In 'Adieu mystères', an article published in 1881, Maupassant argues that poetry draws its power from the unknown. Comparing the latter to 'une épaisse et redoutée forêt', Maupassant implores would-be poets to work quickly, since, 'Ô poètes, vous n'avez plus qu'un coin de forêt où nous conduire'.¹ This race against time is prompted by the advance of modern science, which drives the unknown before it. In an intriguing inversion of Herbert Spencer's famous image, Maupassant implies that human contact with the unknown is finite and that it decreases with the expansion of knowledge. It is clear that, for Maupassant, a watershed has been reached. He intimates that poets are hard-pressed to compete with men of science, whose thrilling discoveries and inventions reduce the artist's exploitation of the unknown to a rather feeble rivalry. Maupassant mocks and yet sympathises with poets, claiming that 'vos pauvres fantômes sont bien mesquins à côté d'une locomotive lancée' (i, 313–14).

Both Huysmans and Zola were later to dwell on the power and compelling beauty of the same machine, but Maupassant's own recourse to the train as icon proceeds less from any confident fascination than from an anxious recognition of the values the train appears to embody. Indeed, notwithstanding his condemnation of those 'qui ne sont pas de leur siècle', those whom he qualifies, in the opening lines of his article, as 'ces ankylosés, ces pétrifiés, ces empêcheurs de sonder les mystères du monde' (i, 311), the onward march of science arouses in him feelings of regret and loss for 'ce quelque chose de vague et de terrifiant' (i, 315) which shrouded the pre-positivistic age. Maupassant is quick to point out that measurements and laws which explain reality also divest it of a fundamentally important spiritual aspect, a tension which emerges fully in the following: 'malgré moi, malgré mon vouloir, et la joie de cette émancipation, tous ces voiles levés m'attristent. Il me semble qu'on a dépeuplé le monde. On a supprimé l'Invisible. Et tout me paraît muet, vide, abandonné!' (i, 314).

Maupassant's nostalgia, the way in which he emphasises the 'invincible besoin de rêve' (i, 313) as a general human characteristic, might easily be taken as the expression of a somewhat banal truism, although its banality would have appeared less obvious to his contemporary reader than to a modern one. And yet, there is clearly a sense in which Maupassant is writing here within the context of what one might call the negative phase of positivism, a position of serious doubt with regard to the value of material progress. It is the manner in which his nostalgia is fleshed out, as well as its political corollary, elitism, which deserve more detailed consideration, and the aim of this chapter is to follow Maupassant's discussion of these and related themes through his Chroniques and to suggest how his journalistic writing necessarily informs and modifies one's view of his fictional works.

Maupassant's terminology throughout 'Adieu mystères' offers a convenient point of departure in this respect, since the basic opposition he establishes between terms such as mystères, croyances, légendes, fantômes, esprits, voiles, invisible, on the one hand, and lois, quantité, phases, figures, temps, on the other, illustrates the polarisation of two notions, quality and quantity, which are explored in considerable detail in the Chroniques. The distinction between the intangible and the measurable, between vagueness and precision, embodies what Maupassant perceives as a struggle between two orders of knowledge, a struggle which the second, materialistic element of the opposition is in the process of winning. To put this another way, Maupassant sees the advance of science as the inexorable quantification of the qualitative. One example would be his description of electric lighting as 'l'antique foudre des dieux, la foudre de Jupiter et de Jéhova emprisonnée en des bouteilles!' It is this fencing in of the insaisissable which removes the intellectual pleasure and stimulus to be derived from speculation, the latter being replaced by calculation. As Maupassant puts it, 'les choses ne parlent plus, ne chantent plus, elles ont des lois! La source murmure simplement la quantité d'eau qu'elle débite!' (i, 314).

