Uncategorized

FORT COMME LA MORT (illustré) (French Edition)

Published December 13th by Arvensa Editions first published August 12th To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Bachar Kelly rated it really liked it Aug 19, Anita Faivre rated it it was amazing Apr 14, Ella Sykorova rated it liked it Apr 05, Diana rated it it was amazing Feb 20, Don rated it it was amazing Dec 27, Natali Exposito rated it it was amazing Sep 19, Hamze Ghalebi rated it it was amazing Nov 27, Lynne D'Amico rated it really liked it Feb 15, Tatiana rated it it was amazing May 14, Marion Megel rated it it was amazing Jan 06, Doria O'stark rated it really liked it Jun 17, Courties Marie Laurence rated it it was amazing Jul 10, Drex rated it it was amazing Aug 21, Victor Chu rated it it was amazing Nov 17, Trish rated it it was amazing Jul 06, Nadia A zerhouni rated it really liked it Apr 16, Dean Limbert rated it liked it May 04, Camille de Fleurville rated it it was amazing Apr 24, Lizets Eidelman rated it it was amazing Jul 28, Lest the reader mistakenly assume that Duroy intends to be faithful to his young bride, Maupassant closes his novel with the description of a nostalgic Duroy reminiscing about Madame de Marelle.

Bel-Ami is a biting satire of Parisian society in general, and of the journalistic milieu in particular. The theme of Duroy's triumphant climb through the echelons of a fictitious--and highly disreputable--Paris daily newspaper allowed Maupassant to question the tremendous political power wielded by the press and to expose the abuse to which such power was susceptible.


  • Have Your Hearts Desire: Tools for a Wealthier, Healthier, Happier Life or Change Your Life with Inspirational Prayers, Forgive, Help Relationships, the ... Spirit Healing (Your Spiritual Awakening)?
  • Valid bid!.
  • Guy de Maupassant (Maupassant, Guy de, ) | The Online Books Page.
  • Maupassant, (Henri René Albert) Guy de | www.newyorkethnicfood.com;
  • Download Document?
  • Seventh Son: Tales of Alvin maker, book 1.

It further allowed him to criticize France's policy of colonial expansion, the taking of Tunisia being rather thinly disguised in the novel as "the Moroccan adventure. In Bel-Ami the reduction of all activity to the venal bears testimony not only to Maupassant's contempt for the crassly commercial society in which he lived but also to his lack of esteem for the journalistic medium in which he was forced to publish.

Greeted with anger by those who felt personally targeted, Bel-Ami was nevertheless reviewed favorably by most critics. Moreover, despite Maupassant's fears that Victor Hugo 's death would have a negative impact on sales, his novel was ultimately an immense commercial success. Maupassant had proven himself capable of une ouvre de longue haleine a substantial work , for, although he constructed his second novel in much the same way as his first, incorporating stories and articles published previously, they are better integrated into the whole, the transitions are smoother, and the plot is better constructed and more coherent.

If Une Vie records the descent of a female protagonist, Bel-Ami records the ascent of a male. With the exception of Mont-Oriol ; translated, , which grants equal importance to male and female perspectives, all future novels would feature a masculine point of view. Although the treatment was in the long run inefficacious, the experience did bear fruit in the writing of his next novel, Mont-Oriol. In the meantime, however, he continued to write stories, and three more collections appeared, Monsieur Parent , Toine , and La Petite Roque The first two, which appeared only a few weeks apart-- Monsieur Parent put out by Ollendorff in December , Toine by Marpon and Flammarion in January Maupassant deliberately avoided submitting all his work to one publisher, so as to give himself a broadly based power over the Paris publishing industry --are as disparate in their composition as the stories in Contes du jour et de la nuit.

Returning once again to the practice of naming his collection after the longest tale, Maupassant highlighted for the first collection the story of a doubtful paternity. In the second collection the title story concerns a Norman bon vivant who suffers a paralyzing stroke and is recruited by his wife for the job of hatching eggs, while the third collection begins with the story of a provincial mayor who rapes and murders a young girl.

The subject of the illegitimate child had fascinated Maupassant from the earliest days of his career; he was to return to it repeatedly, with multiple variations on the same theme. The biological fathers of Maupassant's fictional universe are rarely imbued with paternal sentiments. Ironically, perhaps, the wronged husbands generally feel most strongly the bonds of paternity toward those they assume falsely to be their offspring.

This is the case with Monsieur Parent, and Maupassant tells with great compassion the man's horrifying discovery that his beloved son is not his own, his anguish when the child goes to live with his mother, and the aimlessness of the life Parent leads after the separation.

Learn more about our specialized publishing options

With "Toine," Maupassant returned to the lighthearted tone of the Norman farce in what the critic Louis Forestier termed the fabliau tradition. However, as Forestier also remarked, beneath the comic surface one senses some of Maupassant's preoccupations: At least two of the stories, "La Chevelure" "A Woman's Hair," and "Un Fou" "A Madman," , are inspired by the fear of madness, a theme Maupassant was to treat with increasing intensity and frequency.

