But Maupassant affected Tolstoy as he had affected Turgenieff. Guy has told us of his first meeting with the latter, an artist superior to Tolstoy. "The first time I saw Turgenieff was at Gustave Flaubert's--a door opened; a giant came in, a giant with a silver head, as they would say in a fairy tale." This must have been in 1876, for in a letter dated January 24, 1877, Turgenieff writes: "Poor Maupassant is losing all his hair. He came to see me. He is as nice as ever, but very ugly just at present." In 1880 the young man published a volume of poetry, Des Vers. He was thirty years old (born August 5, 1850). The literary apprenticeship of Guy to Gustave Flaubert is a thrice-told tale, and signifies only this: If the pupil had not been richly endowed all the lessons of Flaubert would have availed him little. Perhaps the anecdote has been overdone; Maupassant has related it in the preface to Pierre et Jean, and in the introduction to the George Sand-Flaubert correspondence--now at the head of the edition of Bouvard et Pecuchet. There are letters of Flaubert to his disciple full of his explosive good nature, big heart, irascibility and generous outpouring on the subject of his art. The thing that surprises a close student of this episode and its outcome is that Maupassant was in reality so unlike his master. And when I further insist that the younger man appropriated whole scenes from Flaubert for his longer stories, especially from L'Education Sentimentale, I feel that I am uttering a paradox. What I mean is this: Maupassant's temperament was utterly different from Flaubert's. They were both prosecuted for certain things they wrote, Guy for a poem in 1880, at Estampes; there had been a detraque nervous system in both cases. Yet, similar in ideals and physical peculiarities as were these two men, there was a profound psychical gulf between their temperaments. Flaubert was a great genius, a path breaker, a philosophic poet, and the author of La Tentation de St. Antoine, the nearest approach that France can show to a prose epic, and a book of beauty and originality. Maupassant was a great talent, and a growing one when disease cut him down. He imitated the externals of Flaubert, his irony, his vivid power of picture-making; even his pessimism he developed--though that was personal, as we shall soon see. And yet his work is utterly unlike Flaubert, probably unlike what Flaubert had hoped for--the old man died in 1881 and therefore did not live to enjoy Maupassant in full bloom. If it did not sound quite heretical I should be tempted to assert that the writer Maupassant most patterned after, was Prosper Merimee, an artist detested by Flaubert because of his hard style. It is this precise style that Maupassant exhibits but coupled with a clarity, an ease, and a grace that Merimee could not boast. Of Flaubert's harmonious and imaginatively coloured manner, Maupassant shows no trace in his six novels and his two hundred and odd tales.