Titans of History

Maupassant was the French writer who almost single-handedly made the short story an art form. A famous hedonist and sportsman, he shocked many with his “immoral” literature. His work recognized the appeal of sensuality and human nature’s ambivalence toward it. It is this sensitivity, combined with prose of exquisite clarity, that makes him a writer of greatness.

In 1880 Émile Zola decided to publish a collection of stories inspired by the recent Franco-Prussian War. Maupassant’s contribution, “Boule de Suif,” was a masterpiece in miniature that ensured its author overnight success. It was typical of his style and originality, a tale of how a prostitute is exploited and betrayed by the hypocritical middle class in wartime. Many regarded such writing as little more than padding for newspaper columns, but Maupassant went on to develop the short story as a distinctive genre that was taken up by a series of later writers from James Joyce to Ernest Hemingway, and from Anton Chekhov to Somerset Maugham.

Born of impoverished Norman nobility, Maupassant gave up his unrewarding post in the civil service to embrace life as a writer. His genius was to reveal, in simple narrative, fundamental human truths with a skill that rivaled—and sometimes even surpassed—that of the finest novelists. The concision, elegance and humanity of the 300-plus short stories he produced over the ensuing decade demonstrate his mastery of the form.

Maupassant sought to present not “a banal, photographic view of life … but a vision more complete, more gripping, more searching than reality itself.” In this, he owed much to the tutelage of the great novelist Gustave Flaubert (1821–80). Flaubert, a friend of Maupassant’s mother, took the young man under his wing when he returned to Paris after serving in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1.

Flaubert introduced him to the leading writers of the day, saying, “He’s my disciple and I love him like a son.” In turn Flaubert was a surrogate father (some murmured a real one) to Maupassant, whose own parents had separated when he was eleven and whose father was always a remote figure. Maupassant’s style was honed under Flaubert to such an extent that the Russian master Tolstoy was moved to praise his searing insight and his disciplined, beautiful prose as the marks of genius.

At the same time Tolstoy deplored Maupassant’s immorality. He was perverse and witty: one story told of a hungry gentleman in a stranded train on a very hot day who finally availed himself of the milk of a breast-feeding peasant. Another tells of a respectable upper-class lady who, looking out of her window, is mistaken for a call-girl by a good-looking young blade and afterward seeks forgiveness by buying her husband a present with the proceeds. His work was often set in brothels or boudoirs; yet he was equally fascinated by war, by the shrewd peasants of his native Normandy, by finance and journalism, and by the strange twists of fate. The writer’s fascination with sex (one critic described him as a “complete erotomaniac”) reflected a phenomenal promiscuity in life. Indeed, his boating trips with hedonistic Parisian girls inspired his short story “Mouche,” and his literary success financed the maintenance of several mistresses. Maupassant’s best-selling novel Bel-Ami

(1885) is a masterpiece, probably the best account ever written of that very modern world where journalism and politics meet, and the author went on to name his yacht after it.

Maupassant believed that the artist’s duty was not to be a moral arbiter but to present society with its own reflection and leave people to draw their own conclusions. He declared, “for a writer there can be no halfway house: he must either tell what he believes to be the truth, or tell lies.” The resulting incisiveness of his writing highlights the contrast between appearance and reality, illustrating how vanity and pride lead to self-deception and falsehood. Maupassant wrote of betrayal and seduction; of fortune favoring the ruthless and the selfish; of societies based on collective hypocrisy; and of madness. He did not shy away from the deep ambiguities hidden within ourselves, while his writing has the power to dispel society’s myths.

Maupassant himself was living proof of such ambiguities. On the one hand, he was a man of action, a passionate oarsman who could comfortably row fifty miles in a day and once saved the English poet Swinburne from drowning. His military service and his love of the sea influenced many of the narratives and settings of his work. On the other hand, he was prone to anxiety and morbid thoughts and was increasingly gripped by the depression from which his mother had also suffered.