if you went high enough you could oversee it all."

  "True, true," cried Maupassant. "I hadn't thought of it; yet he leads us all today and we follow humbly and at some distance."

  Maupassant was almost as patriotic as Kipling, but not so blinded by the herd-instinct.

  "You know," he said to me once, "we Normans and Bretons dislike the English more than the Germans; you are our enemies, it was you who came and sacked our towns and took toll of our wealth. The German is far away from us while you are close, just there across a strip of sea."

  "I understand," I replied, "but the English have no fear, no dislike of you. How do you explain that?"

  "Curious," he declared. "I think it must be because we were rich and you were poor before the modern industrial era. The rich always fear the poor and they have good reason for their instinctive dread."

  The explanation was ingenious and in part true, I imagine.

  Very early in our acquaintance, in spite of his alertness of mind and sympathetic, companionable good humour, I began to realize the truth of Taine's word that Maupassant was a sort of taureau triste, 'a sad bull.'

  Maupassant complained at first of his eyes; a year or so later he said that he often went blind for an hour: "A terrifying experience," he called it. About this time he confessed he had tried all the drugs; neuralgia plagued him and he took ether for it-"a temporary relief was better than nothing" — but with his sound good sense, he quickly saw that a drug only deferred the payment while increasing the debt. No wonder Flaubert begged him to be "moderate" in everything, in muscular exertion, in writing even, and especially in yielding to fits of sadness that only left one depressed and drained (abruti).

  Maupassant loved to ascribe all his malaise to overwork; more than once he boasted to me of having written fifteen hundred pages in one year, to say nothing of articles in the Gaulois and the Gil Blas. The pages hardly contained more than one hundred and fifty words each, or say two English novels in the year; hard work, but nothing extraordinary, unless one takes into the account his steadily diminishing stock of health, which began to strike me about this time.

  One evening I shall always remember. He had had neuralgia in the morning, which had gradually yielded to food and drink, a glass of wonderful port completing the cure. We had been talking of the belief in God when Maupassant turned to the personal factor. "What a strange being is man," he cried, "an imperial intelligence that watches the pains and mise
ries of its unfortunate fleshy partner. Plainly I note that I am getting steadily worse in health, that my bodily pains are increasing, that my hallucinations are becoming longer, my power of work diminishing. The supreme consolation comes from the certitude that when my state gets too bad, I'll put an end to it.

  Meanwhile I won't whine, I've had great hours! Ah! Great hours!"

  It was in 1889,1 think, that I first discovered why he was getting steadily worse in health. He broke an engagement with me, and when we next met a month later, I was still annoyed with him and showed it. To excuse himself, he blurted out that he had had an unexpected visitor from Paris and went on to confess that one's "late loves were the most terrible." "She is exquisitely pretty," he broke in, "perfect physically: a flawless mistress, a perfumed altar of love, and has besides a wealth of passion that I never met before. I can't resist her, and the worst of it is, I can't resist showing off with her and bringing her to wonder. What vain fools we men are and how I pay for the excess afterwards. Really, for a week after an orgy with her I suffer like one of the damned, and even now, though she has been a month gone, I'm a prey to misery (inducible malaise). I wish she'd keep away: she drains me, exhausts my vitality, unnerves me."

  I thought it my duty to warn him. "You are showing the surmenage everywhere," I said. "Your skin is leaden, your expression curious, troubled, fearful even. For God's sake, cut out all that orgy business: it's excusable at twenty or thirty but not at forty; it's your test and trial. You'll go under if your mind doesn't master your body. Take Shakespeare's great word to heart: even his Antony would not be 'the bellows and the fan to cool a harlot's lust'; it was doubtless his own confession."

  "What a great phrase," cried Maupassant, "the bellows and the fan, great…

  "I know all that," he went on, "but then I say to myself, I'm beaten anyhow, growing steadily worse; one more gaudy night will be so much to the good.

  You can't imagine her myriad seductiveness. She uses a perfume that makes me drunk at first like ether; in an hour it has vanished but the still more intoxicating subtle scent of her body has taken its place; and her bodily beauty, and the ineffable charm of her withholding, and her giving drive me crazy. Never before have I experienced such pleasure or given it.

  "Man! she's an aphrodisiac. As soon as my state of depression and misery begins to lighten, I want her. My thoughts turn to her; my mind, my body ache for her. Of course I make all sorts of good resolutions: I will be moderate and restrain myself; but when she is there I feel in me the strength of ten and the desire of conquest, the mad longing to reach an intenser thrill than ever before overpowers me, and her intense response carries me away, and-once more I fall into the depths."

  He was assuredly a great lover, one of the most gifted of whom we have any record, and though in talk with me he usually dwelt most on the physical side of the passion, his letters to his mistress show that he was devoted to her spiritually as well, and that she was his heart's mate and complement. There is no greater love story in all literature; it ranks with Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, and some of Maupassant's phrases are as intense as the best of Shakespeare. Surely it deserves to be recorded and given its due importance.

  Now who was she, this incomparable mistress? A Jewess, well off, ten years or so younger than Maupassant and married to a man who would not have forgiven her unfaith had he even suspected it. The lovers had to meet at long intervals and on the sly. Ten years after Maupassant's death she wrote of him and their love in La Grande Revue and it is plain, I think, from those pages, that if Maupassant had told her the effect of then' love-orgies on his health, she would not only have refused to be a party to injuring him, but would have sought to help him to self-control.

