It was during the hiatus between his ignominious but welcome dismissal from the seminary and his enrolment at the Lycée of Rouen that his first and unexpected meeting with a literary figure took place. One morning, on the beach at Etretat, he heard cries for help coming from the direction of the Petite Porte, one of the rocky points off the coast. Guy quickly became involved in the rescue of the stranger who was then pulled from the water to safety on board one of the local fishing boats. Grateful and touched by the boy’s gesture, the swimmer, one Charles Algernon Swinburne, invited him to lunch the next day. Also resident at the remote little cottage the homosexual Swinburne had rented was an intimate of his, a Welshman by the name of Powell, as well as a somewhat anti-social pet monkey called Nip. The place, which Swinburne had named Chaumière Dolmancé after the protagonist of de Sade’s La philosophie dans le boudoir, was unusually furnished and decorated. The boy was shown grotesque objects as well as male nude photographs and various bones or ossements scattered about. The wraith-like Swinburne reminded Guy of Edgar Allan Poe who, since the time of Baudelaire, had been regarded by the French literary world as the embodiment of Anglo-Saxon sophistication. On a subsequent visit he was given a shrivelled hand as a souvenir and based several of his more macabre stories on this grisly relic of an encounter he was never to forget. The monkey later came to a bad end at the hands of a valet and was buried under a tombstone marked, with gallows humour, NIP.

During the time Maupassant spent as a boarder at the Lycée in Rouen, he was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of two very different men of letters. One was Louis Bouilhet, a well-established poet, and the other, after a series of carefully worded letters from his mother, the great Flaubert himself. Maupassant was schooled rigorously by them in the art of writing. Masters of their respective crafts, they were also sympathetic and friendly towards the boy’s development as a poet and encouraged him in his efforts. The two bachelor artists’ mixture of serious arguments about literary matters and bawdy humour over sexual affairs was an irresistible one to the fatherless young man and their influence upon him was both incalculable and enduring.