A Life

GUY DE MAUPASSANT was born of upper-middle-class parents in Normandy in 1850. After the failure of his parents' marriage he lived with his mother at Étretat, a newly fashionable seaside resort. Having enrolled as a law student in 1869, he was called up after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and served as a quartermaster's clerk in Rouen. Following the war he left the army and eventually secured a post as a minor civil servant His favourite pastimes were womanizing and boating, especially at Argenteuil on the Seine, which was also a favourite haunt of the Impressionists. Flaubert, whom he knew through his mother, encouraged his literary activities and shaped both his style and his pessimistic outlook on life. Through Flaubert he came to know the leading figures in Parisian cultural life, notably Émile Zola, who recruited him to his new 'Naturalist' school of writing.
Boule de Suif
, his short story about a prostitute during the Franco-Prussian War, was hailed as a masterpiece by both Flaubert and the reading public. A leading figure in fashionable society and artistic circles, Maupassant wrote prolifically and was soon the bestselling author in France after Zola. During the following decade he wrote nearly 300 stories, 200 newspaper articles, six novels, and three travel books. He earned substantial sums of money, which he spent on yachts, women, travel, and houses, and on his mother, and his younger brother Hervé, who eventually died insane in an asylum in Lyons in 1889. Despite his enthusiasm for sex and outdoor pursuits, Maupassant's own health had never been good. A nervous disorder possibly inherited from his mother was compounded by syphilis, contracted in 1876, and he consulted numerous doctors in the course of his short life. On New Year's Day 1892 he attempted suicide with a paper-knife and was removed to the clinic of Dr Blanche at Passy, suffering from the syphilitic paresis, or general paralysis, which had driven him mad. He died on 6 July 1893 at the age of 42.

ROGER PEARSON is Professor of French in the University of Oxford and Fellow and Praelector in French at The Queen's College, Oxford. He is the author of
Stendhal's Violin: A Novelist and His Reader
(Oxford, 1988),
The Fables of Reason: A Study of Voltaire's 'contes philosophiques'
(Oxford, 1993), and
Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art
(Oxford, 1996). For Oxford World's Classics he has translated and edited Voltaire,
Candide and Other Stories
(1990) and Zola,
La Bête humaine
(1996), and revised and edited Thomas Walton's translation of Zola,
The Masterpiece
(1993).

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A Life

The Humble Truth

Guy de Maupassant

Oxford World's Classics

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by Roger Pearson

Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford
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Translated with an Introduction and Notes © Roger Pearson 1999

First published as a World's Classics paperback 1999

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Maupassant, Guy de, 18501893
[Vie. English]
A life/Guy de Maupassant; translated with an introduction and notes by Roger Pearson.
(Oxford world's classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
I. Pearson, Roger. II. Title. III. Series: Oxford world's classics (Oxford University Press)
PQ2349.V4E6      1999      843'.8dc21      98-32139
ISBN 0-19-28398-0

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by Refine Catch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
Printed in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd., Reading, Berkshire

CONTENTS

Introduction

Note on the Translation

Select Bibliography

A Chronology of Guy de Maupassant

A LIFE

Explanatory Notes

INTRODUCTION

A work of art is superior only if it is at once a symbol and the accurate expression of a particular reality.
(
Maupassant
, La Vie errante)

Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to treat the Introduction as an Epilogue.

Guy de Maupassant and
A Life

What is a life? A biological blip or a subtle construct of will and circumstance? A measured progress through time and space, from the spasm of departure to a mortal terminus, or an eddy in the swirling current of eternity? And how shall a storyteller conceive a life? As a causal chain in which the child is truly father to the man, or as some contingent and promiscuous sequence of accident and ephemeral impulse? As a plotted adventure of exploit, place, and character, or a grey tedium punctuated by non-events and peopled with faceless non-entities? What if art means pattern and life has none? How, then, can any story be true to life? These are some of the questions which inform
A Life
(1883), the first of Guy de Maupassant's six novels.

His own life did not lack for event or entity. Born in Normandy in 1850, he was the elder son of Gustave de Maupassant, a man of some means but little resolve, who squandered the means and lavished such determination as he possessed upon the pursuit of women. Guy's mother, Laure Le Poittevin, a cultivated but febrile woman, had been a friend since childhood of Gustave Flaubert (182180), author of
Madame Bovary
(1857) and later the literary mentor and 'departed friend' to whose memory
A Life
is dedicated. Maupassant's parents separated formally in 1863 (divorce, briefly legalized between 1792 and 1816, did not become lawful again in France until 1884), and the young Guy went to  live with his mother and younger brother Hervé at Étretat on the coast of Normandy. In 1867 the two boys began to go to school in Rouen. Thus some of the 'exploit, place, and character' of his first novel is clearly drawn from life.

