But this sentimental outburst that astonished his admirers quickly dies down, for the following year, there appeared the sober Pierre et Jean, that admirable masterpiece of typical reality constructed with "human leaven," without any admixture of literary seasoning, or romantic combinations. The reader finds once more in his splendid integrity the master of yore. But his heart has been touched, nevertheless. In the books that follow, his impassivity gives way like an edifice that has been slowly undermined. With an ever-growing emotion he relates under slight disguises all his physical distress, all the terrors of his mind and heart. What is the secret of this evolution? The perusal of his works gives us a sufficient insight into it. The Minstrel has been received in country houses; has been admitted to "the ladies' apartments." He has given up composing those hurried tales which made his fame, in order to construct beautiful romances of love and death.... The story teller has forsaken rustics and peasants, the comrades of the "Repues franches," for the nobility and the wealthy. He who formerly frequented Mme. Tellier's establishment now praises Michèle de Burne. Ysolde replaces Macette. In "l'Ostel de Courtoisie," Maupassant cultivates the usual abstractions of the modern Round Table: Distinction and Moderation; Fervor and Delicacy. We see him inditing love sonnets and becoming a knight of chivalry. The apologist of brutal pleasures has become a devotee of the "culte de la Dame." Everywhere he was sought after, fêted, petted.... But Maupassant never let himself be carried away by the tinsel of his prestige, nor the puerility of his enchantment. He despised at heart the puppets that moved about him as he had formerly despised his short stories and his petit bourgeois. "Ah," he cries, "I see them, their heads, their types, their hearts and their souls! What a clinic for a maker of books! The disgust with which this humanity inspires me makes me regret still more that I could not become what I should most have preferred--an Aristophanes, or a Rabelais." And he adds: "The world makes failures of all scientists, all artists, all intelligences that it monopolizes. It aborts all sincere sentiment by its manner of scattering our taste, our curiosity, our desire, the little spark of genius that burns in us." Maupassant had to bend to the conditions of his new life. Being well bred, he respected, outwardly at least, the laws of artificiality and conventionality, and bowed before the idols of the cave he had entered.... If Maupassant never became the slave of worldly ideas, the creature of instinct that was part of his being acquired the refined tastes of the salons, and the manners of the highest civilization.