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Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) - in full Henry-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant |
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French author of the naturalistic school, generally considered the greatest French short story writer. Guy de Maupassant took the subjects for his pessimistic stories and novels chiefly from the behavior of the bourgeoisie, the Franco-Prussian War, and the fashionable life of Paris. During the last years of life, Maupassant suffered from mental illness. "Marriage for me is not a charm, but a partnership. I mean to be free, perfectly free as to my ways, my acts, my going and coming. I could neither tolerate supervision, nor jealousy, nor arguments as to my behavior. I should undertake, be it understood, never to compromise the name of the man who takes me as his wife, never to render him hateful and ridiculous. But this man must also undertake to see in me an equal, an ally, and not an inferior or an obedient and submissive wife. My notions, I know, are not those of every one, but I shall not change them." (from Bel Ami by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Ernest Boyd, 1923, p. 144) Guy de Maupassant was probably born at the Château de Miromesniel, Dieppe. His paternal ancestors were noble, and his maternal grandfather, Paul Le Poittevin, was Gustave Flaubert's godfather. Maupassant spent his childhood in Normandy, the scene of several of his tales. When Maupassant was 11, his parents separated, and he was brought up by his mother in the picturesque coastal town of Étretat. While studying at the Rouen Lycée, after being expelled from the seminary at Yvetot, Maupassant started to write poetry. In his teens Maupassant was shown, by the poet Algernon Swinburne (1837-1909), a mummified hand. He used this haunting image in his early short story 'La Main Ecorchée' (1875). The gift of a photographic memory enabled him to gather a storehouse of information, which later helped him in his stories about the Norman people. From Flaubert, who was obsessed with the writer's craft, Maupassant learned the exactness and accuracy of observations and balance and precision of style. However, by nature Maupassant himself was more light-hearted and more cynical than Flaubert. In 1869 Maupassant joined his stockbroker brother in Paris, where he started to study law at the Sorbonne, but soon, at age 20, he volunteered to serve in the army during Franco-Prussian War. After returning to Paris, Maupassant joined the literary circle of Gustave Flaubert. The famous writer was a friend of Maupassant's mother's friend, and introduced his protégé to Émile Zola, Ivan Turgenev, and Henry James. Between the years 1872 and 1880 Maupassant was a civil servant, first at the ministry of maritime affairs, then at the ministry of education. He hated to work and spent much of his free time in pursuit of women. Under the pseudonym of Guy de Valmont, Maupassant contributed articles to the newspapers. As a poet Maupassant made his debut with Des vers, which came out in 1880. In the same year he published with other "Naturalist" writers his masterpiece, 'Boule de Suif' (Ball of Fat, 1880), in Emile Zola's anthology Les Soirées de Medan (1880) . The theme of the anthology was the Franco-Prussian War. Other writers included Zola and J.-K. Huysmans, but Maupassant's contribution, considered a manifestation of naturalism, is the most famous. Huysmans, Maupassant, Zola, and Paul Alexis among others were known as Le Groupe de Médan - the name was drawn from the house where Zola lived. Set during the Franco-Prussian War, the story tells of
well-known
prostitute, nicknamed 'Boule de Suif', who is traveling in a coach with
bourgeois fellow passengers. They are detained by a Prussian officer,
who will not allow the coach to proceed until Boule de Suif gives her
to him, which she refuses on principle to do: "Kindly tell that
scoundrel, that cur, that carrion of a Prussian, that I will never
