Attaque du Moulin and other episodes of the war by different hands in a volume styled Les Soirées de Medan, was at once hailed by the author of Madame Bovary as a veritable master-piece, in a verdict which nobody has wished to dispute.
Eight years later, in his well-known preface to Pierre et Jean, Maupassant expounded his opinions on the writing of stories. It is a somewhat ragged piece of criticism in itself, but necessarily interesting, and demands a word here. What, he asks, are the set rules for writing a novel? The answer is simple: there are no such rules. A story can only be a personal conception, transfigured by its author into his personal realisation of a work of art. As Mr. Kipling puts it:
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays. And every single one of them is right!"
The artist, then, says Maupassant, is in a sense the slave of his personality; he must write as he can, not as he would. Romantic or realist, he must follow his bent. The goal, therefore, of training such as Maupassant's own is not the attainment of an absolutely best method, but the discovery of the special subject and the scheme of treatment which are most in harmony with the writer's mind. As Louis Bouilhet, another early
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