The Prisoners. Guy de Maupassant

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      The Prisoners

      By

      Guy de Maupassant

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      Guy De Maupassant

      Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, France. He came from a prosperous family, but when Maupassant was eleven, his mother risked social disgrace by trying to secure a legal separation from her husband. After the split, Maupassant lived with his mother till he was thirteen, and inherited her love of classical literature, especially Shakespeare. Upon entering high school, he met the great author Gustave Flaubert, and despite being something of an unruly student proved himself as a good scholar, delighting in poetry and theatre.

      Not long after he graduated from college in 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Maupassant enlisted voluntarily. Afterwards, he moved to Paris, where he spent ten years as a clerk in the Navy Department, and began to write fiction under the guidance of Flaubert. At Flaubert’s home he met a number of distinguished authors, including Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev. In 1878, Maupassant became a contributing editor of several major newspapers, including Le Figaro, Gil Blas, Le Gaulois and l’Écho de Paris, writing fiction in his spare time.

      In 1880, Maupassant published his first – and, according to many, his best – short story, entitled ‘Boule de Suif’ (‘Ball of Fat’). It was an instant success. He went on to be extremely prolific during the 1880s, working methodically to produce up to four volumes of short fiction every year. In 1883 and 1885 respectively, Maupassant published Une Vie (A Woman’s Life) and Bel-Ami, both of which rank among his best-known works. In 1887, by then a very famous and very wealthy literary figure, he published what is widely regarded as his finest novel, Pierre et Jean.

      As well as being a well-known opponent of the construction of the Eiffel Tower, Maupassant was a solitary, withdrawn man with an aversion to public life. In his later years, as a result of the syphilis he had contracted earlier in life, he developed a powerful fear of death and became deeply paranoid. In early 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat, and was committed to a private asylum in Paris. He died here some eighteen months later, aged 42. He penned his own epitaph: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.” Some years later, in his autobiography, Friedrich Nietzsche called Maupassant “one of the stronger race, a genuine Latin to whom I am particularly attached.”