In fact the number of stories that refer to madness in their titles "Fou? He succumbs to the temptation to kill, beginning with the mutilation of a defenseless goldfish, and "graduating" to the murder of a young boy. One finds here the postmortem "exposure" of one who was believed to be virtuous as in "Les Bijoux" ["The False Gems," ], Une Vie , "Le Testament" ["The Will," ] and Pierre et Jean [; translated as The Two Brothers , ] , a theme that may well have been inspired by Maupassant's fear of self-revelation through his fiction.

Furthermore, the story describes the pleasure--distinctly erotic in nature--of killing, a theme that is also treated in the many hunting stories of Maupassant's corpus for example, "Amour" ["Love," ], "Le Loup," "Farce normande," and "Un Coq chanta". These two themes--that of the posthumous revelation and that of the link between sexuality and violence--are combined in the title tale of La Petite Roque.

The protagonist of this story is a town mayor, Renardet, who, suffering from an imperious sexual hunger since the death of his wife, comes upon a young girl la petite Roque--the little Roque child--of the title bathing in a woodland pond and rapes her, "sans comprendre ce qu'il faisait" without understanding what he was doing. Renardet, who must direct the investigation into the death of the child, writhes in the grip of fear and remorse, becoming prey to hallucinations and eventually losing his mind. The tale ends when he leaps to his death after trying unsuccessfully to persuade the postman to return a letter of confession he has written to the examining magistrate in a moment of weakness.

But it is also possible that Maupassant's own obsessions--he was suffering terrifying hallucinations, a condition that resulted indirectly from his own insatiable carnal appetite--were finding expression in his fiction. Whatever the case, the reputedly objective observer was clearly developing a taste for psychological analysis.

There was no real unity in this collection of previously published stories, which Maupassant assembled with customary negligence when he was not traveling or working on his new novel, Mont-Oriol. Begun in July , this third novel was more or less finished by April and was published serially by Gil Blas at the end of the year.

It appeared in book form in January The writing of the novel, much of which took place in a rented villa, Le Bosquet The Grove , in Antibes, was punctuated by a trip to southern Italy and by Mediterranean excursions on his newly acquired yacht, purchased with royalties from his second novel and appropriately christened Bel-Ami. A novel of manners like Une Vie and Bel-Ami, Mont-Oriol is the only one of Maupassant's novels to derive its unity--and its title--from geography.

There is no single character through which events are filtered, as is the case in all of Maupassant's other novels. Although the name of the thermal station is fictitious, the setting is not: Grounded in historical reality, the novel chronicles the discovery of mineralized springs in a small Auvergne town and the subsequent establishment of a thermal station by the wealthy Jewish businessman William Andermatt, who engages in intense and not altogether scrupulous negotiations with the wily, suspicious peasants in order to persuade them to sell him their land.

Maupassant weaves a sentimental tale of love and betrayal against this backdrop of tough-minded financial maneuvering. Andermatt and his wife, Christiane, are staying at the neighboring spa of Enval when a boulder on the old peasant Oriol's property is dynamited, revealing a spring that inspires Andermatt to create a competing spa. The normally shrewd Andermatt, naive where his personal life is involved, assumes the child is his own. The spa, ironically, has provided a setting for Christiane's "cure" in a way Andermatt would never have suspected. Maupassant's correspondence reveals that he had a great deal of trouble with the sentimental passages, and although many of his critics welcomed the new, less cruelly objective narration, the author did not think highly of his creation.

The critic Edward Sullivan agreed, finding Mont-Oriol the weakest of Maupassant's novels and lamenting the absence of irony and the inadequate integration between the financial and the sentimental plots. Nevertheless, the novel is not without interest for the modern reader.

It has considerable documentary value because it exposes with remarkable accuracy the mechanism of a typical business venture of the time and because it paints a fairly precise--although cynical--picture of the state of the medical profession in the early s. The descriptions of treatments that resemble torture and of vicious competition among the spa physicians, who are presented as incompetent charlatans interested only in financial gain, may seem exaggerated to the modern reader, but in fact they rang true to Maupassant's contemporaries.

Despite remarkable advances in medical knowledge and technology in the second half of the century, which propelled physicians to the most respected levels of society, the nineteenth-century Frenchman, still surrounded by quacks and subjected to inefficacious and painful treatments, was understandably skeptical where medical science was concerned.

With good reason the nineteenth century came to be known as the "age of heroic therapy. In Mont-Oriol , Maupassant also gave expression to his preoccupation with the illegitimate child, this time from the viewpoint of the mother; related themes of the disgust inspired by the pregnant woman, the horror of paternity, and the inevitable disappointments of conjugal love were also treated, as was the sexual awakening of a young woman, here associated as in Une Vie with the magic of an aquatic setting.

If, as several critics have noted, many of the characters are without substance, being drawn according to stereotypes of the day the Jewish financier, the Don Juan, the dissipated former aristocrat, the avaricious peasant , his heavily caricaturized portraits of the spa physicians allowed Maupassant to give vent to his frustrations regarding his own disease, against which even the most respected physicians and the most elegant watering holes seemed powerless.

