fine enough, and that for the author who sought to escape oblivion there
was only one course to pursue--to learn his trade thoroly, to master
every secret of the craft, to do his best always, in the hope that some
fortunate day the Muse would reward his unfailing devotion. And from
Flaubert, the author of that merciless masterpiece 'Madame Bovary,' the
young man learned the importance of individuality, of originality, of
the personal note which should be all his own, and which should never
suggest or recall any one else's. Flaubert was kindly and encouraging,
but he was a desperately severe taskmaster. At Flaubert's dictation
Maupassant gave up verse for prose; and for seven years he wrote
incessantly and published nothing. The stories and tales and verses and
dramas of those seven years of apprenticeship were ruthlessly criticized
by the author of 'Salammbô,' and then they were destroyed unprinted. In
all the long history of literature there is no record of any other
author who served so severe a novitiate.

Douglas Jerrold once said of a certain British author who had begun to
publish very young that "he had taken down the shutters before he had
anything to put up in the shop window." From being transfixt by such a
jibe Maupassant was preserved by Flaubert. When he was thirty he
contributed that masterpiece of ironic humor 'Boule de suif,' to the
'Soirées de Médan,' a volume of short-stories put forth by the late
Émile Zola, with the collaboration of a little group of his friends and
followers. On this first appearance in the arena of letters Maupassant
stept at once to a foremost place. That was in 1880; and in 1892 his
mind gave way and he was taken to the asylum, where he soon died. In
those twelve years he had published a dozen volumes of short-stories
and half a dozen novels. Of the novel he might have made himself master
in time; of the short-story he proved himself a master with the very
earliest of all his tales.