1889 Begins to oversee anthologizing and translation (into English, Russian, Spanish, German, etc.) of his now large number of short stories. Arranges with Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de L’Ouest for Zola to travel on engine of locomotive to research material for the latter’s La Bête humaine. Opening of the International Exhibition in Paris. Publication of novel Fort comme la mort. Hervé sectioned at Lyon and dies on 13 November.

1890 Next collection of travel sketches, La Vie errante, published in serial form. Maupassant spends increasingly more time in south of France. Purchases bachelor flat in Paris. Publication of his last novel, Notre Coeur. Makes friends with Dr Henry Cazalis who, with colleague Dr Blanche, will attend him to the end of his life. Guy’s illness reaches its apotheosis. The number of short stories he is able to write decreases.

1891 Maupassant’s intellectual powers are now seriously on the wane and he suffers from loss of memory and confusion. General paralysis of body begins to affect his mind.

1892 Attempts to slit his throat. Is admitted to clinic of Dr Blanche at Passy.

1893 Dies on 6 July.

Introduction

The circumstances surrounding the birth on 5 August 1850 of Guy de Maupassant are prophetically tinged with the fiction for which he was later to become so widely renowned. Although reliable evidence suggests he was born in the modest summer apartment of his grandmother in Fécamp, on the Normandy coast, his birth certificate gives as place of birth the imposing eighteenth-century Château de Miromesnil some ten miles inland and rented shortly before by his parents to ensure that their first-born should enter the world from as good an address as they could possibly afford.

The twenty-eight-year-old couple were an ill-assorted pair. Gustave de Maupassant, Guy’s father, who on the same document describes his occupation as ‘living on a private income’, came from an upper-bourgeois, not to say aristocratic family and spent his time as a dandy and man about town. His wife Laure, née Le Poittevin, was the daughter of a traditional and prosperous Rouen businessman, owner of two important spinning-mills and with roots deep in the city’s ship-building industry. Her family was linked through friendship with another eminent Rouennais family, that of Dr Flaubert, father of a very different Gustave, the future author of Madame Bovary. Laure’s brother Alfred was, until his sudden and early death, one of the young Flaubert’s closest friends and admirers. Each young man was a strong and formative influence upon the other, and the atmosphere prevailing throughout Laure’s childhood and youth was conspicuously bookish. Given that Laure’s grandmother was a highly witty eighteenth-century woman of letters and that Laure’s own ambitions as a writer were thwarted, it is unsurprising that those she harboured for her elder son should also come to privilege the literary over all else.