Bouilhet died the year Maupassant passed his baccalauréat and from then on it was Flaubert who became his permanent mentor. After being cleared of the charges of offending public morals with the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, Flaubert became a well-established literary figure. Laure had taken care to remind him, in the unlikely event he should have forgotten it, of the great friendship which had existed between him and her late brother and played mercilessly on his feelings, suggesting he might take some responsibility for the fate of their dear Alfred’s nephew. In particular, she was anxious to secure his support in continuing to instruct and encourage her son in his literary ambition. Flaubert responded with generosity and managed to instil into his protégé, whose initial efforts were clumsy and banal, the belief that the most important aspect of writing was to learn to see with his own eyes. The images produced must be those of his own vision and based on careful, attentive, idiosyncratic and possibly unique observation of the particular.

This precept, as well as many others, he carried with him to Paris where he was now to join his father and read law. His life as a student, however, was neither an exciting nor a long one. He did not experience the bohemian existence for which university life in Paris is well known, but at his father’s side saw rather more of the sophisticated social life of the capital. His stay there was cut short in any case by political events and his student days abruptly curtailed by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.

On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia and Maupassant joined the army. Once enlisted, he was posted to the second division of the commissariat at Le Havre from where he was sent as a messenger to Rouen. He spent the short-lived but disastrous war going between that city and Paris where, after the terrible siege and weeks of suffering and starvation, the equally traumatic and brutal suppression of the Commune took place. The war had a profound effect on him, as it did on the whole of France, which was obliged to acknowledge a crushing defeat and endure occupation. Many of his most successful stories, including his best-known work, the nouvelle or long short story ‘Boule de Suif’, are based on his experience of that period and its effect upon ordinary people of both sides. The complacency and petty-mindedness of the bourgeoisie, who were more interested in the continued running of their businesses than in the defence of their country, is a theme to which he often returns in his writing.