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The Portraits of Guy de Maupassant
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.
Autograph.
Je me suis fait une loi absolue de ne jamais laisser publier mon portrait toutes les fois que je peux l'empêcher. Les exceptions n'ont eu lieu que par surprise. Nos oeuvres surprise. Nos oeuvres appartiennent au public, mais pas nos figures.
Guy Maupassant
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
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