It was here that he became familiar with the Norman peasant life so often portrayed in his short stories and here that he began to develop the passion for boats and the water which was to become such an important part of his own life. He mixed easily with the local fishermen and their sons as well as with the sons of the farms and smallholdings surrounding the town. He also mixed with the smart summer set of Etretat and came to know the characteristics of both populations, moving without difficulty from one to the other and developing both the social and the physical skills associated with each.

If his practical education en plein air was wide and comprehensive, his intellectual and literary development under the supervision of his mother was no less rigorous. After a brief, unhappy spell at the Lycée Impérial Napoléon in Paris, he returned to Normandy where a local priest taught him his catechism, his mother read him Shakespeare and another cleric gave him instruction in French grammar, maths and Latin.

Laure was by all accounts a neurotic and controlling mother to whom Guy was always closely, some would say unhealthily attached. Under the circumstances, his sexual development might have been for those days problematic. In the event, it was both rapid and precocious. At the age of thirteen, his first sexual experience – with a country girl one year his senior – was the prelude to an adolescence and manhood in which love affairs would feature prominently, both in his life and his work. His own sexual appetite, athleticism and stamina became his trademark as a young man. In combination with an inherited susceptibility, these led him to contract the venereal disease which was ultimately to be the cause of his death.

In this same fourteenth year, an equally important event took place. He was sent off to board at the seminary of Yvetot, which he hated. Particularly loathsome to him were the discipline and bigotry of the establishment and the curtailment of the freedom he had by now come to take for granted. He rebelled, misbehaved and, finally, was expelled when an allegedly obscene poem, written on the occasion of a pretty girl cousin’s marriage, was discovered by the authorities.