consent—you understand?—never, never, never!" (Boule de Suif: And Other Stories by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Alberft M.C. McMaster, A.E. Henderson, Mme Quesada and others, 1922, p. 36) However, the
other passagers start to get bored and press her to yield to the
officers demands. After swallowing her pride, she spends a night with
him and in the morning she is treated by the group as if she had been
infected with some deadly disease. "No one looked at her, no one
thought of her. She felt herself swallowed up in the scorn of these
virtuous creatures, who had first sacrificed, then rejected her as a
thing useless and unclean. Then she remembered her big basket full of
the good things they had so greedily devoured: the two chickens coated
in jelly, the pies, the pears, the four bottles of claret; and her fury
broke forth like a cord that is overstrained, and she was on the verge
of tears. She made terrible efforts at self-control, drew herself up,
swallowed the sobs which choked her; but the tears rose nevertheless,
shone at the brink of her eyelids, and soon two heavy drops coursed
slowly down her cheeks." (Ibid., pp. 53-54) It has often been said that the American director John Ford
borrowed the plot of 'Boule de Suif to his film Stagecoach
(1939), but it was Ernest Haycox's (1899-1950) 'Stage to Lordsburg' that served for the director as the framework for
his morality drama. Originally the Western story was published in
the Colliers' in 1937. In the movie a group of people travel by stage to Lordsburg, passing through Indian territory. Ford kept the basic storyline, but all the characters' names were changed. Thus Malpais Bill became the Ringo Kidd. ('Stage to Lordsburg': "He was tall, hollow-flanked, and definitely stamped by the guns slung low on his hips.") Henriette became Dallas. ('Stage to Lordsburg': "She was young, yet she had a knowledge that put the cattleman and the gambler and the drummer and the army girl in their exact places; and she knew why the gambler had offered the army girl his sear.") The socially respected passengers turn out to be hypocrites, thieves, and unworthy characters, whereas the outsiders win their faults or show bravery and compassion. Claire Trevor played the good-hearted prostitute Dallas. John Wayne, in the role of the Ringo Kidd, became a star. David O. Selznick, who was interested in producing the picture but but eventually withdrew from it, wanted Gary Cooper and Marlene Dietrich for the hero and heroine. During the 1880s Maupassant wrote some 300 short stories, six
novels,
three travel books, and one volume of verse. Probably Maupassant
fictionalized true occurrences or tales told to him, but his
experiences as a reporter and columnist provided him material. In 1881
he reported on the French campaign against Tunisia. His tales were
marked by objectivity, highly controlled style, and sometimes sheer
comedy. Usually they were built around simple episodes from everyday
life, which revealed the hidden sides of people. Maupassant has been
accused of misogynism, but his portrayal of prostitutes was
sympathetic. According to Maupassant, a modern novel aims not at
"telling a story or entertaining us or touching our hearts but at
forcing us to think and understand the deeper, hidden meaning of
events . . ." ('Maupassant and Bel-Ami,' in Bel-Ami, translated with an introduction by Douglas Parmée, Penguin UK, 1975) On several occasions the tales were narrated in the first
person or
were told by a named character. In 'The Jewels of M. Lantin' the chief
clerk of the Minister of the Interior marries the daughter of a
provincial tax collector. He is unbelievably happy. She has only two
small vices -
her love of the theater and her passion for artificial jewels. One
wintry evening she comes from the opera shivering with cold and a week
later she dies. Lantin is haunted by his memories, and plunges into
poverty. He takes her necklace to a jeweler who tells that it is very
valuable. Lantin has believed that his wife's jewelry were fakes
because she could not have purchased valuable items. He realizes that
they were gifts and the truth makes him weep bitterly. "As he walked
along, Lantin said to himself, "How easy it is to be happy when you're
