"It has already got hold of me, la gueuse,[1] says he, alluding to death. "It has already shaken out my teeth, snatched away my hair, crippled my limbs, and is just ready to swallow me up. I am already in its power; it is only playing with me, like a cat with a mouse, knowing that I cannot escape. Fame ? riches?—what good are they, since with these one cannot buy a woman's love. For it is only a woman's love that is worth living for. And death takes that away. Takes away that; then health, strength, and life itself. It is the lot of every one. And there is nothing more."
Such is the meaning of the words of the aged poet. But Duroy, the successful lover of all the women who please him, is so full of sensual energy and strength that he both hears and does not hear, understands and does not understand, what has been said. He hears and understands, but the source of sensual life in him gushes out from him with such power that this unquestionable truth, while predicting the same end for him, does not disturb him.
It is the presentation of this inner contradiction in life, which, in addition to the satirical value of the novel, constitutes its chief significance. This same idea gleams in the fine scene of the death of the consumptive journalist. The author puts to himself the question: "What is this life? How settle this contradiction between the love of life and the knowledge of inevitable death?" And he does not answer. He seems to seek, to pause, and does not decide either one way or the other. And therefore, in this novel also, the author's moral relation to life continues to be correct.
But in the succeeding novels this moral relation to life begins to be confused. The appreciation of the phenomena of life begins to waver, to grow obscure, and in the last novels it is completely perverted.
In "Mont-Oriol," Maupassant seems to unite the subjects of the two preceding novels and to repeat himself. Notwithstanding the fine descriptions, full of subtle humor, of a fashionable watering-place and the
- ↑ The old hag.
