French Literature · 5 books
Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850, in Normandy — the baptismal register gives Tourville-sur-Arques as the birthplace, though the family home was at the Château de Miromesnil in Dieppe — and died on July 6, 1893, in a private asylum in Paris. He was forty-two years old. In the decade and a half between his literary debut and the breakdown of his mental health, he produced roughly three hundred short stories, six novels, three travel books, and a volume of poetry — a body of work that made him, in the 1880s, one of the most widely read writers in France and established him as a master of the short story form whose influence extends through the entire subsequent history of the genre.
His family background was comfortable but unstable. His father, Gustave de Maupassant, was from a Lorraine family with some claim to minor nobility; his mother, Laure Le Poittevin, was an intelligent and literary woman whose brother Alfred had been a close friend of Gustave Flaubert. When Guy was about eleven years old his parents separated — his mother took the children to Étretat, on the Norman coast — and Guy grew up primarily in Normandy, in close contact with the landscape that would become the setting of much of his fiction.
Flaubert became his literary mentor, and the relationship was decisive. Maupassant had access to the older writer through his mother’s family connection, and Flaubert took his education seriously. For years Flaubert read and criticized his drafts, instructed him in the discipline of finding the precise word, the single detail that captures a scene rather than describing it comprehensively, and the importance of removing from a piece of writing everything that did not earn its presence. The lesson was absorbed with remarkable completeness.
Maupassant served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, an experience that provided the historical setting and moral backdrop for some of his most celebrated stories. He worked as a clerk in government ministries in Paris through the 1870s while continuing to write and submitting work for Flaubert’s scrutiny. The story Boule de Suif, published in 1880 in a collective volume of stories about the war to which Flaubert, Zola, and other prominent writers contributed, was the breakthrough: Flaubert declared it a masterpiece, and the verdict was immediately confirmed by the reading public.
The 1880s were the decade of his full productivity. He published collections of short stories with regularity — La Maison Tellier in 1881, Mademoiselle Fifi in 1882, Contes de la Bécasse in 1883, and many others — while simultaneously writing novels: Une Vie in 1883, Bel-Ami in 1885, Pierre et Jean in 1888. His subjects were the Norman peasantry he had grown up around; the petty bureaucracy of Paris where he had worked; the military humiliation of 1870–71; bourgeois life and its compromises; prostitution; death; and the mechanisms of human self-deception. His method was to take a situation, strip away everything superfluous, and present what remained with a clarity that was also a verdict.
His style is characterized by economy and objectivity. He does not explain or moralize. He shows — with a precision of observed detail — what happens, and trusts the reader to draw the implications. This restraint can make his fiction seem cold to readers expecting warmth, but what is actually happening is the opposite of coldness: his moral sense is acute, and it is the more powerful for being enacted rather than stated. The trick Flaubert taught him — find the thing that is uniquely true of this person, this place, this moment — becomes in Maupassant’s hands a procedure that reveals the universal through the specific.
His personal life included a long relationship with Josephine Litzelmann, with whom he had three children, none of whom he publicly acknowledged. He enjoyed sailing and owned a series of yachts. He traveled to Algeria, Tunisia, and across France, and wrote travel books about all of it.
He had contracted syphilis in the 1870s. The neurological effects of the disease became increasingly severe in the late 1880s: he began to suffer headaches, vision problems, and episodes of psychological disturbance. In January 1892 he attempted to take his own life. He was committed to a private clinic in Paris, where he died eighteen months later, on July 6, 1893.
Flaubert had died in 1880, ten years before the breakdown began. He had seen the full flowering of the talent he had cultivated but not its destruction.
The three hundred stories represent an astonishing range within a consistent method. Some are comic; some are horror pieces; some are war stories; some are studies of provincial or Parisian manners; some are ghost stories, or nearly. What connects them is the precision of the eye and the discipline of the hand. He knew what he was doing, and he did it completely.
His influence on the short story as a literary form is difficult to overestimate. He and Anton Chekhov, writing at the same time and independently, defined the two principal modes of the modern short story: Maupassant’s mode is architectural and conclusive, working toward a point of revelation or irony that illuminates everything that preceded it; Chekhov’s is atmospheric and inconclusive, working toward an emotional resonance that does not resolve into statement. Both modes remain the primary options available to writers of short fiction, and both were defined, in large part, by these two writers working in the 1880s and early 1890s. The writers who came after them — O. Henry, Somerset Maugham, Hemingway, and many others — acknowledged Maupassant as a primary model.
The novels are sometimes undervalued relative to the stories, but Bel-Ami in particular deserves independent recognition. It follows Georges Duroy — a man of modest origin, considerable physical confidence, and very few scruples — as he rises through Parisian society and journalism by systematically using the women around him. It is a study in cynicism that is itself not cynical: Maupassant presents Duroy’s behavior with the same clear-eyed precision he brought to his peasant stories, and the precision produces a judgment that the novel never states directly. The reader makes it themselves, which is more satisfying and more durable than being told.
At Classics Retold, we have made a wide selection of Maupassant’s fiction available in new English translations — short stories and novels alike, presented in editions that match the clarity and directness of his prose. These are works that have never lost their force, and these translations are designed to ensure that force reaches the reader without interference.