rich! With money you can even shake off your sorrows; you can go or
stay as you please! You can travel and amuse yourself." ('The Jewels of M. Latin, in 75 Short Masterpieces: Stories from the World's Literature, edited by Roger B. Goodman, 1961, p. 69) He sells her
jewelry, resigns from his work, and enjoys the theater for the first
time in his life. "Six months later he married. His second wife was a
most worthy woman, but rather difficult. She made his life unbearable." (Ibid., p. 70) Maupassant's first novel was Une vie (A Woman's Life, 1883), a naturalistic story about the life of a Norman woman, Jeanne de Lamare, whose kindliness is her strength but also a vice. "And now she was leaving the convent, radiant and brimful of happiness, ready for every joy and for all the charming adventures that, in the idle moments of her day and during the longs nights, she had already pictured to herself." (A Woman's Life, translated from the latest French edition, 1888, p. 6-7) The episodic novel Bel-Ami (1885) depicted an unscrupulous journalist, Georges Duroy, whose success is build on hypocrisy, decadence, and corruption of the society. Maupassant named his little sailing yacht after the book. Pierre et Jean (1888) was a psychological study of adultery of a young wife and two brothers. The novel was thought to be immoral - infidelity is not actually condemned. In Luis Buñuel's screen adaptation of the novel from 1951, which the director later called his worst film, the emphasis is on the woman's experience. Buñuel made also other changes: the story is transported to modern Mexico. The ending is, ambiguously, a happy one. Maupassant's most upsetting horror story, 'Le Horla' (1887), was about madness and suicide. The nameless protagonist is perhaps a syphilitic. In the beginning the narrator, a prosperous young Norman gentleman, sees a Brazilian three-master boat flow by his house. He salutes it and the gesture evidently summons the Horla, and invisible being. The Horlas are cousins of the vampires and their advent means the end of the reign of man. Our narrator eventually sets fire to his own house, to destroy his Horla, but only his servants die in the fire. He realizes that the Horla is still alive and decides to kill himself. Maupassant
had contracted syphilis in his 20s and the disease
later
caused increasing mental disorder. He had the habit of inhaling ether,
and he took hashish and opium, but gave up smoking a pipe. By
1891, Maupassant's mind was deteriorating
rapidly: he saw his own ghost, shot at an imaginary enemy, and
believed that a saline fermentation has taken place in his brain. Also
his sight had troubled
him at intervals. Moreover, he suffered from terrible migraines. Critics have charted the author's developing illness through his semi-autobiographical stories of abnormal psychology, but the theme of mental disorder is present in his first collection, La Maison Tellier (1881), published at the height of his health. 'A Night in Paris' is a paranoid nightmare: its narrator feels compelled to walk the streets. In 'Who Knows?' the narrator sufferers from delusions about the furniture of his house, and in 'A Madman' a judge commits murder, just for the experience, and condemns an innocent man to death for the crime. Maupassant's horror fiction consists of some 39 stories, only
a
tenth of his total. The nightmarish stories have much in common with Edgar Allan Poe's supernatural visions.
Recurring themes are madness and cruelty. 'L'horrible' (1884;
'Kammottavaa', suom. Jyrki Iivonen, Portti
4/2015) tells about the horrors of war and cannibalism. 'The Inn' has
much similarities with Stephen King's
famous novel The Shining.
Maupassant describes two caretakers, living in the French Alps in a
remote inn, which is surrounded by snow six months and unreachable.
When the older caretaker goes missing, the younger in his loneliness
loses his reason. 'La Main Écorchée' (1883, 'The Hand'; 'Käsi', suom. Päivälehti,
3.12.1890) is about a severed, living human hand
which runs "like a scorpion or a spider" using its fingers for paws.
Despite it is chained up, it escapes and strangles its owner.
