Maupassant’s masterstrokes

“Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. To live, in fact, is to die.”

Guy de Maupassant enjoyed messing about in boats. While living in Paris, he thought nothing of rowing 50 kilometres down the Seine to visit Emile Zola.

Indeed, his mentor and fellow Norman Gustave Flaubert took him to task. “Too much rowing! Too much exercise! A civilised person needs much less locomotion than the doctors claim.”

Maupassant’s pen strokes were as deft as his oars. He wrote 300 short stories in the decade from 1880. In 1886 he was turning out three stories a week.

Time was against him. Despite his healthy outdoor pursuits, his indoor ones were his undoing. An enthusiastic frequenter of brothels, he caught syphilis at 27 and died at 43.

His impending doom weighed on his mind. His stories are riddled with pessimism about the human condition. He wrote: “Breathing, sleeping, drinking, eating, working, dreaming, everything we do is dying. To live, in fact, is to die.”

Maupassant was born in 1850. A year after moving to Paris in 1959, Maupassant’s mother Laure de Maupassant legally separated from his father and returned to Normandy, buying a house in Etretat.

Maupassant was 17 when his mother, through her connections, introduced him to Flaubert. The writer took the youngster under his wing, molding his talent right up to the publication of Maupassant’s breakthrough story Boule de Suif in 1880.

The late Valery Giscard d'Estaing pushed the theory Flaubert was actually Maupassant’s father. His flimsy evidence was a slip of the tongue by Laure de Maupassant in later life. But an analysis of Flaubert’s movements in October 1849 renders it barely conceivable.

Flaubert was not Maupassant’s only literary influence. At the age of 18, Maupassant had a hand in saving English poet Algernon Swinburne from drowning. Already drunk as a lord by 10 am, Swinburne was found floundering off Etretat.

In gratitude, Swinburne and his bosom buddy George Powell invited Maupassant to lunch at their cottage. The eccentric ex-Etonians were part of the Dieppe diaspora of British dilettantes living up and down the Channel coast.

Much monkey business ensued. Powell’s pet primate and odd bedfellow was present at lunch (one of Powell’s jealous teenage protégées later hanged it in the garden). The roast entrée was suspiciously monkey flavoured. Maupassant was regaled with a flayed human hand which Powell insisted on licking. With brandy, the odd couple tried to interest the youngster in an album of male pornographic images. Maupassant took rapid French leave.

Maupassant later recounted this encounter with warmth. He considered Swinburne a genius, saying “The world would be a lot jollier if one came across ménages like that one a little more often."

With the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War, Maupassant enlisted. Then in 1871 he moved to Paris to become a clerk in the Navy Department. In 1878 he transfered to the Ministry of Public Instruction.

Low-level civil servants and their grasping wives abound in his stories. As do prostitutes. When the eponymous heroine Boul de Suif, generous and self-sacrificing, is treated with cruel disdain by her snobby fellow travellers, it is clear where Maupassant’s sympathies lie.

Boule de Suif is set against the backcloth of the Prussian invasion. Maupassant takes his time describing the setting and fleshing out the characters. It runs to a bumper 14,000 words.

Having made his mark, he trims the fat. His subsequent stories are brief, punchy, often with a trademark twist in the tail. Description serves only to establish scene and character. He moves easily between third and first-person narrative, often wrapping a tale within a tale.

He knew his readers. His stories appeared in Le Gaulois and Gil Blas. The public could not get enough. One imagines the morning Neuilly tram, as depicted in En Famille, stuffed with commuters lapping up the latest offering.

The money rolled in. He gave up work at the ministry. He was socially feted. He had his own yacht. He travelled extensively. Only his contemporary Dickens, with his weekly serialisations, was more financially successful.

Like Dickens, he was adept at bringing characters to life. Unlike Dickens, he knew when to stop. These were not grotesques, but easily-recognisable everyday types. In his crosshairs were the property-owning classes with their moral bankruptcy, vulgarity and egoism.

Unlike Flaubert, Maupassant did not cherish high literary aspirations. He described himself as a “marchand de prose, happy to sell my wares to the highest bidder.”

Maupassant comes across as a pragmatic writer. It is easy to picture him cranking out another story, throwing down his pen, changing into his culottes and sprinting down to the boathouse.

Who can blame him? The clock is ticking. His younger brother Hervé died from syphilis in 1889. Maupassant was forced to watch Hervé’s mental decline. He knew exactly what was coming.

His writing reflects his growing despair. Le Horla published at the end of 1886 opens a disturbing window on his mental state.

In January 1892, he botched cutting his own throat. In July 1893 syphilis finally took him. The robust athlete was reduced to crawling along the corridors of a mental hospital on all fours.

Maupassant penned his own epitaph “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing."