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Guy de Maupassant

In this article, thesurnameisMaupassant,notde Maupassant.

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant(UK:/ˈmoʊpæsɒ̃/,[1][2]US:/ˈmoʊpəsɒnt,ˌmoʊpəˈsɒ̃/;[2][3][4][5]French:[ɡid(ə)mopasɑ̃];5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a 19th-century Frenchauthor,celebrated as a master of theshort story,as well as a representative of thenaturalistschool,depicting human lives, destinies and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms.

Guy de Maupassant
Photograph by Nadar
Photograph byNadar
BornHenri René Albert Guy de Maupassant
(1850-08-05)5 August 1850
Tourville-sur-Arques,Normandy,France
Died6 July 1893(1893-07-06)(aged 42)
Passy,Paris,France
Resting placeMontparnasse Cemetery,Paris
Pen nameGuy de Valmont, Joseph Prunier
OccupationNovelist, short story writer, poet, comedian
GenreNaturalism,Realism
Signature

Maupassant was aprotégéofGustave Flaubertand his stories are characterized by economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortlessdénouements.Many are set during theFranco-Prussian Warof the 1870s, describing the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught up in events beyond their control, are permanently changed by their experiences. He wrote 300 short stories, six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. His first published story, "Boule de Suif"(" The Dumpling ", 1880), is often considered his most famous work.

Biography

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Guy de Maupassant aged 7
Guy de Maupassant and his mother, Laure
His father, Gustave de Maupassant, byHippolyte Bellangé
Château de Miromesnil, Normandy
Grave at Montparnasse, Paris

Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born on 5 August 1850 at the late 16th-centuryChâteau de Miromesnil(nearDieppein theSeine-Inférieure(nowSeine-Maritime)Department,France), the elder son of Gustave de Maupassant (1821–99) and Laure Le Poittevin,[6]whose family hailed from the prosperousbourgeoisie.His mother urged her husband when they married in 1846 to obtain the right to use theparticuleor form "de Maupassant" instead of "Maupassant" as his family name, in order to indicate noble birth.[7]Gustave’s great-great-grandfather, Jean-Baptiste de Maupassant (1699–1774),conseiller-secrétairetoKing Louis XV,had been ennobled byEmperor Francis Iin 1752, and although his family were consideredpetite noblessethey had not yet received official recognition by theKingdom of France.He then obtained from theTribunal CivilofRouenbyroyal decreedated 9 July 1846 therighttostylehimself "de Maupassant" instead of "Maupassant", being formally assumed as thefamily namebefore the birth of his children.[8]

When Maupassant was 11 and his brother Hervé was five, his mother, an independent-minded woman, risked social disgrace to obtain a legal separation from her husband, who was violent towards her.

After the separation, Laure Le Poittevin kept custody of her two sons. In the absence of the Maupassant's father, his mother became the most influential figure in the young boy's life.[9]She was an exceptionally well-read woman and was very fond of classical literature, particularlyShakespeare.Until the age of thirteen, Guy lived happily with his mother, atÉtretatin Normandy. At the Villa des Verguies, between the sea and the luxuriant countryside, he grew very fond of fishing and of outdoor activities. When Guy reached the age of thirteen, his mother placed her two sons as day boarders in a private school, the Institution Leroy-Petit, in Rouen—theInstitution Robineauof Maupassant's storyLa Question du Latin—for classical studies.[10]From his early education, he retained a marked hostility to religion, and to judge from verses composed around this time, he deplored the ecclesiastical atmosphere, its ritual and discipline.[11]Finding the place unbearable, he finally got himself expelled in his penultimate year.[12]

In 1867, while he was injunior high school,Maupassant metGustave FlaubertatCroisseton the insistence of his mother.[13]Next year, in autumn, he was sent to theLycée Pierre-Corneillein Rouen[14]where he proved a good scholar, indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals. In October 1868, at the age of 18, he saved the famous poetAlgernon Swinburnefrom drowning off the coast of Étretat.[15]

TheFranco-Prussian Warbroke out soon after his graduation from college in 1870 and Maupassant volunteered to serve in theFrench Armywithout attending military academy asaspirant.In 1871, he left Normandy and moved to Paris, where he spent ten years as a clerk in theNavy Department.During this time his only recreation and relaxation was boating on theSeineon 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 metÉmile Zola(1840–1902) and the Russian novelistIvan Turgenev(1818–1883), as well as many of the proponents of therealistandnaturalistschools. He wrote and himself played (1875) in a comedy - "À la feuille de rose, maison turque"- with Flaubert's blessing.

