Once the war and the Prussian occupation were over, he felt it was time to look for a job. His experiences as a soldier had given him both confidence and resourcefulness and he now decided to try to embark on a life of independence. He applied for, and was appointed to, a post in the Naval Administration, from which he moved to the Central Administration and subsequently the Department for the Colonies. Guy remained at the Colonial Office until 1877 when he joined the Ministry of Education. His knowledge and experience of the ministries, the world of the civil servant and in particular that of its myriad clerks and functionaries provided rich material for the stories he would later write. His years as a minor bureaucrat were for him, however, the most devastatingly miserable of his life and despite the fact that they provided him with valuable experience on which to draw in his writing, they also took their toll upon his spirit. That he managed to rise above the pettiness of such an existence, surrounded as he was by those whom he considered philistines, is a tribute both to Flaubert’s constant care and interest and to his own tenacity in continuing to work at writing at night after a mind-numbing day totting up figures at the office. His letters home during this period make sad reading, and his longing for the open air and the water were satisfied only by considerable physical effort.

He acquired a boat and rented a small room in a house at Argenteuil on the banks of the Seine downstream from the centre of Paris. After work, he would take the train out to this idyllic spot and go sailing or rowing before dawn and his return to work. He became part of a gang of pleasure-seeking young men who loved the social activity of the landing-stages immortalized in the contemporary paintings of Renoir. The orgiastic character of his riverside life, though hugely enjoyable, resulted in his contracting syphilis and he now began to suffer from the ill-health that was to dog him for the rest of his days.

Eventually Maupassant managed to obtain tenure and thereby relative security at his hated job. More importantly, through Flaubert, he also gained entrée into the literary world of Paris. He began to meet on a regular basis such well-established writers as Turgenev, Alphonse Daudet, Emile Zola, Huysmans, Edmond de Goncourt and a host of others, as well as an extremely powerful group of publishers and editors who were also habitués of the writers’ circle.