Inspirational Quotations by Guy de Maupassant (French Short-story Writer)

Guy de Maupassant (1850–93,) fully Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant, was a French naturalist writer of 300 short stories and six novels. He is generally considered the greatest French short-story writer. In his simple, direct narrative style, he portrayed a broad spectrum of society and embraced themes of war, mystery, hallucination, and horror.

Born in the Norman Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, France, Maupassant was educated at Rouen and spent his life in Normandy. After a short stint as a soldier in the Franco-Prussian War, he became a government clerk, but encouraged by Gustave Flaubert, a friend of his mother’s, he took to writing and mingled with Émile Zola and other disciples of Naturalism.

Free from romanticism or idealism, Maupassant’s stories expose, with minute observation, the pretense and the vulgarity of the middle class of the period and the cunning and traditional spitefulness of the Norman peasant. He first achieved success with Boule de suif (1880, ‘Ball of Tallow,’) which reveals the hypocrisy, prudishness, and ungratefulness of the bourgeois. Le Horla (1887; Eng trans 1890) and La Peur (1925; ‘The Fear’) portray psychosis and fear with a disturbing accuracy, foretelling the insanity which affected Maupassant in 1892 and ultimately precipitated his death.

A number of Maupassant’s stories are collected in La Maison Tellier (1881,) Contes de la Bécasse (1883,) and L’Inutile Beauté (1890.) He also wrote several full-length novels, including Une Vie (1883; A Woman’s Life, 1888) and Bel-Ami (1885; Good Friend, 1891.) Pierre et Jean (1887) is regarded as the best of his six novels.

By the second half of the 20th century, Maupassant’s popularity as a short-story writer had declined and that he was read more in the English-speaking countries than in France.

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