Guy de Maupassant

Born Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant on August 5, 1850, at the Château de Miromesnil near Dieppe in Normandy, the elder son of Gustave de Maupassant and Laure Le Poittevin, a childhood friend of Gustave Flaubert. When Maupassant was eleven, his parents separated, and his mother kept custody of him and his younger brother Hervé. In 1867 his mother arranged for him to meet Flaubert at Croisset, and the older writer became his literary master, drilling the young man every Sunday in the craft of prose, insisting on precision, economy, and the discipline of seeing. Maupassant studied law briefly, served as a soldier during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, and spent a decade as a government clerk, first at the Ministry of the Navy and then at the Ministry of Education, writing in his spare hours under Flaubert's exacting supervision. His first published story, "Boule de Suif" (1880), a devastating tale of hypocrisy among bourgeois refugees fleeing the Prussian occupation, appeared in a collection organized by Émile Zola and was immediately recognized as a masterpiece. Over the next decade he produced roughly three hundred short stories and six novels with astonishing speed, becoming the most widely read French author of his time. Une Vie (1883) and Bel-Ami (1885) are his finest novels; "The Necklace," "The Horla," and "Moonlight" rank among the most anthologized stories in any language. But syphilis, contracted in his twenties, was destroying him. By the late 1880s he suffered from hallucinations, paranoia, and deteriorating eyesight. On January 2, 1892, he attempted suicide by cutting his throat. He was committed to a private asylum in Paris, where he died on July 6, 1893, one month before his forty-third birthday.

In 1889, two years after publishing Le Horla, a story about a man haunted by an invisible double, Maupassant told friends the double had begun appearing for real. He would hear his study door open, turn, and watch himself walk in, sit down, and begin dictating the very sentences he was writing.