Biography of Guy de Maupassant, Father of the Short Story

Thank you my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that on July 6, 1893 French short story author, poet and novelist Guy de Maupassant died at age 42 at the "celebrated private asylum of Dr. Espirit Blanche" in Paris, France after a failed suicide attempt 18 months earlier.

Guy De Maupassant: How Syphilis and Migraines Inspired the Cosmic Horror Subgenre.
Guy de Maupassant is best known for his short stories such as "The Necklace" and "Boule de Suif", but he was also one of the first authors who experimented with themes which would later come to be known as "weird fiction" and go on to inspire authors such as H.P Lovecraft.
As a young man de Maupassant contracted syphilis, and in the last years of his creative life he drew on his own experiences with the disease as inspiration for some of his stories.
A lot of this video is speculation and some of the information I have used is found specifically in academic articles, which are listed below.
References:
Lusk, E., & Roeske, M. (2003).
The Horlas: Maupassant's Mirror of Self-Reflection.CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture. 5. 10.7771/1481-4374.1180
Straub, E. (2015). Maupassant and Medicine:
The intersection between the works of Guy de Maupassant and the development of psychiatry and neurology in fin-de-siecle France. {[//doi.org/10.17615/r0qf-fk79]}
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibhXbbVIRvI

Images:
1. Photograph of Guy de Maupassant, 1888 by French photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (6 April 1820 – 20 March 1910), known by the pseudonym Nadar
2. Guy de Maupassant 7 years old
3. Guy de Maupassant 'Our memory is a more perfect world than the universe - it gives back life to those who no longer exist.'
4. Guy de Maupassant seated photographed on September 1, 1988

Biographies
1. bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/highlights/000808_maupassant.shtml
2. wordsworthclassics.com/blog/guy-de-maupassant]

1. Background from {[https://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/highlights/000808_maupassant.shtml]}
"Remembering Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant lived a short but highly productive life and his short stories and novels are still among the most widely read of French literature. One hundred and fifty years since his birth, Meridian Writing celebrates the life and work of one of the most significant French writers.
Guy de Maupassant was that rare thing - a writer who was successful in his own time, immensely popular, prosperous and feted by society. But he was never married, was haunted by illness and depression and died alone in a mental institute. He always longed to make literature his career, but the achievement of that ambition destroyed him. Though he was fond of jokes and shocking people, he was over sensitive and often despairing. He was, as his friend Emile Zola put it, ‘the happiest and unhappiest of men’.

The Young Maupassant
Maupassant grew up in his native Normandy. Though the Maupassant family was aristocratic, and Guy’s father didn’t need to work, they weren’t above petty snobberies. His mother’s claims that her son was born in the local chateau were later thought to be untrue when researchers discovered his birth certificate.
Underneath the solid family facade there were cracks. His father, Gustave, was a womaniser and his constant affairs led to a permanent separation from Guy’s mother, when the young Maupassant was 11 years old.
At school Maupassant was a good student and in 1869 he started to study law in Paris. However, by the age of 20 he had abandoned his studies to serve in the army during the Franco Prussian War. His letters from the field demonstrated to his parents a skill for writing and storytelling.
On his return, his mother introduced him to one of her friends who was to become a huge influence in Maupassant’s life. His lasting friendship with the author of Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert not only provided him with a father figure, but also encouraged his entry into the world of literature. Soon he was mixing with the leading writers of the day, among them Emile Zola, Ivan Turgenev and Henry James and, despite his boring daytime work as a civil servant, his leisure time was spent having fun and mixing with women of dubious reputation.
Of this time he wrote: ‘She was absolutely crazy into the bargain. She told us that she had been born with a glass of absinthe in her belly, which her mother had drunk just before giving birth to her and she had never sobered up since…Every week we would travel along the Seine with a load of five strapping, light-hearted fellows, steered by a lively scatter brained creature under a parasol of painted paper. We adored her, first for a variety of reasons and then for one in particular…’

