Maupassant was not altogether faithful to Flaubert's injunctions regarding the publication of his early attempts. He made many secret flights under different pen-names, though Boule de Suif was the first prose signed by him. It appeared in Les Soirees de Medan, and its originality quite outshone the more solid qualities of Zola's L'Attaque au Moulin, and a realistic tale of Huysmans's, Sac au dos. It was this knapsack of story, nevertheless, that opened the eyes of both Zola and Goncourt to the genuine realism of Huysmans as opposed to the more human but also more sentimental surface realism of Maupassant. Huysmans proved himself devoid of the story-telling gift, of dramatic power; yet he has, if compared to Maupassant, without an iota of doubt, the more vivid vision of the two; "the intensest vision of the modern world," says Havelock Ellis. Pictorial, not imaginative vision, be it understood. In his mystic latter-day rhapsodies it is the realist who sees, the realist who makes those poignant, image-breeding phrases. Take up Maupassant and in his best tales and novels, such as La Maison Tellier, Boule de Suif, Une Vie, Fort Comme la Mort, to mention a few, you will be surprised at the fluidity, the artful devices to elude the harshness of reality, the pessimistic poetry that suffuses his pages after reading Huysmans's immitigable exposition of the ugly and his unflinching attitude before the unpleasant. And Huysmans's point of departure is seldom from an idea; facts furnish him with an adequate spring-board. Maupassant is more lyric in tone and texture. Edmond de Goncourt, jealous of the success of the newcomer, wrote in his diary that Maupassant was an admirable conteur, but a great writer, never. Zola admitted to a few intimates that Guy was not the realist that Huysmans was. All of which is interesting, but proves nothing except that Maupassant wrote a marvellous collection of short stories, real, hyphenated short-stories, as Mr. Brander Matthews makes the delicate distinction, while Huysmans did not.