Gi de Mopassan

Guy de Maupassant was a French writer and the author of many famous short stories, novels, and novellas.

He was born at the Château de Miromesnil near the town of Dieppe (Seine-Inférieure Department). His father, Gustave de Maupassant, who belonged to an aristocratic Lorraine family that had settled in Normandy, married Laure Le Poittevin, a girl from a bourgeois family. From childhood Maupassant enjoyed excellent health, although his mother, a friend of Flaubert, suffered from neuroses throughout her life, and his younger brother, a physician by profession, died in an asylum for the mentally ill.

After entering a school run by the clergy, Maupassant then transferred to the lycée in Rouen, where he completed his course.

Having served as a simple soldier in the Franco-Prussian campaign, Maupassant supplemented his education by reading and became especially interested in natural science and astronomy. In order to avert the danger of an inherited illness threatening him, he worked intensively on his physical development.

The ruin that befell his family forced Maupassant to take a clerical post in the Ministry of the Navy, where he remained for about 10 years. Maupassant was drawn to literature. For more than six years, closely associated with Flaubert, Maupassant composed, recopied, and tore up what he had written; but he only decided to appear in print when Flaubert declared his works sufficiently mature and stylistically coherent.

Maupassant’s first story was published in 1880 together with novellas by Zola, Alexis, Céard, Hennique, and Huysmans, in the collection Les soirées de Médan.

Maupassant’s works enjoyed great success; he raised his earnings to 60,000 francs a year and considered it his duty to support his mother and his brother’s family. Excessive mental strain quickly undermined Maupassant’s health. From 1884 on, he suffered nervous attacks; as his disillusionment and hypochondria increased, he fell into restless idealism and was tormented by the need to find an answer to what eludes the senses.

In December 1891, nervous attacks drove him to