Maupassant himself would have answered: Nothing. For he was one of the fighting art-for-art’s-sakers, to whom the idea of morality in an art-work is an insult. But the fact is that he has a propaganda, as definite, as deeply felt, as persistently hammered home as that of a tub-thumper like John Bunyan or a prophet like Tolstoi. His message is that life is a cheat and a snare, and that human beings are beasts decked in fine clothing and pretenses. Maupassant dislikes them so that he eats himself up. He tries to believe in play, in natural, animal enjoyment of the passions; but instead of being content with such pleasures, he shuts himself up like a hermit in a cell, to acquire mastery of a difficult art, and have the satisfaction before he dies of voicing his hatred of that fate, whatever it may be, which has created his own life, and the bourgeois France which he sees about him. Maupassant watches with eager eye and alert fancy for a scene, an episode, a trait of character, which will enable him to illustrate the pettiness and ignominy of human destiny, and the falsity of man’s dignities and honors. He collects such things, as a naturalist collects biting bugs and stinging serpents. His characters are the French peasants with their greed and cruelty, and the French bourgeois and cultured classes, who, underneath their silks and satins, their moralities and intellectualities, are the same vile animals as the peasants. But Maupassant’s quarrel is not merely with men and women; it is with life itself. The thing which brings him the keenest satisfaction is an incident which shows the futility even of virtue; which exhibits God as a sportive demon, amusing himself by pulling off the wings of the butterflies he has created. Out of the two hundred and twelve specimens in the Maupassant museum, any one will suffice. I choose one called “The Necklace,” simply because it has stayed in my memory for twenty-five years. A lovely woman, married to a poor clerk, and living a starved life, borrows from a wealthy friend a beautiful diamond necklace, in order to make a show at some function. She loses the necklace, and she and her husband pledge everything they own, buy another to replace it, and take it to the owner without revealing what has happened. For ten years they slave and drudge to pay off their debts, and the lovely woman is turned into a haggard wreck. The friend who loaned the necklace meets her, and is horrified at her condition; the poor woman tells how she has drudged all these years--and learns that she has wasted her life in order to replace an imitation necklace, of no value worth considering!