Literary Instruction
In addition to having fun, Maupassant adhered to the words of his mentor and Flaubert counselled his disciple in his philosophy of writing. He advised his student to write of the things that he knew about and he was to disregard any ideas of making money from his art.
Maupassant did what he was told, but the strain of working by day, writing at night and coping with his mother’s stream of illnesses began to take its toll. In a letter to Flaubert he made his feelings of despair clear:
‘For three weeks I have been trying to work every night and haven’t been able to write a single page…nothing. The result is that I am gradually falling into a black depression and will have a hard time climbing out again.’
He was however suffering from more than a bout of melancholy. His symptoms included heart palpitations and skin problems and while his doctor diagnosed a rheumatic condition, Flaubert had other ideas:
‘Come my dear friend you seem badly worried. You could use your time more agreeably. I’ve come to suspect you have become something of a loafer with too many whores, too much rowing and too much exercise. Civilised man does not need as much locomotion as the doctors pretend.’
Flaubert’s diagnosis was more accurate than he may have realised, for Maupassant’s condition was indeed caused by the early stages of the sexually transmitted disease, syphilis.

Naturalists
Meanwhile, through Flaubert, Maupassant joined a group of writers, which included Emile Zola, and began calling themselves naturalists. Their aim was to show the life, suffering and exploitation of ordinary people and in 1880 they published an anthology entitled Soirés de Medan, which included Maupassant’s tale of a prostitute, nicknamed Boule De Suif (Ball Of Fat).
At that time the short story was a very popular form of literature and Maupasant’s work was well received, becoming a best seller almost over night. His ability to portray real people coupled with humour and candid sexuality won readers and throughout the 1880s he went on to create 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books and one volume of verse.
At the start of Maupassant’s success his mentor died. His work began to reflect his macabre thoughts and often took the forms of nightmarish stories and paranoid tales. His pessimism aside audiences loved the simple realism of his work and his success continued.
His ability to portray real people coupled with humour and candid sexuality won readers

Success
Although Maupassant’s literary career probably only lasted for about ten years, he was extremely successful. He gave up his civil service work and whole heatedly pursued a career as a writer. With the success of Une Vie (A Woman’s Life) in 1883, his life became a round of luxury and sophistication. He travelled the world and maintained an apartment with a separate annex for clandestine meetings with women.
At this stage he was described as being in full health, which is compliant with the second stage of syphilis, and he took full advantage of the interest that society ladies afforded him. In his usual, naturalist style, his 1885 novel Bel Ami tells the story of the unscrupulous rogue, Georges Duroy, who moves from woman to woman in his scrabble for advantage in the cut-throat world of fin-de-siecle Paris.

Illness
By the later half of the 1880s, Maupassant's health was in decline. His friends began to remark on his unusual behaviour and his writing became shocking and, on occasion nothing short of outrageous. Maupassant had always had a taste for the macabre but, combined with his fears for himself, he now produced a series of disturbing stories such as Yvette, which detailed a bloody self abortion; Le Horla, presented a diary account of the narrator’s descent into madness and Pierre et Jean, a profile of two brothers was thought immoral as the hero is successful in his wrong doings.
Maupassant became increasingly sombre as the syphilis attacked his spinal chord. He became obsessed with the notion that there were flies devouring his brain and in January 1892 he attempted to shoot himself, when he failed he rammed a paper knife into his throat and was committed to an asylum the next day. He died some months later, a little before his 43rd birthday.
Following Maupassant’s death, his friend Emile Zola, accurately pin pointed his appeal: ‘If he was understood and loved from the first it was because the French soul found in him the gifts and qualities that have created its finest achievements. He was understood because he had clarity, simplicity, moderation and strength. He was loved because he possessed a laughing goodness; a profound satire which persists even through tears.’"

2. Background from {[http://wordsworthclassics.com/blog/guy-de-maupassant]}
David Stuart Davies looks at the life and work of the French master of the short story.

‘Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.’

