substitute.

The most of Maupassant's earlier tales were not a little hard and stern
and unsympathetic; and here again Maupassant was the disciple of
Flaubert. His manner was not only unemotional at first, it was icily
impassive. These first stories of his were cold and they were
contemptuous;--at least they made the reader feel that the author
heartily despised the pitiable and pitiful creatures he was depicting.
They dealt mainly with the externals of life,--with outward actions; and
the internal motives of the several actors were not always adequately
implied. But in time the mind came to interest Maupassant as much as the
body. In the beginning he seems to have considered solely what his
characters did, and he cared little to tell us what they felt and what
they thought; probably he did not know himself and did not try to know.

The inquirers who should read his stories in the strict sequence of
their production could not fail to be struck with the first awakening of
his curiosity about human feeling; and they might easily trace the
steady growth of his interest in psychologic states. Telling us at first
bluntly and barely what his characters did, he came in time to find his
chief pleasure in suggesting to us not only what they felt, but
especially what they vaguely feared. Toward the end of his brief career
the thought of death and the dread of mental disease seemed to possess
him more and more with a haunting horror that kept recurring with a
pathetic persistence. He came to have a close terror of death, almost an
obsession of the grave; and to find a parallel to this we should have to
go back four hundred years, to Villon, also a realist and a humorist
with a profound relish for the outward appearances of life. But
Maupassant went far beyond the earlier poet, and he even developed a
fondness for the morbid and the abnormal. This is revealed in 'Le