In 1878, he was transferred to theMinistry of Public Instructionand became a contributing editor to several leading newspapers such asLe Figaro,Gil Blas,Le Gauloisandl'Écho de Paris.He devoted his spare time to writing novels and short stories.

Maupassant's study, illustrated byGustave Fraipont

In 1880 he published what is considered his first masterpiece, "Boule de Suif",which met with instant and tremendous success. Flaubert characterized it as" a masterpiece that will endure ". This, Maupassant's first piece of short fiction set during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, was followed by short stories such as"Deux Amis","Mother Savage",and"Mademoiselle Fifi".

"The fear that haunted his restless brain day and night was already visible in his eyes, I for one considered him then as a doomed man. I knew that the subtle poison of his ownBoule de Suifhad already begun its work of destruction in this magnificent brain. Did he know it himself? I often thought he did. The MS. of his Sur L'Eau was lying on the table between us, he had just read me a few chapters, the best thing he had ever written I thought. He was still producing with feverish haste one masterpiece after another, slashing his excited brain with champagne, ether and drugs of all sorts. Women after women in endless succession hastened the destruction, women recruited from all quarters... actresses, ballet-dancers, midinettes, grisettes, common prostitutes-- 'le taureau triste' his friends used to call him.[16]

Maupassant in the 1880s

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 or sometimes four volumes annually. His talent and practicalbusiness sensemade him wealthy.

In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the title ofLa Maison Tellier;it reached its twelfth edition within two years. In 1883 he finished his first novel,Une Vie(translated into English asA Woman's Life), 25,000 copies of which were sold in less than a year.

"Bed 29",published in 1884, is a social and political satirical collection[17]of some of his best short stories, including the titular story which is shocking and scandalous, even by modern standards.[18]

His editor, Victor Havard, commissioned him to write more stories, and Maupassant continued to produce them efficiently and frequently. His second novel,Bel-Ami,which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven printings in four months. Then, he wrote what many consider his greatest novel,Pierre et Jean(1888).

With a natural aversion to society, he loved retirement, solitude, and meditation. He traveled extensively inAlgeria,Italy,England,Brittany,Sicily,and theAuvergne,and from each voyage brought back a new volume. He cruised on his private yachtBel-Ami,named after his novel. This life did not prevent him from making friends among the literary celebrities of his day:Alexandre Dumas,filshad a paternal affection for him; atAix-les-Bainshe metHippolyte Taine(1828–1893) and became devoted to the philosopher-historian.

Flaubert continued to act as his literary godfather. His friendship with theGoncourtswas 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 18th-century stylesalon.

Maupassant was one of a fair number of 19th-century Parisians (includingCharles Gounod,Alexandre Dumas,fils,andCharles Garnier) who did not care for theEiffel Tower[19](erected 1887/89). He often ate lunch in the restaurant at its base, not out of preference for the food but because only there could he avoid seeing its otherwise unavoidable profile.[20]He and forty-six other Parisian literary and artistic notables attached their names to an elaborately irate letter of protest against the tower's construction, written to the Minister of Public Works, and published on 14 February 1887.[21]

Declining appointment to theLégion d'honneurand election to theAcadémie française,[22]Maupassant also wrote under severalpseudonyms,including "Joseph Prunier", "Guy de Valmont", and "Maufrigneuse" (which he used from 1881 to 1885).

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 caused by thesyphilishe had contracted in his youth. It has been suggested that his brother, Hervé, also suffered from syphilis and that the disease may have been congenital.[23]On 2 January 1892, Maupassant tried to take his own life by cutting his throat; he was committed to the private asylum of Esprit Blanche atPassy,in Paris, where he died on 6 July 1893 from syphilis.