Maupassant's wistful musing on the dubious value of progress in the sciences, as expressed in 'Adieu mystères', is symptomatic of a much broader preoccupation with the substitution of quantity for quality, a preoccupation which, not surprisingly, finds more elaborate expression in his thoughts on writing. Of his contemporaries only Flaubert excites his unqualified admiration.² Bourget, Goncourt and Zola are also singled out for favourable treatment.³ Earlier figures, such as Balzac and Gautier, interest Maupassant too—the former, especially, being impressive by the sheer energy of his work.⁴

In general, however, Maupassant looks further back into the past for his articles of literary faith. He praises the 'grands maîtres sincères de l'Antiquité' (ii, 269), the most frequently mentioned among these being Aristophanes, Ovid and Virgil.⁵ But, while his admiration for such giants as Boccaccio, Cervantes, Dante and Shakespeare is also clear, Maupassant's nostalgia for the greatness of the past almost invariably selects the eighteenth century as the period par excellence of sophistication. In the visual arts two names, Boucher and Watteau, recur frequently. In literature, Beaumarchais and Voltaire are mentioned whenever the eighteenth century is evoked.⁶ On a more general, social level, Maupassant laments the passing of the 'charmants causeurs du siècle dernier' (i, 389) and the 'grâce poudrée de l'autre siècle' (ii, 82). In sum, the eighteenth century constituted the period 'qui est et qui restera le grand siècle de la France, le siècle de l'art par excellence, de la grâce et de la beauté' (ii, 185).

Again, a first reaction to this might be to see it as nothing more than a simple preference for the traditional, a not unusual admiration for the great figures of history: in short, a potentially banal conservatism. To be sure, on a superficial level it is all of these things. And yet, the implied absence of the truly artistic sensibility from late nineteenth-century society, and the nationalism lurking in the last quotation suggest a richer and more serious set of attitudes to be explored.

Indeed, the sterility of contemporary French intellectual life is the inevitable consequence, Maupassant argues, of a social order 'composé presque exclusivement de parvenus récents' (ii, 303). What motivates his resignation concerning scientific progress and his nostalgia for France's artistic heritage, is not merely an innocuous passéisme, but a profound anxiety fuelled by what he sees as the disappearance of the 'fines qualités' of the French nation, those traits of behaviour which formerly elevated the French above other nations. His yearning for 'le siècle de Watteau et de Boucher, le siècle de Voltaire, le siècle aussi de Diderot, le siècle de l'incroyance, de la galanterie et de l'amour, le siècle qui grise, même de loin, le siècle français' (i, 303) is prompted not so much by feelings of regret for the specific political order of the Ancien Régime, as by the individualism and flamboyance which were the hall-marks of the kind of society over which it held sway.

Throughout the Chroniques Maupassant returns, again and again, to the examination of these 'fines qualités': 'la politesse', 'la galanterie', and 'l'esprit', notably, are all discussed in detail. What emerges is a picture of a society steeped in mediocrity, condemned at every turn for its lack of sophistication, a society which has lost, in a word, its Frenchness. Manupassant unleashes a bitter cynicism against his compatriots, who seem to have become 'une race de goujats' and wonders at 'les causes secètes, les influences mystérieuses qui ont pu faire du peuple le plus courtois du monde un des plus grossiers qui soient aujourd'hui' (i, 289).

As a writer, Maupassant understandably dwells on linguistic issues, aiming to shore up what he sees as the inherent purity of the French language. In 'En lisant', for example, published in 1882, he reviews a re-edition of Themidore, an eighteenth-century text, exclaiming 'voilà de bonne prose de notre vieux pays, de la prose bien transparente qu'on boit comme nos vins, qui scintille comme eux, et monte aux têtes, et rend joyeux' (ii, 11). Simplicity and playfulness: these are the natural qualities of the French language which, like French wine, seems to emanate from the very soil of France, as well as the history of the French people. Wit, especially, 'né sur le sol de France' (i, 242), and an essential characteristic of the French nation, is under threat from linguistic change and infiltration. As Maupassant puts it, 'l'esprit français semble malade' (ii, 300). The agile wit of former generations, characterised by subtlety and economy, is being overtaken by 'des sottises tellement lourdes qu'on en demeure confondu' (ii, 301). The superiority of the earlier form of wit was located in its lightness of touch and its 'ludic' qualities; in sarcasm, satire and irony. But Maupassant discerns only volume and clumsiness in contemporary attempts at witticism. Paradoxically, efforts to enrich the French language merely impoverish it.

In this linguistic context, Maupassant's disillusioned elitism and his nationalism converge to heap scorn on a work by a Swiss author: La Ferme du Choquard, by Victor Cherbuliez. The latter's 'français d'outre-monts', because of its close similarities to metropolitan French, embodies an especially insidious threat and is taken to task in the most strident terms for the 'invincible somnolence' it provokes, its 'pâleur' and its 'uniforme banalité' (ii, 197). But linguistic variation within France is also attacked, the authors of the 'Société des gens de lettres' being lambasted for their 'charabia négro-français' (iii, 66), and the marked regional accent of inhabitants of southern France for inducing in northerners the feeling of being 'des barbares étrangers à la patrie' (ii, 180). Maupassant's conclusion, in the face of such evidence, is that 'nous paraissons surtout être devenus beaucoup moins français' (iii, 35).

