PIERRE ET JEAN
GUY DE MAUPASSANT was born of upper-middle-class parents in Normandy in 1850. After the failure of his parents’ marriage he lived with his mother at Étretat, a newly fashionable seaside resort. Having enrolled as a law student in 1869, he was called up after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and served as a quartermaster’s clerk in Rouen. Following the war he left the army and eventually secured a post as a minor civil servant. His favourite pastimes included boating, especially at Argenteuil on the Seine, which was also a favourite haunt of the Impressionists. Flaubert, whom he knew through his mother, encouraged his literary activities and shaped both his style and his pessimistic outlook on life. Through Flaubert he came to know the leading figures in Parisian cultural life, notably Émile Zola, who recruited him to his new ‘Naturalist’ school of writing. ‘Boule de Suif’, his short story about a prostitute during the Franco-Prussian War, was hailed as a masterpiece by both Flaubert and the reading public. A leading figure in fashionable society and artistic circles, Maupassant wrote prolifically and was soon the best-selling author in France after Zola. During the following decade he wrote nearly 300 stories, 200 newspaper articles, six novels, and three travel books. He earned substantial sums of money, which he spent on yachts, women, travel, and houses, and on his mother, and his younger brother Hervé, who eventually died insane in an asylum in Lyons in 1889. Despite his enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits, Maupassant’s own health had never been good. A nervous disorder possibly inherited from his mother was compounded by syphilis, contracted in 1876, and he consulted numerous doctors in the course of his short life. On New Year’s Day 1892 he attempted suicide with a paper-knife and was removed to the clinic of Dr Blanche at Passy, suffering from the syphilitic paresis, or general paralysis, which had driven him mad. He died on 6 July 1893 at the age of 42.
JULIE MEAD studied French as an undergraduate and postgraduate at Royal Holloway, University of London; she has worked as a translator since 1996.
ROBERT LETHBRIDGE is Professor of French Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Maupassant: ‘Pierre et Jean’ (Grant & Cutler, 1984) and co-editor of Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Leicester, 1994), Maupassant conteur et romancier (Durham, 1994), and Artistic Relations. Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 1994). For Oxford World’s Classics he has edited Zola’s L’Assommoir (1995) and La Débâcle (2000), and Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (2001).