Engraving of Maupassant, byMarcellin Desboutin.

Maupassant penned his ownepitaph:"I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing." He is buried in Section 26 of theMontparnasse Cemetery,Paris.

Significance

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Maupassant is considered a father of the modern short story. Literary theorist Kornelije Kvas wrote that along "withChekhov,Maupassant is the greatest master of the short story in world literature. He is not a naturalist like Zola; to him, physiological processes do not constitute the basis of human actions, although the influence of the environment is manifested in his prose. In many respects, Maupassant's naturalism is Schopenhauerian anthropological pessimism, as he is often harsh and merciless when it comes to depicting human nature. He owes most to Flaubert, from whom he learned to use a concise and measured style and to establish a distance towards the object of narration. "[24]He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model forSomerset MaughamandO. Henryin this respect. One of his famous short stories, "The Necklace",was imitated with a twist by Maugham (" Mr Know-All "," A String of Beads ").Henry James's "Paste"adapts another story of his with a similar title," The Jewels ".

Taking his cue fromBalzac,Maupassant wrote comfortably in both the high-realistandfantasticmodes; stories and novels such as "L'Héritage" andBel-Amiaim to recreateThird RepublicFrance in a realistic way, whereas many of the short stories (notably "Le Horla"and" Qui sait? ") describe apparently supernatural phenomena.

The supernatural in Maupassant, however, is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists' troubled minds; Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline ofpsychiatry,and attended the public lectures ofJean-Martin Charcotbetween 1885 and 1886.[25]

Legacy

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Guy de Maupassant early in his career; byAlphonse Liébert.

Leo Tolstoyused Maupassant as the subject for one of his essays on art:The Works of Guy de Maupassant.His stories are second only to Shakespeare in their inspiration of movie adaptations with films ranging fromStagecoach,Oyuki the VirginandMasculine Feminine.[26]

Friedrich Nietzsche'sautobiographymentions him in the following text:

"I cannot at all conceive in which century of history one could haul together such inquisitive and at the same time delicate psychologists as one can in contemporary Paris: I can name as a sample – for their number is by no means small,... or to pick out one of the stronger race, a genuine Latin to whom I am particularly attached, Guy de Maupassant."

William Saroyanwrote a short story about Maupassant in his 1971 book,Letters from 74 rue Taitboutor Don't Go But If You Must Say Hello To Everybody.

Isaac Babelwrote a short story about him, "Guy de Maupassant." It appears inThe Collected Stories of Isaac Babeland in the story anthologyYou’ve Got To Read This: Contemporary American Writers Introduce Stories that Held Them in Awe.

Gene Roddenberry,in an early draft forThe Questor Tapes,wrote a scene in which theandroidQuestor employs Maupassant's theory that, "the human female will open her mind to a man to whom she has opened other channels of communications."[27]In the script Questor copulates with a woman to obtain information that she is reluctant to impart. Due to complaints fromNBCexecutives, this scene was never filmed.[28]

Michel Drachdirected and co-wrote a 1982 Frenchbiographical film:Guy de Maupassant.Claude Brasseurstars as the titular character.

Several of Maupassant's short stories, including"La Peur"and "The Necklace",were adapted as episodes of the 1986Indiananthology television seriesKatha Sagar.

Bibliography

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See also:Guy de Maupassant bibliographyandList of short stories by Guy de Maupassant