Given such attitudes, the diachronic enterprise of historical linguists attempting to analyse their way back through the Babel of late nineteenth-century language forms to the Ursprache, or proto-language, from which all others sprang would have been anathema to Maupassant. His own endeavour is to maintain the specificity of French at all costs.⁷ Maupassant's own approach is achronic. Time, he seems to imply, cannot alter the fundamental nature of the French language, which bears the imprint of a set of French-language universals, outside history and embodying the very essence of the national character. It is as though, for Maupassant, the French language had sprung fully formed from the loins of France.⁸

In the context of boulangisme and the fanatical cries for revenge of Paul Déroulède and his 'Ligue des patriotes', Maupassant's linguistic and artistic nationalism is apt to appear understated. And yet, it is worth stressing its significance, because it clearly relates to such social and political issues, of great prominence during Maupassant's writing-career, issues from which his work is sometimes separated, perhaps because they are assumed to be irrelevant, to lie beyond his field of interest, even beyond his intellect.

That Maupassant was alive to the flavour of emerging debates on race and nationality seems a logical inference given his position and, indeed, might already be supposed from the preceding paragraphs. This becomes clearer, however, if one considers his assessment of Rabelais as someone who was 'Français dans les moelles', as someone who characterises 'notre race gaillarde, rieuse, amoureuse, en qui le sang et le propos sont vifs' (ii, 93). One can attempt to dismiss the terminology here as simple enthusiasm; there is something rather too insistent about the conflation of the national and the biological to be quite coincidental. This fact comes into focus more sharply still when Maupassant claims that 'la puissance absorbante de la race blanche devient irrésistible dans les climats qui lui conviennent' (iii, 148).⁹ One is tempted to see in Maupassant's defence of the French language and culture the manifestation of a crude racism. His presentation of Walter in Bel-Ami, and Andermatt in Mont-Oriol, certainly appears to confirm the extent to which Maupassant was aware of, and perhaps a party to, an incipient anti-semitism, for example.

His use of the term race, however, is both extensive and unstable, being used to mean social class, social group, type, sex and even clan.¹⁰ Moreover, it is unclear whether Maupassant had any precise knowledge of the ideas of such theorists as Broca and de Gobineau.¹¹ His repeated use of the term suggests, none the less, that contemporary discussions on the subject may well have influenced his own ideas. In the broader context of the development of theories of racial origins and superiorities, Maupassant's use of the term might be deemed amateurish, a pseudofamiliarity with current research in sociology and psychology. Within the context of his own nostalgia and nationalism, however, it is clear that he is attempting to underpin his elitist attitudes by appropriating and redefining race.

The core of his argument seems to be that, just as France was a great country in the past by virtue of the art and literature of a restricted number of brilliant artists, expressing the French genius for individualism primarily through the French language, so, at the end of the nineteenth century, the principal national characteristics and the greatness of French art are being diluted, not least through the linguistic channel, by a fundamentally different society and political system. What had once been the preserve of the few is now threatened by the advance of the many.

Indeed, the aristocratic and the artistic are synonymous for Maupassant. The artistic and the popular sensibilities are incompatible. When, for example, a proposal is put forward to extend military service for all Frenchmen to three years, Maupassant cannot contain his amazement: 'Trois ans de la vie d'un artiste, juste au moment où cet artiste se forme, où il va devenir lui, où il va s'affirmer, naître, mais cela vaut la vie entière de cent mille commerçants et de cent millions d'ouvriers!' (ii, 231).¹² The essentially qualitative difference between the artist and the masses excludes popular art, a contradiction in terms for Maupassant. In 'A propos de peuple', he underlines this when he writes, 'L'Art, quel qu'il soit, ne s'adresse qu'à l'aristocratie intellectuelle d'un pays. Je m'étonne qu'on puisse confondre' (ii, 274). Maupassant makes it clear that by 'intellectual aristocracy' he is referring not to any specific political group or class within society, but to 'la partie vraiment intelligente d'une nation' (ii, 274).