  Her affection for him seems both deep and high; she delights to record all his good qualities: his love and admiration of his mother; his kindness even to shameless beggars; his interest in other men and women, particularly in all curious, uncommon types; his constant desire to be fair and honest. Of course she dwells on his love for her and gives one extract from his letters to her twice. Here it is in French, a superb expression of love's humility and that sacred adoration of love that will yet redeem this sordid existence of ours.

  Comme je vous aimais! Et comme j'aurais voulu m'agenouiller tout a coup devant vous, m'agenouiller la, dans la poussiere, sur le bord du trottoir, et baiser vos belles mains, vos petits pieds, le bas de votre robe, les baiser en pleurant.

  It is easy to English it:

  "How I love you! How I wished to throw myself on my knees before you, there in the dust of the sidewalk, and kiss your lovely hands, and your little feet, the hem of your dress-kiss them all with hot tears."

  This Madame X has more in her than facile appreciation. Maupassant confesses once that he is a "romance-writer, even in his embracings." She adds finely, "I would rather say that he remained a lover even in his romances… And what a wonderful lover he was," she goes on.

  Every meeting was a new birth of love, thanks to his genius. Through him I have lived such wonderful enchanting hours that I shudder to think what life would have meant, had I not met and loved him. His letters, and they were many, came at odd moments, most of them were dated at night; often I had only just left him when a letter from him would come, so ardent, so passionate, so tender, that I could hardly refrain from hastening back to him.

  Here's the end of one of those love letters that shows, I think, marvellous intensity of feeling, perhaps the most astonishing and convincing expression known to me of the deepest human passion.

  A few hours ago, you were there in my arms. Now I'm alone. But you remain with me. All the peculiarities of your personality live in me with such overwhelming unity that I seem to see your voice, to breathe your beauty, to hear the perfume of you… I kiss your white hands and my lips dwell on your scarlet mouth…

  Surely this man reached undream'd of heights!

  Some of us knew beforehand that Maupassant was richly affectionate, a born lover if ever there was one, but these golden words are the best proof of his astonishing genius. Alas! His fall was the more appalling.

  In 1890 his love recognizes a profound change in him. "He is living," she says,

  "hi a state of spiritual exaltation that brings with it hallucinations." In August he writes from Nice telling her that he needs her: "I am troubled by such strange ideas, oppressed by such mysterious anguish, shaken by such confused sensations that I feel like crying, 'Help, help!' "The confused echoes of days I have lived torture me now and again, or excite me to a sort of madness"; and then he talks of the wild regrets he feels "for the days that are no more" (des regrets pour un temps qui jut et qui ne sera plus jamais, jamais). "I have the feeling," he goes on, "that my end is near and wholly unexpected. Come to me, come!"

  It was this appeal, this cry of supreme distress, that brought about her final fatal visit.

  Again and again she notes the constant preoccupation of his thought with the idea of death, even at a time when she was filled with a sense of his abounding health and vigour. Towards the end she declares that "his reason never seemed shaken; his sensations had altered, it is true, but not his judgment!"

  She is always an advocate of the angel, always sees the best in her lover, and when all is over and long past, further off than far away, her words still ring pathetically sincere; the heart's cry for the golden days, "the days that are no more!"

  "Only two years before, how full of life he was, and how strong, and I was young and in love with him. Oh, the sad, painful years I have lived since."

  I think no one will deny that if Maupassant had told this woman the truth, she would have helped him to exercise self-restraint. Not once does she dwell on the physical side of their affection. It is the joys of his companionship she recalls, the delights of their spiritual intimacy. It is always he who calls and she who comes.

  Maupassant's fate is not so worthy of pity, for he was warned again and again, and we mortals can hardly complain, even of those
catastrophes that are unexpected and difficult, if not impossible, to foresee. Even his valet, Francois, had warned him.

  Three or four years before the end Maupassant knew that the path of senseindulgence for him led directly to madness and untimely death.

  He could trace the progress of his malady in body and in mind from Le Horla, in the beginning, to Qui salt with its unholy terror, the last story he ever wrote. Even in his creative work he was warned after every excess and in fifty different ways. First an orgy brought on fits of partial blindness, then acute neuralgic pains and periods of sleeplessness, while his writing showed terrifying fears; and all this disease had to be cured by rest and dieting, baths and frictions, and, above all, by constant change of scene. Then came desperate long-continued depression broken by occasional exaltations and excitements; later still, periods of hallucination, during which his mind wandered and which he recalled afterwards with humiliation and shame; and always, always the indescribable mental agony he spoke of as inducible malaise. Finally he lost control of his limbs, saw phantoms on the highway and was terrified by visions that gave him the certainty of madness, which could only be faced by the fixed resolve to put an end to himself, if the punishments became more than he could bear.

  Yet he prayed again and again for the fatal caresses. It is possible that syphilis had weakened his moral fibre; many of us between forty and fifty have come to nervous breakdown and by resolute abstinence, careful exercise and change of scene have won back to health and sanity. But it was the young Maupassant of the boating on the Seine and the heedless insane indulgences with Mimi and Musette that weighted the dice against him.

  I have said that it took sheer good fortune for a miracle of genius such as Shakespeare to grow to full height and give the best in him; had it not been for Lord Southampton's gift of a thousand pounds we should never have seen Hamlet or Lear or Macbeth or The Tempest. It requires a miracle of genius, and extraordinary bodily strength to boot, in a Frenchman to reach healthful old age as Hugo did and at seventy write on the art and joy of being a grandfather. But Maupassant, like Shakespeare, was first and last a lover, and that's the heaviest of all handicaps.