Guy de Maupassant (1850 - 1893) was one of literature’s greatest story tellers. He excelled at the art of the short story and although his work was produced in the nineteenth century, his tales and characters are timeless and universal. There was great clarity to his prose and he exercised a wonderful deftness in exposing the irony, fickleness and cruelty of fate. He was regarded as a member of the naturalist school of writers, who depicted personal destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.
Maupassant was born into an affluent French family but his childhood was marred by the divorce of his parents. His mother, a strong-minded woman, risked social disgrace to obtain a legal separation from her husband, who was violent towards her. After the separation, she kept her two sons. With the father's absence, Maupassant's mother became the most influential figure in the young boy's life and this is probably the reason why so many strong female characters feature in his fiction.
In 1869 Maupassant went to Paris to study law but soon, at the age of twenty, he volunteered to serve in the army during the Franco-Prussian War. This conflict was used by Maupassant in a number of his tales such as ‘Boule Le Suif’, arguably his most famous short story. It concerns a prostitute traveling by coach who is companionably treated by her fellow French passengers because they are anxious to share her provisions of food, but then a German officer stops the coach and refuses to let it proceed until he she allows him to go to bed with her. She refuses, not wanting to surrender to one of her country’s oppressors. However, the other passengers induce her to satisfy the officer, and then ostracize her for the rest of the journey. While Maupassant highlights the cowardice and selfish narrow mindedness of the passengers – a microcosm of French society of the time - he reveals that, despite her profession, the prostitute is the most courageous, honest and moral of them all. It is a wonderfully moving story.
When Maupassant returned to Paris after the war, his mother asked her friend the author Flaubert to keep an eye on him. This was the beginning of the apprenticeship that was the making of Maupassant the writer. Whenever Flaubert was staying in Paris, he used to invite Maupassant to lunch on Sundays, lecture him on prose style, and correct his youthful literary exercises. He also introduced him to some of the leading writers of the time, such as Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, Edmond Goncourt, and Henry James. Flaubert observed: ‘He’s my disciple and I love him like a son’.
It was under Flaubert’s tutelage that ‘Boule de suif’ was written in 1880. When it was published, Maupassant found himself in demand by newspapers and he spent the next two years writing articles for Le Gaulois and the Gil Blas. Many of his stories made their first appearance in the latter newspaper. The ten years from 1880 to 1890 were remarkable for their productivity; he published some 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and a volume of verse.
One aspect that gives Maupassant’s work the longevity it has attained is that it is thoroughly realistic. His characters inhabit a world of material desires and sensual appetites in which lust, greed, and ambition are the driving forces and any higher feelings are either absent or doomed to cruel disappointment. The tragic power of many of the stories derives from the fact that Maupassant presents his characters, poor people or rich bourgeois, as the victims of ironic necessity, crushed by a fate that they have dared to defy yet still struggling against it hopelessly. This theme is epitomised in a favourite story of mine, The Necklace in which Madame Loisel, a beautiful but poor Parisian, nurtures the belief that material wealth will bring her joy. Her pride prevents her from admitting to her rich friend Madame Forestier that that she has lost the diamond necklace she had borrowed from her. As a result, Mathilde loses years of her life and spends all of her savings on replacing the necklace. The twist ending of this remarkable story is both moving and tragic.
Apart from his brilliant short tales, Maupassant also wrote novels, perhaps the best being Bel Ami (1885). The story chronicles journalist Georges Duroy's corrupt rise to power from a poor former cavalry officer in France's African colonies, to one of the most successful men in Paris, most of which he achieves by manipulating a series of powerful, intelligent, and wealthy women. It has been filmed many times and was a five-part BBC TV series in 1971 with Robin Ellis as Duroy. The most recent cinematic version was released in 2012. It was a European co-production with Robert Pattinson, Uma Thurman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Christina Ricci and Holliday Grainger.
While his literary efforts were incredibly successful, Maupassant’s personal life was less so. From his twenties he had suffered from syphilis. The disease later caused increasing mental disorder and in his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death and paranoia of persecution. It has been suggested that his brother, Hervé, also suffered from syphilis and the disease may have been congenital, although as a young man Maupassant was a frequent visitor to brothels.
On 2 January 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat, and was committed to the private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died in July 1893 at the very young age of 42. Maupassant penned his own melancholy epitaph: ‘I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing’. He is buried in Section 26 of the Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris. It was a very sad end for a brilliant writer – but his literary legacy remains as vibrant and pertinent as it did when it first appeared in print."

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Thanks for posting!

Great literary history share brother David.