A Selection from the Writings of Guy De Maupassant|Vol. I

GUY DE MAUPASSANT. Of the French writers of romance of the latter part of the nineteenth century no one made a reputation as quickly as did Guy de Maupassant. Not one has preserved that reputation with more ease not only during life but in death. None so completely hides his personality in his glory. In an epoch of the utmost publicity in which the most insignificant deeds of a celebrated man are spied recorded and commented on the author of Boule de Suif of Pierre et Jean of Notre Coeur found a way of effacing his personality in his work.. Of De Maupassant we know that he was born in Normandy about 1850; that he was the favorite pupil if one may so express it the literary protege of Gustave Flaubert; that he made his debut late in 1880 with a novel inserted in a small collection published by Emile Zola and his young friends under the title: The Soirees of Medan; that subsequently he did not fail to publish stories and romances every year up to 1891 when a disease of the brain struck him down in the fullness of production; and that he died finally in 1893 without having recovered his reason.. We know too that he passionately loved a strenuous physical life and long journeys particularly long journeys upon the sea. He owned a little sailing yacht named after one of his books Bel-Ami in which he used to sojourn for weeks and months. These meager details are almost the only ones that have been gathered as food for the curiosity of the public.. I leave the legendary side which is always in evidence in the case of a celebrated man—that gossip for example which avers that Maupassant was a high liver and a worldling. The very number of his volumes is a protest to the contrary. One could not write so large a number of pages in so small a number of years without the virtue of industry a virtue incompatible with habits of dissipation. This does not mean that the writer of these great romances had no love for pleasure and had not tasted the world but that for him these were secondary things. The psychology of his work ought then to find an interpretation other than that afforded by wholly false or exaggerated anecdotes. I wish to indicate here how this work illumined by the three or four positive data which I have given appears to me to demand it.