The story has inspired several writers and movie directors, such as
Robert Florey, Henry Cass, and Oliver Stone. Maupassant's other
supernatural stories include 'The Englishman', 'The Apparation / The
Spectre / The Ghost / The Story of a Law Suit', 'Was It a Dream', and
'Who Knows'. 'L'Homme de Mars' (1887, Martian Mankind), Maupassant's only
science fiction story, took its astronomical material from the work of
Camille
Flammarion (1842-1925). Like Flammarion, title character who visits the
narrator in his study, tells that the sky
of Mars is yellow, not red as commonly
held. Because
of the lighter gravity, the Ruling Being of Mars has wings. This little tale fell soon into oblivion. It was not
reprinted until 1956, when it
appeared in an Italian periodical. Notre cœur (1890),
a psychological love story,
was
Maupassant's last completed novel. On January 2, in 1892, Maupassant
tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat but was saved by his
servant. He was driven in a straitjacket to the
celebrated private asylum of Dr. Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris,
where he died next year, July 6, 1983. Maupassant was buried in
Montparnasse cemetery. Zola, who made a speech at his grave, called his
"one of the happiest, and one of the unhappiest, me the world has ever
seen." (Private Lives: Curious Facts about the Famous and Infamous by Mark Bryant, 1996, p. 206) Maupassant's style has been imitated by countless writers and his influence can be seen on such masters of the short story as Anton Chekhov, W. Somerset Maugham and O. Henry. A number of films have been based on Maupassant's stories, such as Jean Renoir's masterpiece Une partie de campagne (1936), Boule de Suif by Christian-Jacque's (1945), and Max Ophüls's Le plaisir 1952). Other movie adaptations: La père Milon, 1908; Le Collier, 1909; La Petite Roque, 1910; Yvette, 1916; L'Ordonnance, 1921; Ce cochon de Morin, 1923; Le Rosier de Mme Husson, 1932, dir. by Bernard Deschamps; L'Ordonnance, 1933, dir. by Victor Tourjansky; 1936; Lumière dans la nuit, 1943, dir. by Helmut Kautner; Mademoiselle Fifi, 1944, dir. by Robert Wise; Deux Amis, 1949, dir. by Dimitri Kirsanoff; Le Rosier de Mme Husson, 1950, dir. by Jean Boyer; The Knife Thrower, 1951, Maxwell Weinberg; Trois Femmes, 1951, dir. by André Michel; Mari et femme, 1952, dir. by Edouardo de Filippo; Ça commence par un péche (Am anfang war er Sünde), 1954, dir. by Franz Cap; The True and the False, 1955, dir. Michaël Road; La Chevelure, 1961, dir. by Ado Kyrou; Il lavoro (episode in Boccaccio 79), 1962, Luchino Visconti; L'Étrange Histoire du juge Cordier, 1962, dir. by Réginald Le Borg; Le Dernier Matin de Guy de Maupassant, 1963, dir. by Maurice Fasquelle; L'Héritage, 1963, dir. by Ricardo Alvertosa; Masculin Féminin, 1965, dir. by Jean-Luc Godard; Rosalie, 1966, dir. by Walerian Borowczyk For further reading: La vie et l'œuvre de Guy de Maupassant by Edouard Maynial (1906); Souvenirs sur Maupassant by A. Lumbroso (1905); Souvenirs sur Maupassant by F. Tassart (1911); Guy de Maupassant by René Dumesnil (1933); Maupassant: a Lion in the Path by Francis Steegmüller (1941); L'art de Maupassant d'aprés ses variantes by Jean Thorval (1950); Guy de Maupassant et l'art du roman by A. Vial (1954); Maupassant the Novelist by Edward D. Sullivan (1954); Nouveaux Souvenirs intimes sur Maupassant by F. Tassart and P. Cogny (1962); Illusion and Reality by John L. Ducan (1973); Guy de Maupassant by Leo Tolstoy (1974); Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction by Mary Donaldson-Evans (1986); Maupassant: The Semiotics of Text by Paul Perron (1988); Love and Nature, Unity and Doubling in the Novels of Maupassant, ed. by Bertrand Logan Ball, Helen Roulston (1989), Struggling Under the Destructive Glance: Androgyny in the Novels of Guy de Maupassant by Rachel M. Hartig (1991); Maupassant and the American Short Story by Richard Fusco (1994); The Art of Rupture by Charles J. Stivale (1994); St. James Guide to Horror, Ghost & Gothic Writers, ed. by David Pringle (1998, see entry by Chris Morgan); Guy de Maupassant by Michael Bettencourt (1999); Maupassant's Fiction And The Darwinian View Of Life by Laurence A. Gregorio (2005); Identity Trouble: Illusion and Suicide in the Works of Guy de Maupassant by Eva Yampolsky (2016); Guy de Maupassant by Christopher Lloyd (2020); Le taureau triste: la solitude du célibataire de Maupassant by Céline Brossillon (2021) - See also: Axel Munthe Selected works:
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