August 05, 2010 <Back to Index>
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Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular 19th-century French writer and considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. A protégé of Flaubert, Maupassant's stories are characterized by their economy of style and efficient, effortless dénouement. Many of the stories are set during the Franco-Prussian War of
the 1870s and several describe the futility of war and the innocent
civilians who, caught in the conflict, emerge changed. He also wrote
six short novels. Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 at the Chateau de Miromesnil, near Dieppe in the Seine-Inférieure (now Seine-Maritime)
department. He was the first son of Laure Le Poittevin and Gustave de
Maupassant, both from prosperous bourgeois families. When Maupassant
was eleven and his brother Hervé was five, his mother, an
independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace to obtain a legal
separation from her husband. After
separating from her husband, Le Poittevin kept her two sons, the elder
Guy and younger Hervé. With the father’s absence, Maupassant’s
mother became the most influential figure in the young boy’s life. She
was a woman of no common literary accomplishments, but was very fond of
classic 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 a small seminary near Rouen for classical
studies. In October 1868, at the age of 18, he saved the famous poet Algernon Charles Swinburne from drowning off the coast of Étretat at Normandy. As he entered junior high school, he met the great author Gustave Flaubert. He first entered a seminary at Yvetot, but deliberately got himself expelled. From his early education he retained a marked hostility to religion. Then he was sent to the Rouen Lycée, where he proved a good scholar indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals. The Franco-Prussian War broke
out soon after his graduation from college in 1870; he enlisted as a
volunteer and fought bravely. Afterwards, in 1871, he left Normandy and
moved to Paris where
he spent ten years as a clerk in the Navy Department. During these ten
tedious years 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 protagonists of the realist and naturalist schools. In
1878 he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction and
became a contributing editor of several leading newspapers such as Le Figaro, Gil Blas, Le Gaulois and l'Echo 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 an 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. He combined talent and
practical business sense, which 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 (translated into English as A Woman's Life),
25,000 copies of which were sold in less than a year. In his novels, he
concentrated all his observations scattered in his short stories. His
second novel Bel-Ami,
which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven printings in four months. His
editor, Havard, commissioned him to write new masterpieces and
Maupassant continued to produce them without the slightest apparent
effort. 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 he brought back a new volume. He cruised on his
private yacht "Bel-Ami," named after his earlier novel. This feverish
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
fell under the spell of 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
ambience 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 but one of a fair number of 19th-century Parisians who did not care for the Eiffel tower; indeed, he often ate lunch in the restaurant at
its base, not out of any preference for the food, but because it was
only there that he could avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable profile. Moreover,
he and forty-six other Parisian literary and artistic notables attached
their names to a letter of protest, ornate as it was irate, against the
tower's construction to the then Minister of Public Works. In
his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an
obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death and crazed paranoia of persecution, that came from the syphilis he
had contracted in his early days. On January 2, in 1892, Maupassant
tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat and was committed to the
celebrated private asylum of Dr. 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. 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 real or fake jewels ("La Parure", "Les Bijoux") are imitated with a twist by Maugham ("Mr Know-All", "A String of Beads") 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 (notably "Le Horla", cited as an inspiration for H.P. Lovecraft's "The Call of Cthulhu", and "Qui sait?") 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. |