But Maupassant's anxiety in the face of the increasing importance of the masses in social terms and their resulting influence on the intellectual standards of the country renders direct political comment inevitable. His nostalgia for a political system which allowed individualistic talent to flourish inevitably entails a fundamental critique of the democratic principles of the Third Republic. Equality, for Maupassant, is a farcical notion, being defined as 'le mal dont nous mourrons' (ii, 233).

He frequently turns on the republican regime, denigrating it for its judicial system, its specious morality, or its attempts, ludicrous in his view, to encourage and protect artists, to collectivise that which is necessarily individualistic. He attacks France's demo-cratically elected representatives, dismissing Gambetta as a 'charmeur de foules' (ii, 154) and tarring all the deputies of the National Assembly with the same brush, calling them 'les Dupont et les Durand qui nous gouvernent' (ii, 369). They are nothing more than 'pesants doctrinaires', whose principal distinguishing characteristic is their 'gravité pontifiante' (ii, 388). Following Tocqueville, Maupassant recognises the potential despotism of the majority. His own interest in the phenomenon, however, is driven by scepticism and fear.

A system based on the notion of number inevitably projects men from the masses forward into the arena of government, a fact which Maupassant sees as having incalculable consequences, given a social framework not yet in a position adequately to prepare those who may be required to assume responsibilities in government. The Chamber of Deputies is described as 'cette assemblée de provinciaux illettrés, élus et parvenus par l'aveugle volonté du nombre' (ii, 90) and Maupassant dismisses 'cette machine qu'on appelle le suffrage universel, inventée pour l'exaltation des médiocres, l'élimination des supérieurs et l'abaissement général' (ii, 370).

The consequences do not end at this point, since, erected as it is on the principle of number, France's republican government is drawn inexorably into committing that gravest of sins in Maupassant's eyes, the corruption of the French language. As a democratic institution, France's National Assembly, is, at least in part, accountable to its electors. It is to the masses of recently enfranchised Frenchmen that the Chamber necessarily directs much of its comment. The inevitable result of this is that speeches in the Assembly are 'rédigés en charabia' (i, 343). At the same time, in an effort to influence public opinion—'toujours aveugle' (ii, 252) in Maupassant's view—that other turbine of democracy, the press, is also tempted to reduce the intellectual demands it makes of its readers, with the result that 'les journaux, les trois quarts du temps, sont écrits en petit nègre, seule langue à la portée des foules' (i, 344).

There is a clear link here between Maupassant's denigration of contemporary writing and his criticism of the contemporary political scene. The implied foreignness of the language emanating from the Chamber of Deputies or the press matches the un-French babble he perceives in current abuse of the language in works of literature. Similarly, the false wit of the late nineteenth century, qualified as a 'robinet à banalités' (ii, 302), finds its political corollary in the sheer welter of words produced in the Assembly. The orators and demagogues of the Republic have been cut off from the great French tradition in which the political and the aesthetic appeal of the linguistic were closely interwoven. While the great orators of former times merited 'le surnom poétique de "Bouche-d' Or" ', for their latter-day counterparts 'si un surnom peut leur aller, c'est celui de "Bouche-d'Egout" ' (i, 291).

While Maupassant's treatment of this whole theme clearly reveals his affective involvement in political questions, the terms in which he presents his arguments effectively discount any direct or practical form of political action on his part. His elitist assessment of France under the Republic prevents him from participating, his anxious defence of individualism forcing a reticence in the face of a constant invitation to take up cudgels on behalf of a specific political ideology. Identification with any such cause, however closely related to his own position, would associate him with a group attitude and represent a dilution of precisely those values which he seeks to defend. In this sense his elitism contains an incipient right-wing anarchism.¹³ He is unable to reconcile the idea of government of whatever political hue—legitimist, Orleanist, Bonapartist, republican—with the practical implications of the day-to-day implementation of policy.

