Flaubert's protégé perfected the ruthless short story
Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) remains France's short-story benchmark: lean prose, clean endings, often set in the Franco-Prussian War's shadow. His mother introduced him to Gustave Flaubert, who drilled the craft that made the tales feel effortless.
He was born in 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil near Dieppe. His mother, Laure Le Poittevin, a keen reader of Shakespeare, braved social disgrace to separate from her violent husband when Guy was 11, and raised him and his brother Hervé at Étretat on the Normandy coast. At 18 he pulled the poet Algernon Swinburne out of the sea there. After volunteering in the Franco-Prussian War he spent a decade as a navy ministry clerk in Paris, escaping only to row on the Seine at weekends.
Flaubert acted as his literary guardian, and at his house the young man met Zola and Turgenev. Success arrived in 1880 with Boule de Suif, which Flaubert predicted would last. The next decade was frantic: two to four volumes a year, a first story collection that reached its twelfth edition within two years, the novel Une Vie selling 25,000 copies in under a year, and Bel-Ami running through thirty-seven printings in four months in 1885. Many readers rank Pierre et Jean of 1888 his finest novel. Altogether he produced some 300 stories, six novels, three travel books and a book of verse.
His range ran from realist portraits of Third Republic France to tales of the uncanny such as Le Horla, where apparent hauntings often mirror a disturbed mind; he attended Jean-Martin Charcot's lectures on psychiatry in 1885 and 1886. He loathed the Eiffel Tower enough to lunch beneath it, the one spot where it was out of sight, and he turned down both the Legion of Honour and the Académie Française.
Syphilis caught in youth brought paranoia and a dread of death. After trying to cut his throat on 2 January 1892 he was confined to Esprit Blanche's asylum at Passy and died there the following year. His self-written epitaph says he coveted everything and enjoyed nothing. Tolstoy wrote an essay on his work, and only Shakespeare has inspired more film adaptations.
Source: Guy de Maupassant