References

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  1. ^"Maupassant, Guy de".LexicoUK English Dictionary.Oxford University Press.Archived fromthe originalon 16 July 2021.
  2. ^ab"Maupassant, Guy de".Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English.Longman.Retrieved21 August2019.
  3. ^"Maupassant".Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary.
  4. ^"Maupassant".Collins English Dictionary.HarperCollins.Retrieved21 August2019.
  5. ^"Maupassant".Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary.Merriam-Webster.Retrieved21 August2019.
  6. ^www.data.bnf.fr
  7. ^Alain-Claude Gicquel,Maupassant, tel un météore,Le Castor Astral, 1993, p. 12
  8. ^ Gicquel, Alain-Claude (1993).Maupassant, tel un météore: biographie.Collection "Les inattendus", number 218 (in French). Le Castor Astral. p. 12, 32.ISBN9782859202187.Retrieved7 October2022.
  9. ^"Guy de Maupassant Biography".enotes.Retrieved9 December2014.
  10. ^Maupassant,Choix de Contes,Cambridge, p. viii, 1945
  11. ^de Maupassant, Guy (1984).Le Horla et autres contes d'angoisse(in French) (2006 ed.). Paris: Flammarion. p.233.ISBN978-2-0807-1300-1.
  12. ^"Biographie de Guy de Maupassant".@lalettre.com.Retrieved9 December2014.
  13. ^"Maupassant's Apprenticeship with Flaubert".26 March 2024.
  14. ^"Lycée Pierre Corneille de Rouen - History".Lgcorneille-lyc.spip.ac-rouen.fr. 19 April 1944.Retrieved13 March2018.
  15. ^Clyde K. Hyder,Algernon Swinburne: The Critical Heritage,1995, p. 185.
  16. ^Munthe, Axel (1962).The story of San Michele.John Murray. p. 201.
  17. ^www.letemps.ch
  18. ^www.librarything.com
  19. ^"The Tower of Babel -Criticism of Eiffel Tower".Archived fromthe originalon 13 October 2013.
  20. ^Barthes, Roland.The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies.Tr. Howard, Richard. Berkeley:University of California Press.ISBN978-0-520-20982-4.Page 1.
  21. ^ Loyrette, Henri(1985).Gustave Eiffel.Rizzoli. p. 174.ISBN9780847806317.Retrieved7 October2022.'We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection [...] of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower [...] To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years [...] we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal.'
  22. ^www.editions-allia.com
  23. ^"Remembering Maupassant | Arts and Entertainment | BBC World Service".Bbc.co.uk. 9 August 2000.Retrieved13 March2018.
  24. ^Kvas, Kornelije (2019).The Boundaries of Realism in World Literature.Lanham, Boulder, New York, London: Lexington Books. p. 131.ISBN978-1-7936-0910-6.
  25. ^Pierre Bayard,Maupassant, juste avant Freud(Paris: Minuit, 1998)
  26. ^Richard Brody(26 October 2015)."The Writer Who Sparks the Finest Movie Adaptations".The New Yorker.Retrieved31 October2015.
  27. ^www.lumoslearning.com
  28. ^[Quoted from the track "The Questor Affair" from the albumInside Star Trek.]

Further reading

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  • Abamine, E. P. "German-French Sexual Encounters of the Franco-Prussian War Period in the Fiction of Guy de Maupassant."CLA Journal32.3 (1989): 323–334.online
  • Bonnefis, Philippe.Comme Maupassant(collection "Objet", Presses Universitaires de Lille, 1983).
  • Dugan, John Raymond.Illusion and reality: a study of descriptive techniques in the works of Guy de Maupassant(Walter de Gruyter, 2014).
  • Fagley, Robert.Bachelors, Bastards, and Nomadic Masculinity: Illegitimacy in Guy de Maupassant and André Gide(Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014)online (PDF).
  • Harris, Trevor A.Le V. Maupassant in the Hall of Mirrors: Ironies of Repetition in the Work of Guy de Maupassant(Springer, 1990).
  • Lanoux, Armand.Maupassant le Bel-Ami(Fayard, 1967).
  • Morand, Paul.Vie de Guy de Maupassant(Flammarion, 1942).
  • Reda, Jacques.Album Maupassant(Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, 1987).
  • Rougle, Charles. "Art and the Artist in Babel's" Guy de Maupassant "."The Russian Review48.2 (1989): 171–180.online
  • Sattar, Atia. "Certain Madness: Guy de Maupassant and Hypnotism".Configurations19.2 (2011): 213–241. regarding both versions of his horror story "The Horla" (1886/87).online
  • Schmidt, Albert-Marie. Maupassant par lui-même (Le Seuil, 1962).
  • Stivale, Charles J.The art of rupture: narrative desire and duplicity in the tales of Guy de Maupassant(University of Michigan Press, 1994).
  • Vial, André.Maupassant et l'art du roman(Nizet, 1954).
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