Above all, Maupassant's critique of democracy is prompted by the feeling that the individual as a social entity is threatened with extinction. Within a republican system of government, under the terms of which 'le nombre imbécile seul est puissant' (i, 279), the downward trend of French artistic and cultural life affects even and especially those individuals who might flourish in other circumstances. Maupassant is prepared to admit that not all politicians are necessarily devoid of positive qualities. The difficulty, as he perceives it, is that they form only a small part of a vast structure which effectively neutralises their political impact. There may be exceptions, 'mais ils ne comptent pas, noyés dans la masse des représentants crottés du suffrage universel' (ii, 305). Just as vast numbers of cheap foreign ornaments swamp France, smothering the sophisticated French bibelot, so the Republic with its mass of electors drowns the few, the men who possess 'ce flair des races fines, manquant totalement à notre société utilitaire et lourdaude' (i, 106).¹⁴

It is the crowd which threatens to sweep away the France of old in a torrent of mediocrity, the crowd's incomprehension, its 'férocitiés inconscientes' (i, 179) and the 'tourbillon de sottises' (i, 218) it propagates. The crowd is 'crédule' (i, 260), possessed of a 'bêtise particulière' (i, 224), a 'bête à mille têtes' (i, 408), 'incapable de subtiles délicatesses' (ii, 120).

Maupassant's anxiety merely intensifies as he concentrates, drawn by a somewhat morbid fascination, on the psychology of the crowd and the conflict between the crowd and the individual. The crowd is a 'pâtée grouillante' (ii, 138), 'une épaisse bouillie humaine' (i, 375), into which the individual is absorbed. Anticipating theorists such as Gustave Le Bon and Gabriel Tarde, Maupassant perceives how the collectivity functions independently of the individuals which compose it. The collective body, he implies, is not simply the sum of its constituent elements, but something quite different. Turning again to France's legislative body by way of example, he claims that it shows how a structure operates to the detriment of all personal idiosyncrasies. It is the position which one occupies within the structure, the role one plays, rather than one's individual characteristics, which are most important. It is this which prompts Maupassant to suggest that a député, as an individual, is 'si facile à remplacer qu'on ne s'aperçoit pas du changement' (ii, 374). The legislative structure, despite periodic changes in its membership, continues to function according to a collective identity which ignores or subjugates the differences ordinarily pertaining between its individual members.

Maupassant is attracted by the subject to the extent that he devotes an entire article to the theme. In 'Les Foules', written in 1882, Maupassant opens with the following description of the crowd:

Regardez ces têtes pressées, ce flot d'hommes, ce tas de vivants. N'y voyez-vous rien que des gens réunis? Oh! C'est autre chose, car il se produit là un phénomène singulier. Toutes ces personnes côte à côte, distinctes, différentes de corps, d'esprit, d'intelligence, de passions, d'éducation, de croyances, de préjugés, tout à coup, par le seul fait de leur réunion, forment un être spécial, doué d'une âme propre, d'une manière de penser nouvelle, commune, et qui ne semble nullement formée de la moyenne des opinions de tous. (ii, 15)

Maupassant's description underlines the difference between his own vision and that of others. As Susanna Barrows has shown, analysing the work of crowd psychologists and authors of the period, the vision of the crowd, in many cases, was shot through with metaphors which belied immense fears, 'fears deeply rooted in the social fabric of the time'. The crowds of many writers 'loomed as violent, bestial, insane, capricious beings whose comportment resembled that of the mentally ill'.¹⁵

It should be clear from the preceding paragraphs that Maupassant's view of the crowd does not perceive in it the bloodthirsty power and savagery which Susanna Barrows isolates in many accounts. Even the portrayal of the crowd in Germinal, for example, a near-contemporary of 'Les Foules' by an author often equated with Maupassant, seems alien to the perception of the crowd which the latter formulates. His own metaphors tend to emphasise the insidious at the expense of the gory. Panic and horror, to say nothing of sensationalist exploitation of a convenient image, give way to a description of the subtle ways in which the crowd operates at the physical and psychological levels. Its power is none the less unsettling and destructive for that, since the combination of individuals into a crowd 'fait que tous subitement, par suite d'une sorte de dégagement cérébral commun, pensent, sentent et jugent comme une seule personne, avec un seul esprit et une même manière de voir' (ii, 17).

The mysterious and spontaneous process engendered by the formation of a crowd both intrigues and unnerves Maupassant. Each member of a crowd, he seems to imply, sheds his usual personality and adopts another, a standardised psyche, a social self, which is reproduced as many times as there are people in the crowd. Those present, however intelligent, are incapable of preventing the transformation. On their return home, Maupassant surmises, they must ask themselves how they failed to resist such a change in their behaviour. The reason is simply that their individual will 's'etait noyée dans la volonté commune comme une goutte d'eau se mêle à un fleuve' (ii, 16).

