Guy de Maupassant was born at the Chateau de Miromesnil, near
Dieppe, on August 5th, 1850. The Maupassants were an old Lorraine
family who had settled in Normandy in the middle of the Eighteenth
Century. His father had married in 1846 a young lady of the rich
bourgeoisie, Laure Le Poittevin. With her brother Alfred, she had
been the playmate of Gustave Flaubert, the son of a Rouen surgeon,
who was destined to have a directing influence on her son's life.
She was a woman of no common literary accomplishments, very fond of
the Classics, especially Shakespeare. Separated from her husband,
she kept her two sons, Guy and his younger brother Hervé.
Until he was thirteen years old Guy lived with his mother at
Etretat, in the Villa des Verguies, where between the sea and the
luxuriant country, he grew very fond of nature and out door sports;
he went fishing with the fishermen of the coast and spoke patois
with the peasants. He was deeply devoted to his mother. He first
entered the Seminary of Yvetot, but managed to have himself expelled
on account of a peccadillo of precocious poetry. From his early
religious education he conserved 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 war of 1870 broke out soon after his graduation from College;
he enlisted as a volunteer and fought gallantly. After the war, in
1871, he left Normandy and came to Paris where he spent ten years
as a clerk in the Navy Department. During these ten tedious years
his only recreation 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 befriended the Russian novelist
Tourgueneff and Emilie Zola, as well as many of the protagonists of
the realistic school. He wrote considerable verse and short plays.
In 1878 he was transferred to the Ministry of Public Instruction
and became a contributing editor to several leading newspapers
such as Le Figaro, le Gil Blas, le Gaulois and l'Echo de Paris.
He devoted his spare time to writing novels and short stories. In
1880 he published his first masterpiece, "Boule de Suif", which met
with an instant and tremendous success. Flaubert characterized it
as "a masterpiece that will remain."
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 and sometimes four volumes annually.
By a privilege of nature and his Norman origin, he combined talent
and practical business sense, which brought him affluence and wealth.
In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the
title of "La Maison Tellier"; it reached its twelfth edition in two
years; in 1883 he finished his first novel "Une Vie", twenty-five
thousand copies of which were sold in less than a year. Glory and
Fortune smiled on him. 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 editions in
four months. His editor, Havard, commissioned him to write new
masterpieces and, without the slightest effort, his pen produced new
masterpieces of style, description, conception and penetration[*].
With a natural aversion for Society, he loved retirement, solitude
and meditation. He traveled extensively in Algeria, Italy, England,
Britany, Sicily, Auvergne, and from each voyage he brought back
a new volume. He cruised on his private yacht "Bel Ami", named
after one of his earlier masterpieces. This feverish life did not
prevent him from making friends among the literary celebrities of
his day: Dumas fils had a paternal affection for him; at Aix-les-Bains
he met Taine and fell under the spell of the philosopher-historian.
Flaubert continued to act as his literary Godfather. His friendship
with the Goucourts 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 Eighteenth Century style salon. He hated
the human comedy, the social farce.
In his latter years he developed an exaggerated love for solitude,
a predilection for self-preservation and still worse, a constant
fear of death and mania of persecution, which ran like a black
thread through all his writings and brought on gradually the final
tragic catastrophe.--He became insane in 1891 and died in 1893
without having recovered his mind.
Life, movement, penetrating[*] observation, and hypersensitiveness,
both artistic and physical, are the dominant traits of this literary
phenomenon. His rise to fame was as vertiginous as his fall and
decay. As a novelist he may have his equals and superiors, but
as a short story-writer, with the exception of Charles Nodier and
Alphonse Daudet, he had none.--