There have been two men with such a conception of thought. Rodin carved what Flaubert had written. The statue of _Le Penseur_, that stands in front of the Panthéon in Paris, is the statue of a man tormented like St. Anthony, baffled like Bouvard and Pécuchet. This statue does not represent man's dream of the power of thought, of the dominion of thought. That head is no clear mechanism, faultless and frictionless; that attitude is not one of placid contemplation. The head is in torture, the whole body grips itself in the agony of articulation. The statue is not that of _a_ thinker, but of _the_ thinker; man before the Universe, man unable to wrest the words out of himself. Flaubert had such a vision as that when he wrote the _Tentation_ and _Bouvard et Pécuchet_. He hated mankind because they could not share it with him. They did not know as he knew, or see as he saw, but knelt or worked, and were happy. This one stupendous conception of the true relation between man and thought is that on which all Flaubert's work is founded. Expressed in these two books, it is implied in all the others (even in _Salammbo_, which is almost an attempt to escape from it). It is not a message; it does not say anything; it is as dumb as Rodin's statue; it simply _is_--like _Paradise Lost_ or the _Mona Lisa_ or a religion. 'I am the last of the Fathers of the Church.' A NOTE ON DE MAUPASSANT DE MAUPASSANT for seven years submitted all he wrote to Flaubert's criticism. If we add to the preceding essay some sentences from Flaubert's correspondence, it will be easy to imagine the lines that criticism must have taken, and interesting to compare them with the resulting craftsman. 'I love above all the nervous phrase, substantial, clear, with strong muscles and browned skin. I love masculine phrases not feminine. 'What dull stupidity it is always to praise the lie, and to say that poetry lives on illusion: as if disillusion were not a hundred times more poetic. 'Find out what is really your nature, and be in harmony with it. _Sibi constat_ said Horace. All is there. 'Work, above all think, condense your thought; you know that beautiful fragments are worthless; unity, unity is everything. 'The author in his work ought to be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere. 'Fine subjects make mediocre works.'