The Birmingham age-herald., 1911-04-12
From the Kansas City Star.

"HE dying days of Guy de Maupas- sant are thus painted anew, and ! with new lines, from the diary of Francois Tassart, the authors valet de chambre, by Ralph Jefferson, in the Lon don Morning Post:
 It was plain to see that he was pro- foundly troubled. How profoundly the others did not know till later. He put his arm upon the table and leaned across toward Gerard. Then he broke the long silence and began to speak in that rich and flexible voice for which we had wait ed: that voice whose modulations be- trayed with exquisite fidelity the play and change of emotion within. This night of July" he said in the half smothered tones of one in pain, wounds me, kills me. Its beauty stiles me. #" At that he was silent for few minutes and none of us could find anything to reply
 Presently he began again on a calmer note "Just 40 years,' he said, as if in a muse; and then he repeated: Forty years amid so much beauty. Forty years to have it and enjoy it as l have done |" Forty years to feast riotously on all lovely and de1ectable things. And who;" he went on, raising his voice somewhat. "has found more pleasure in the beauty of the world than I? Which of you has trembed at the splendor of the night as I have trembled at it?' lie made a sweeping gesture with his arm and pointed from under the vine-grown trellis to the western y where bands of a tender peach color yet fingered Look, :" he said, lat the Jura. Here have l sat through the long evenings and seen the twilight fall upon those hills. I have watched the changing colors; crimson and gold saffron and rose, pale green and the tender gray of the opal. have seen them deepen and change and shift until a cool breeze stole down from the moun- tains and I turned to the lake for com fort. To the lake outspread there like plain of misty purple beneath sky of pale stars and beyond the lake to the great mountains that hang like dim white clouds beyond far-stretching violet distances And then I have seen the moon come up from behind the eastern mountains and hang like honey-colored bubble in the dusk, and watched the stars begin to glow and burn and blaze and the sky to grow dark, until the honey -colored moon put on her splendor and flooded the great lake and the snowy southern peaks with her light" He paused on a note that was almost soD And now,' he said, "old age and de- !
 We were spellbound by the magic of his voice. He gulped down some wine, and the action seemed to turn his thought to other channels. "As for the grosser things of life,'' he said, 'who has loved and eaten and drunk as I have done these things? To whom are per- fumes and rich garments and jewels and flowers and wines the things of pure delight that have been to me-? And now I must lose all my pleasures and become an object of disgust and repul- l sion. %'
 How much longer he would have talked in this strain, prey to morbid imaginings, I do not know, for one of us bent toward him and said in a tone of banter:
 Iusisti Satis, edist satis atque bibisti | Tempus abire tibi est.
 Maupassant turned on him face full
 of sudden anger. Then he cooled as
 suddenly. 'Yes, my friend," he said,
 ''better go now than stay 10 rot A few minutes later we sauntered down
 the lane toward Divonne and he would
 have us walk by the graveyard. When
 we came to the gate he stood for mln-
 ute in the dark before the crucifix that
 was set there Then he struck match
 and held it before the face of the Christ.
 Surely" he said, in an awed voice, this
 was the most sensitive Man and the Man
 most full of understanding that has ever come upon this earth. Think of all that
 He has done And He was only S3 when
 they killed Him."
 As we returned to the farmhouse we