MAUNDY THURSDAY. 199 MAUPEBTUIS. et manducate, 'take and eat,' occurring in the Epistle for the day in the Roman Catholic Church (I. Cor. xi. 24). MAUPASSANT, nio'pa'.sax', Henbi RENf; AntKRT (-irv UE (1850-03). A French novelist, one of the greatest modern writers of sliort stories. Maupassant, after serving in the Xavy Department as clerk, and as soldier in the Ger- niau War, was slowly initiated liy Flaubert, who was an old friend of Madame de Maupassant, into the craft of story-telling. Restraint ripened Ids genius, and his first story, lioule de suif, pub- lished in Les soirees dc Midtui in 18S0, revealed a finished master of the naturalistic seliool. In the same year he published some striking but .sensual poems, Des vers (IS.SO), and a drama, llisloire du rieux temps, but he saw clearly that his career was elsewhere. He confirmed the promise of Boiile de siiif in about two hundred tales gathered under the titles: La maison Tellier {ISSl) ; Mile. Fifi (1883) ; Co>ites de la lU'easse ( 1883) ; Vlair de lune (1883) ; Les sa'iirs Kondoli (1884) ; Yvette (1884) ; Conies du jour et de la nuit (1885) ; Contcs et nourelles (1885) ; Le Ilorlii I 1887) ; La petite Roque (1888) ; La main i/auclie (1889); Le pire Milon (180'.l),and others, among them /y'ifrH/i/f fteaw^e (1890). Be- sides these he wrote si. novels, Une vie (1883) ; Hel-Aini (1885); Mont-Oriol (1887); Pierre et Jean (1888) : Fort eomme la mort (1889) ; A'oire ea-ur (1890); and several volumes of traveler's impressions, Au soleil (1884) ; Sur I'eau (1888) ; La rie errante ( 1890) . Traces of insanity appear at times in all the work from 18S7 onward. The cimdition is most strongly marked in the longer novels. It caused a practical suspension of his literary work in 1890. In 1802 Maupassant be- came wholly insane. July 6, 1893, he died in an asylum at Passy. His whole work is a melan- choly yet fascinating study in imaginative psychology*. He begins as a playful satyr, yet wdth an aristocratic assumption of superiority to his fellow men that masked a pessimism as deep as Flaubert's. Year by year he loses the sensuous exuberance of youth, more and more he is. as it were, hypnotized by the ghastly fas- cinations of death, as were Villon. Gauticr, and Baudelaire. The moral gloom deepens, the moral inirest grows. The robust animalism of Vne vie becomes a melancholy moral anatomy in Notre eocur. In losing its sensuality it had become morbid and morally uncertain even in Pierre et Jcnn, artistically Maupassant's best novel. The shorter stories, because requiring less sustained effort, show this less clearly. To the very end Maupassant did work of a character similar to his early work; but from Le Uorln onward there are stories that could not be attributed to the ear- lier period. As a whole and in average excellence these stories are in style and art the best in France. There are stories of his native Nor- mandy, tales of selfishness and meanness, chiefly tragic, occasionally comic, more often grim in their irony; there are stories, usually cynical, of Parisian foibles, of life in strange lands, of hmting, inedical incident, of love, crime, hor- ror, misery, all carefvdly elahorated and in- credibly deft in the rapid portraiture of a scene or character. All is sharply individualized and the point of view is the absence of any moral law. Characteristic of Maupassant's good hu- mor and better nature are J,e papa dr l^imon. Les idces du colonel, Jliss Harriet, Mademoiselle Pcrle, and Clochette; typical of his whimsical and satirical irony are Le paruplifie, Denis, Decore, Aux hois; bitterly satirical are L'licri- tage. La partie de campagne, Pain maudit, Mai- son Tcllier, Hautot pvrc el fils, and nuisl excpiis- ite of all this groip, i'velte; more intensely misanthropic are tales of sordid brutality or wanton cruelty sueli as En mer, L'oncle Jules. Le diable. Coco, L'ane, La fille de ferme, or Aes sabots, and it is to the wanton side of war that he directs attention in La mere sauvage and Saint- Antoine. Finally there are at least forty stories that are pathologic in their pessimism. Nause- ated liorror of life and haunting terror of death are whispered in the stories of 1884 and recur with growing frequenc}" and inten.sity, as will appear from consecutive reading of Petit soldat, Koliliide, I'n fou, Liii, La petite Roque, Le Horia, and Qui sail. MAUPEOU, mcVpm/. Rene Nicolas Charles AVGUSTix UE ( 1714-!i2). A Freneli politician and chancellor, born in Paris. He was made coun- cilor of Parliament, first president (1703). and finally succeeded his father. Ren^ Charles de Maupeou, as Chancellor of France in 1708. He upheld the King in his plan to override the Par- liament of Paris, ami si<led with Madame du Barry against the Duke of Choiseul. After the Duke's exile in 1770 he, the Duke of Aiguillon, and the Comptroller-General, Alilje Terray, formed a triumvirate to suppress the power of Parliament. The 'Jlaupeou Parliament' as it was called, wdiich was then formed, became very unpopular, and Beaumarchais attacked it. Upon the death of the King, the Chancellor wrote an account of his high-handed disruption of the Parliament, under the title Code des parlements ou Collection d'edits . . . depuis decemhre 1110, jusqu'a dfcemhre nil (1772). MAUPERTUIS, mo'par'twe', Pierre Louis !Moi!EAr riE (1098-1759). A French mathemati- cian and astronomer, born at Saint-ilalo. His education was begun under a tutor, and in 1714 he went to Paris to the College of La Marcbe. In 1718 he joined the army and soon attained the rank of lieutenant. Having acquired a taste for mathematics, he resigned five years later and became adjoint geometre in the Academy of Sciences at Paris, and in 1725 assoeie. For the next seven years he devoted liimself to the investigation of certain geometric problems, publishing his results in a series of memoirs. He was one of the first Frenchmen to master the teachings of Newton. He went to England in 1728 and was admitted to the Royal Society of London. The next year he returned to Basel and studied the integral calculus with Bernoulli. In 1736 he conducted the expedition for measuring a degree of the meridian in Lapland. The re- sults of this work confirmed Newton's theory of the flattening of the earth at the poles. It was on his return that he became acquainted with Voltaire and Samuel Ki'inig. In 1740 Frederick the Great called him to Prussia, and he accom- panied the King in the campaign in Silesia. Hav- ing been taken prisoner by the Austrians at ]rollwitz, JIaupertuis was set free by Maria Theresa and returned to Paris. He was elected a member of the French Academy in 1743. but the next year he was again called to Prussia and in 1740 became president of the Academy at Ber- lin. In 1750 Konig came there as professor of