The Franco-Prussian War (18701) changed everything. The family finances were ruined, Maupassant had to abandon his studies, and after the war, the would-be lawyer became a minor civil servant, first in the department of the Minister for the Navy (1873-8), later in the Ministry of Education (187880). Meanwhile, under the tutelage of Flaubert and in the glamorous slip-stream of Émile Zola (18401902), Maupassant embarked upon his career as a writer; the publication of his short story
Boule de Suif
in Zola's anthology
Les Soirées de Médan
(1880) constituted something of an arrival, and the beginning of a period of quite extraordinary creativity. In 1882 he not only completed
A Life
but published sixty-four short stories and thirty-five newspaper articles; in 1883 sixty-two short stories and twenty-six articles; in 1884 fifty-nine stories and twenty-four articles. No wonder that the former pen-pusher in the Naval Ministry could now afford his first (small) yacht. He bought
La Louisette
early in 1883, the year in which
A Life
was published, first in serialized form in the
Gil Blas
(27 February6 April) and then in book form by Havard. Temporarily withheld from station bookstalls by Hachette, the franchise-holder, on account of at least one 'explicit' scene, it quickly became a bestseller and had soon sold more than 25,000 copies.

But the author of
A Life
was suffering from syphilis. He had contracted the disease most probably in 1876, and in a letter written to his friend Robert Pinchon in March 1877 he diagnosed himself with a considerable degree of bravado. But medical understanding of the disease was far from complete at that time, and the fact that Maupassant had already been, and continued to be, subject to nervous disorders meant that a number of his symptoms were susceptible of varying interpretations both by specialists and by the sufferer himself By 1883, however, the effects of syphilis were increasingly taking their toll, and the ophthalmologist consulted by Maupassant explicitly addressed  the possibility that his symptoms (hair-loss, headaches, eye problems) were directly attributable to the disease. Though syphilis was not necessarily fatal, it is likely that the patient confronted the reality of his premature demise; in the event, the 32-year-old novelist now had only ten years to live, ten years of physical and mental decline which culminated in his attempted suicide at the beginning of 1892 (when he slit his throat with a paper-knife on the night of 1 January) and his death in a psychiatric clinic on 6 July 1893. Not that syphilis alone may have been responsible for his torment: his brother Hervé, six years his junior, had earlier lost his reason and died in an asylum in 1889. By the time of Guy de Maupassant's death he had published over 300 short stories, 1888 articles, six novels, two plays, and three travel books. In 1888 he was earning some 120,000 francs a year (the equivalent then of £4,800, and now, most approximately, of some £275,000-£300,000); in December 1891 he estimated his sales over the previous ten years at nearly 350,000 copies. The number of his mistresses is said to have exceeded that of his short stories. Few lives, perhaps, have demonstrated such an extraordinary combination of creative vitality and doomed mortality.

Maupassant began work on
A Life
at the age of 27. On 10 December 1877 he gave notice of his intentions to Flaubert, who responded enthusiastically to the projected story-line. Early in 1878 Maupassant envisaged completing the novel by the beginning of the following year, but after a productive spring he became bogged down during the summer in a plethora of incidental characters (and an excess of work at the Ministry). In the autumn he managed to draft Chapter VII, which set up the plot for the remainder of the novel; but he then left the novel to one side until the spring of 1881, preferring to advance his literary career via the theatre and achieving notoriety through the publication of some risqué verse and the story of the eponymous prostitute in
Boule de Suif
. Having now made a name for himself, he could spare the time to continue work on his novel, and Flaubert's death (on 8 May 1880), while causing Maupassant much immediate distress, perhaps also made it easier for him to  attempt a genre in which his late mentor was the acknowledged master. Following a long visit to Algeria in the summer and autumn of 1881, Maupassant resumed work on
A Life
in November and completed a first draft by the spring of the following year, which he then continued to revise before submitting a final version for publication one year later.

Flaubert and Naturalism

Although Flaubert was not, as baseless rumour sometimes had it, Maupassant's biological father, the author of
A Life
was certainly heir to the Master's literary preoccupations. At the level of plot, Jeanne de Lamare's disappointments are reminiscent of Emma Bovary's discovery that life is not at all like a novel by Sir Walter Scott. Similarly, the comparative brevity with which a human life is summarized and the presentation of this life as a process of gradual and relentless dispossession owe something to
Un coer* simple
(1877), Flaubert's brief and poignant tale of a servant woman in Rouen. At the level of style, the influence is plain in the (almost) impersonal narrative voice, the intricate network of parallels and oppositions which underlies the action, the use of short paragraphs and laconic sentence rhythms, and above all the quest for 'fine writing', the ambition to bring to narrative a concerted orchestration of sound and sense more traditionally associated with poetry. Whereas, among his subsequent novels,
Bel-Ami
(1885) would offer a broad panorama of Parisian society reminiscent of Balzac, and
Pierre et Jean
(1888) would present a psychological study of marital infidelity and its consequences in a manner which situates the novel in a French tradition stretching back to Madame de Lafayette's
La Princesse de Clèves
(1678), Maupassant's first novel is most evidently 'the homage of a devoted friend' in memory of one who had once proclaimed his intention to write 'a book about nothing'
1
by which Flaubert meant predominantly a novel in which the representation of the external world would count much less towards the overall