GUY DE MAUPASSANT
Spots began to glow on her arms and shoulders. Of all gods ever put
on the crucifix, this was the most ravishing one.
"Be so kind as to sit down, M'sieur Polyte."
She pointed to an oblique blue armchair, done in Slavonic style.
Its back was constructed of carved interlacing bands with colorful
pendants. I groped my way to it, stumbling as I went.
Night had blocked the path of my famished youth with a bottle of
'83 Muscatel and twenty-nine books, twenty-nine bombs stuffed with
pity, genius and passion. . . . I sprang up, knocking over the chair
and banging against the shelf. The twenty-nine volumes crashed onto
the floor, their pages flew open, they fell on their edges ... and the
white mare of my fate went on at a walking pace.
"You are funny," growled Raissa.
I left the granite house on the Moika at twelve o'clock, before
the sisters and the husband returned from the theater. I was sober and
could have walked a chalk-line, but it was pleasanter to stagger, so I
swayed from side to side, singing in a language I had just invented.
Through the tunnels of the streets bounded by lines of street lights, the
steamy fog billowed. A monster roared behind the boiling walls of
the buildings. The roads amputated the legs of those walking on them.
Kazantsev was asleep when I got home. He slept sitting up, his
thin legs extended in their felt boots. The canary fluff rose on his
head. He had fallen asleep by the stove bending over a volume of
Don Quixote,
edition 1624. On the fly-leaf of the book was a
dedication to the Duc de Broglio. I got into bed quietly, so as not to
wake Kazantsev, moved the lamp close to me and began to read a
book by Edouard de Menial on "The Life and Work of Guy de
Maupassant."
That night I learned from Edouard de Menial that Maupassant
was born in 1850, the child of a Normandy gentleman and Laure
Lepoitevin, Flaubert's cousin. He was twenty-five when he was first
attacked by hereditary syphilis. His productivity and joy of life with–
stood the development of the disease. At first he suffered from head–
aches and spasms of hypochondria. Then the spectre of blindness arose
before him. His sight weakened. He became suspicious of everyone,
unsociable and quarrelsome in a petty way. He struggled furiously,
dashed about the Mediterranean in a yacht, fled to Tunis, Morocco,
Central Africa ... and wrote ceaselessly. He attained fame, and at
