Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant mopasɑ̃]; 5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular
French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's
finest exponents.
Maupassant was a protégé of Flaubert and his stories are characterized by economy of
style and efficient, effortless dénouements.
Many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s, describing the futility of war
and the innocent civilians who, caught up in events beyond their control, are permanently
changed by their experiences.
He wrote some 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse.
His first published story, "Boule de Suif", is often considered his masterpiece.
Biography
Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil,
near Dieppe in the Seine-Inférieure department in France.
He was the first son of Laure Le Poittevin and Gustave de Maupassant, both from prosperous
bourgeois families.
When Maupassant was 11 and his brother Hervé was five, his mother, an independent-minded
woman, risked social disgrace to obtain a legal separation from her husband.
After the separation, Laure Le Poittevin kept her two sons.
With the father’s absence, Maupassant’s mother became the most influential figure
in the young boy’s life.
She was an exceptionally well read woman and was very fond of classical literature, especially
Shakespeare.
Until the age of thirteen, Guy happily lived with his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted,
at Étretat, in the Villa des Verguies, where, between the sea and the luxuriant countryside,
he grew very fond of fishing and outdoor activities.
At age thirteen, he was sent to the seminary of Yvetot, near Rouen for classical studies.
From his early education he retained a marked hostility to religion, and to judge from verses
composed around this time he deplored the ecclesiastical atmosphere, its ritual and
discipline.
His mother next placed her two sons as day boarders in a private school, the Institution
Leroy-Petit, in Rouen - the Institution Robineau of Maupassant's story La Question du Latin.
In 1867, as he entered junior high school, Maupassant made acquaintance with Gustave
Flaubert at Croisset at the insistence of his mother.
Next year, in autumn, he was sent to the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen where he proved
a good scholar indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals.
In October 1868, at the age of 18, he saved the famous poet Algernon Charles Swinburne
from drowning off the coast of Étretat.
The Franco-Prussian War broke out soon after his graduation from college in 1870; he enlisted
as a volunteer.
In 1871, he left Normandy and moved to Paris where he spent ten years as a clerk in the
Navy Department.
During this time his only recreation and relaxation was canoeing on the Seine on Sundays and holidays.
Gustave Flaubert took him under his protection and acted as a kind of literary guardian to
him, guiding his debut in journalism and literature.
At Flaubert's home he met Émile Zola and the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, as well
as many of the proponents of the realist and naturalist schools.
He wrote and played himself in a comedy in 1875, "À la feuille de rose, maison turque".
In 1878, he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and became a contributing
editor to several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, Gil Blas, Le Gaulois and l'Écho
de Paris.
He devoted his spare time to writing novels and short stories.
In 1880 he published what is considered his first masterpiece, "Boule de Suif", which
met with instant and tremendous success.
Flaubert characterized it as "a masterpiece that will endure."
This was Maupassant's first piece of short fiction set during the Franco-Prussian War,
and was followed by short stories such as "Deux Amis", "Mother Savage", and "Mademoiselle
Fifi".
The decade from 1880 to 1891 was the most fertile period of Maupassant's life.
Made famous by his first short story, he worked methodically and produced two or sometimes
four volumes annually.
His talent and practical business sense made him wealthy.
In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the title of La Maison Tellier;
it reached its twelfth edition within two years.
In 1883 he finished his first novel, Une Vie, 25,000 copies of which were sold in less than
a year.
His second novel Bel Ami, which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven printings in four months.
His editor, Havard, commissioned him to write more stories, and Maupassant continued to
produce them efficiently and frequently.
At this time he wrote what many consider to be his greatest novel, Pierre et Jean.
With a natural aversion to society, he loved retirement, solitude, and meditation.
He traveled extensively in Algeria, Italy, England, Brittany, Sicily, Auvergne, and from
each voyage brought back a new volume.
He cruised on his private yacht Bel-Ami, named after his novel.
This life did not prevent him from making friends among the literary celebrities of
his day: Alexandre Dumas, fils had a paternal affection for him; at Aix-les-Bains he met
Hippolyte Taine and became devoted to the philosopher-historian.
Flaubert continued to act as his literary godfather.
