Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant, French novelist, dramatist, and
short-story writer, was born in 1850. Until he was thirteen years old
he had no teacher except his mother, who personally superintended the
training of her two sons. Life for the two boys, during these early
years, was free and happy, Guy was a strong and robust Norman,
overflowing with animal spirits and exuberant with the joy of youthful
life.
When thirteen years of age Maupassant attended the seminary at Yvetot,
where he found school life irksome and a most distasteful contrast to
his former free life. Later he became a student in the Lycée in Rouen.
His experience as a student here was very pleasant, and he easily
acquired his degree. In 1870 he was appointed to a clerkship in the
Navy, and a little later to a more lucrative position in the Department
of Public Instruction. His work in these two positions suffered very
materially because of his negligence and daily practice in writing
verses and essays for Flaubert, the most careful literary technicist in
the history of literature, to criticize. For seven years Maupassant
served this severe task-master, always writing, receiving criticisms,
and publishing nothing.
Immediately after the publication of his first story Maupassant was
hailed as a finished master artist. From 1880 to 1890 he published six
novels, sixteen volumes of short-stories, three volumes of travels, and
many newspaper articles. This gigantic task was performed only because
of his regular habits and splendid physique. He wrote regularly every
morning from seven o'clock until noon, and at night always wrote out
notes on the impressions from his experiences of the day.
Maupassant was a natural artist deeply in love with the technique of
his work. He did not write for money, although he believed that a
writer should have plenty of this world's possessions, nor did he write
for art's sake. In fact he avoided talking on the subject of writing
and to all appearances seemed to despise his profession. He wrote
because the restless, immitigable force within him compelled him to
work like a slave. He thought little of morals, or religion, but was
enamored with physical life and its insolvable problems. He was, above
everything else, a truthful man. Sometimes his subjects are unclean and
he treats them as such, but, if his subject is clean, his treatment is
undefiled.
In 1887 the shadows of insanity began to creep athwart his life. Even
in 1884 he seemed to feel a premonition of his coming catastrophe when
he wrote: "I am afraid of the walls, of the furniture, of the familiar
objects which seem to me to assume a kind of animal life. Above all, I
fear the horrible confusion of my thought, of my reason escaping,
entangled and scattered by an invisible and mysterious anguish." The
dreaded disease developed until, in 1890, he had to suspend his
writing. In 1892 he became wholly insane and had to be committed to an
insane asylum where he died in a padded cell one year later.