There is a clear link here, in the recurrence of the metaphor of liquidity, between Maupassant's preoccupations in 'Les Foules' and his presentation of the crowd scenes in 'La Ficelle' and Pierre et Jean. Indeed, Maupassant's ideas on the social and political status of the individual in late nineteenth-century France must necessarily place consideration of his fictional writings in a new context, since one cannot fairly assume that his work as a journalist and chroniqueur was subject to some convenient, quite arbitrary separation from his work as a novelist and writer of short stories. Maupassant the journalist clearly had an extensive influence on Maupassant the writer of fiction, and it is the mistaken propensity to disregard the relationship between these two aspects of his work which has encouraged the misleading view of the author as an instinctive, unreflective producer of entertaining but only semi-serious fiction.

Among the important conclusions to emerge from a detailed consideration of the Chroniques, given the vast spread of subjects which Maupassant tackles there, is that it is very difficult to persist in seeing him as this gifted but intellectually limited craftsman of letters. Maupassant was in touch. Art, history, love, marriage, fashion, politics, religion: the list of themes running through his journalism could be extended almost indefinitely. Even more striking, as the preceding pages show, is the stability of tone in a body of material spanning a period of some fifteen years. Nostalgia and elitism are never out of view.

At the centre of the elitist consideration of contemporary French political life, of what he sees as the intellectual and artistic mediocrity which blights the country, is a profound anxiety about the function and status of the individual human being. It is not only that fewer great men seem to be coming forward, but also that even those intelligent individuals that do exist are reduced to insignificance by the standardising influence of the amorphous, anonymous mass around them. People, for Maupassant, especially men, are in danger of becoming reduced to a purely group function which robs them of their specificity, their personality. They are cast, as it were, in the same mould and therefore replaceable.

Notes

¹ Maupassant, Chroniques, ed. Hubert Juin, 3 vols (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1980) i, 313. All quotations from Maupassant's journalism are from this edition. References are given in parentheses after quotations and consist of volume number, in Roman numerals (lowercase), followed by page number(s).

² See, for example, iii, 77–124.

³ On Bourget, see ii, 393–8; on Goncourt, i, 175–80; on Zola, ii, 306–22.

⁴ On Balzac, see ii, 37 and 288; on Gautier, ii, 21 and 146.

⁵ See, for example, ii, 92, 281 or 329.

⁶ See i, 243, 291, 303, 353; and ii, 146, 167.

⁷ On the development of linguistic science in the late nineteenth century see, for example, Julia Kristeva, Le langage, cet inconnu (Paris: Seuil, 1981) pp. 190-214.

⁸ See, for example, 'Le Roman', where he writes, 'La langue française, d'ailleurs, est une eau pure que les écrivains maniérés n'ont jamais pu et ne pourront jamais troubler. Chaque siècle a jeté dans ce courant limpide, ses modes, ses archaïsmes prétentieux et ses préciosités, sans que rien surnage de ces tentatives inutiles, de ces efforts impuissants' (R, 714-15).

⁹ Elme Caro, in his Le Pessimisme au XIXe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1878), uses the word in the same sense and emits a similar elitist view, insisting that physical suffering is most acute in 'les races les plus civilisées et, dans ces races, chez l'homme de génie' (p. 130).

¹⁰ See i, 106; i, 225; ii, 209; ii, 333; i, 70, respectively.

¹¹ Theodore Zeldin, in his France 1848-1945, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973 and 1977) II, 12, gives a brief account of the race theories having some currency at the time.

¹² Caro expresses a similar idea when he writes, 'je suppose que Newton, quand il trouva la formule exacte de l'attraction, condensa dans un seul moment plus de joie que tous les bourgeois de Londres réunis ne pouvaient en goûter durant une année entière dans leurs tavernes, devant leur pâté de venaison et leur pot d'ale' (Le Pessimisme, p. 134).

¹³ What Hubert Juin, in his preface to the Chroniques, has called 'un anarchisme de salon' (i, 7).

¹⁴ For Maupassant's thoughts on consumerism, which he sees as the inevitable social and commercial consequence of the political system, see i, 106-12, 'Chine et Japon'.

¹⁵ Susanna Barrows, Distorting Mirrors: Visions of the Crowd in Late Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1981) p. 5.