His friendship with the Goncourts was of short duration; his frank and practical nature reacted
against the ambiance of gossip, scandal, duplicity, and invidious criticism that the two brothers
had created around them in the guise of an 18th-century style salon.
Maupassant was one of a fair number of 19th-century Parisians, including Alexandre Dumas and Charles
Garnier, who did not care for the Eiffel Tower.
He often ate lunch in the restaurant at its base, not out of preference for the food but
because it was only there that he could avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable profile.
He and forty-six other Parisian literary and artistic notables attached their names to
an elaborately irate letter of protest against the tower's construction, written to the Minister
of Public Works.
Maupassant also wrote under several pseudonyms such as Joseph Prunier, Guy de Valmont, and
Maufrigneuse.
In his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation,
and a fear of death and paranoia of persecution caused by the syphilis he had contracted in
his youth.
On January 2, 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat, and was committed
to the private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died on July 6,
1893.
Guy De Maupassant penned his own epitaph: "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure
in nothing."
He is buried in Section 26 of the Cimetière du Montparnasse, Paris.
Significance Maupassant is considered one of the fathers
of the modern short story.
He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model for Somerset Maugham and O. Henry
in this respect.
His stories about expensive jewellery are imitated with a twist by Maugham and Henry
James.
Taking his cue from Balzac, Maupassant wrote comfortably in both the high-Realist and fantastic
modes; stories and novels such as "L'Héritage" and Bel-Ami aim to recreate Third Republic
France in a realistic way, whereas many of the short stories describe apparently supernatural
phenomena.
The supernatural in Maupassant, however, is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists'
troubled minds; Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry,
and attended the public lectures of Jean-Martin Charcot between 1885 and 1886.
This interest is reflected in his fiction.
.. Legacy
Maupassant is notable as the subject of one of Leo Tolstoy's essays on art: The Works
of Guy de Maupassant.
Friedrich Nietzsche's autobiography mentions him in the following text:
"I cannot at all conceive in which century of history one could haul together such inquisitive
and at the same time delicate psychologists as one can in contemporary Paris: I can name
as a sample – for their number is by no means small, ... or to pick out one of the
stronger race, a genuine Latin to whom I am particularly attached, Guy de Maupassant."
Even Gene Roddenberry was influenced by Maupassant's philosophies.
When creating The Questor Tapes, he had envisioned the android character of Questor to be well
read, which included Maupassant's theory that "the human female will open her mind to a
man to whom she has opened OTHER channels of communications."
This influenced an early draft of the TV movie's script in which the android Questor is trying
to obtain information from a woman who knew his creator, but was reluctant to give him
her information.
He subsequently romanced the woman, copulated with her, and eventually got the information
he sought.
Unfortunately, because of complaints from NBC executives about a "robot" making love
to a woman, this particular part of the script was never filmed.
Gene would later succeed in having an android and a woman make love when the character of
Data is seduced by crewmate Tasha Yar in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode The
Naked Now.
Bibliography
Short stories
The Piece of String The Artist
Novels Une Vie
Bel-Ami Mont-Oriol
Pierre et Jean Fort comme la mort
Notre Cœur Short-story collections
Les Soirées de Médan La Maison Tellier
Mademoiselle Fifi Contes de la Bécasse
Miss Harriet Les Sœurs Rondoli
Clair de lune Yvette
Contes du jour et de la nuit Monsieur Parent
La Petite Roque Toine
Le Horla Le Rosier de Madame Husson
La Main gauche L'Inutile Beauté
Travel writing Au soleil
Sur l'eau La Vie errante.
Poetry Des Vers containing Nuit de Neige
References
External links Maupassantiana, a French scholar's website
on Maupassant and his works Works by or about Guy de Maupassant at Internet
Archive Works by Guy de Maupassant at Project Gutenberg
Works by Guy de Maupassant at LibriVox Université McGill: le roman selon les romanciers
Recensement et analyse des écrits non romanesques de Guy de Maupassant
Works by Guy de Maupassant at Online Literature Works by Guy de Maupassant in Ebooks
Works by or about Guy de Maupassant in libraries Works by Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant biography (French) Oeuvres de Maupassant, à Athena