Guy de Maupassant

It takes us back to Rollo and William of the Long Sword, to the Vikings and the Crusaders, to the conquerors of England and Sicily, to masterful prelates of the feudal age like Odo of Bayeux and Thomas Becket.

It brings us down to the admirals and men of art and letters of the Grand Siècle, Tourville and Duquesne, Poussin, Malherbe, and the great Corneille, to Charlotte Corday and the days of the Terror, and to the painters and scholars and men of letters of the 19th century, Géricault and Millet, Laplace and Léopold Delisle, Flaubert and Maupassant, and Albert Sorel.

It traces the laborious clearing of ancient forests, the rude processes of primitive agriculture, the making of Norman cider and the breeding of the Norman horse, the vicissitudes of trade in fish and marten skins, in pottery, cheap cottons, and strong waters, the development of a center of fashion like Trouville, or centers of war and commerce like Cherbourg and Havre.

It describes the slow building of monasteries and cathedrals and the patient labors of priests and monks, as well as the conquest of the Canaries, the colonization of Canada, and the exploration of the Great West.

The most distinctive parts of Upper Normandy are the valley of the Seine and the region to the north and east, the Pays de Caux, fringed by the coast from Havre to the frontier of Picardy.

Less monotonous than the bare plains farther east, the plateau of Caux is covered by a rich vegetation broken by scattered farmsteads, where house and orchard and outbuildings are protected from the wind by those rectangular earthworks surmounted by trees which are the most characteristic feature of the region.

It is the country of Madame Bovary and of Maupassant's peasants.

Equally typical is the valley of the Seine, ample, majestic, slow, cutting its sinuous way through high banks, which grow higher as we approach the sea, winding around ancient strongholds like Château Gaillard and Tancarville, or ruined abbeys like Jumièges and Saint-Wandrille, where Maeterlinck's bees still hum in the garden, catching the tide soon after it enters Normandy, reaching deep water at Rouen, and meeting the longed-for dash of waves in the great estuary at its mouth.

End of The Water Ghost of Harrowby Hall by John Kendrick Banks Read by Lars Rolander

The Apparition by Guy de Maupassant.

This is a LibriVox recording.

All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain.

After fruitless searches, all further efforts were abandoned, and for fifty-six years I have heard nothing.

I know no more than before.

That was the end of The Apparition by Guy de Maupassant, recorded by Otaria.

Old Mr. Wiley by Grey La Spina.

I'll be back shortly with Act One.

The great French writer Guy de Maupassant was intrigued by jewelry.

He felt that love for precious stones ranked among the highest of all human vanities.

And to him, human vanity was the very staff of his creative life.

But you see, he's my stick in the mud.

Madame, you make me ashamed of my cynicism.

Then, my good Guy de Maupassant, go forward from this day and... and sin no more.

Celeste.

Now it is this great gap in modern ethics, the absence of vivid pictures of purity and spiritual triumph, which lies at the back of the real objection felt by so many men to the realistic literature of the 19th century.

If any ordinary man ever said that he was horrified by the subjects discussed in Ibsen or Maupassant, or by the plain language in which they are spoken of, that ordinary man was lying.

The average conversation of average men throughout the whole of modern civilization, in every class or trade, is such as Zola would never dream of printing.

Nor is the habit of writing thus of these things a new habit.