Indeed, Maupassant's deteriorating health had become by this time impossible to ignore, and both stories and novels betrayed his attempts to deal with his real-life drama. The definitive version of his most famous fantastic tale, "Le Horla" "The Horla" , published for the first time in May , just five months after the publication of Mont-Oriol , recounts the plight of a passive victim, an unwilling host to an invisible parasite that is slowly sapping his power and his life.

It is a role with which Maupassant identified most keenly, and one can trace the development of his fear--and his authorial skill--by examining the three stages in the writing of this well-known story. In the original tale, "Lettre d'un fou" "Letter from a Madman," , a somewhat complacent philosopher-narrator commits himself to a mental hospital when an experiment involving "exciting" the senses results in a temporary inability to see his reflection in a looking glass.

To the empty-mirror scene of this preliminary sketch, the author added in the first version of "Le Horla" published in October the horror of being visited during the night by an invisible being that sucks his life from his lips. Certain "objective" phenomena appear to establish the reality of the mysterious being, who has preyed upon an entire population in Brazil, and the narrator speculates that perhaps man's successor on Earth has arrived.

Mes Classiques Préférés : Guy de Maupassant, Contes et Nouvelles - Hélène et les Livres

The tale is framed by comments from his physician, who is himself uncertain as to whether or not his patient is insane, leaving the reader in that doubt which the critic Tzvetan Todorov finds to be the sine qua non of the fantastic genre. The definitive version of "Le Horla," nearly three times as long as the version, is presented as the diary of a madman; the same incidents are repeated, but in more detail, and many "minor" incidents round out the tale. Here, the fantastic has been "internalized" so to speak; there is virtually no doubt about the diarist's madness, which is attested not only by the events themselves, but by the highly emotional and agitated style of the narration.

Moreover, no physician is present to guide the reader in his interpretation of the text, and the story ends with the narrator's attempt to kill the invisible "monster" by setting fire to his house, which he immediately judges to be futile: I'm going to have to kill myself! Maupassant predicted correctly that his own sanity would be questioned when this story appeared, but in point of fact, he was in full possession of his faculties during the writing of what has been considered a masterpiece of the fantastic genre.

Although this story has a subtext that clearly reveals some of its author's most troubling obsessions, the role played by literary fashion must not be overlooked. The fantastic, introduced into France early in the century, when E. Hoffmann 's works were translated into French, had been reinvigorated by Charles Baudelaire 's translation of Edgar Allan Poe 's work at midcentury. In particular, the idea of a successor to man who would prey upon him owes a great deal to Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution by natural selection.

In a more general way, the pathology of mental illness fascinated the nineteenth-century Frenchman, and Maupassant himself was irresistibly drawn to this subject.

Fort Comme La Mort : Guy de Maupassant :

The subject of mental pathologies is treated in this negative register throughout Maupassant's work, whether he focuses on magnetism, hallucinations, phobias, or neuroses. This was, after all, the period of the bacteriological revolution, when the discovery of microscopic organisms that could wreak havoc on the body gave new meaning to the concept of the invisible enemy.


  • Maupassant, (Henri René Albert) Guy de!
  • Your Online Business.
  • School Librarians and the Technology Department: A Practical Guide to Successful Collaboration: A Practical Guide to Successful Collaboration.
  • The Girl Scouts Rally: Rosanna Wins;
  • El cierre fiscal y contable 2011 (Spanish Edition)?
  • To Please a Lady.

Less than a month after "Le Horla" appeared, Maupassant was hard at work on his fourth novel, Pierre et Jean. Like "Le Horla," Pierre et Jean records a dispossession. The plot is deceptively simple: The subject of this psychological novel--Maupassant's first--is the intense mental suffering of Pierre Roland, a suffering relieved only by communion with the maternal sea.

The novel also records the progressive alienation of the legitimate son, who is eventually excluded from the family circle. Thus, although Maupassant's continuing preoccupation with the problem of illegitimacy is once again treated here, the perspective is quite different. It has been said that Maupassant's own life inspired Pierre et Jean , that his skepticism with regard to feminine virtue led him to wonder whether his mother had taken lovers when it became obvious that her marriage to Gustave was doomed.

Rumors had flown at one stage that Flaubert was the biological father of Maupassant, and although Maupassant scoffed at such an idea indeed, it has been largely discredited , he may well have pondered the possibility that either he or his brother was the product of an extramarital affair. Whatever the case, the interest of this novel lies less in its treatment of the illegitimate son than in the overwhelming tyranny of obsession to which Pierre falls victim.

Because Ollendorff, Maupassant's publisher, judged Pierre et Jean too brief to be published in a volume by itself, Maupassant augmented it with a theoretical essay on the novel "Le Roman" ["The Novel"] , which is known, somewhat misleadingly, as the preface to Pierre et Jean. Although the stereotype of Maupassant producing stories as easily as an apple tree produces fruit an appropriate analogy, no doubt, for a Norman writer carries with it the implication that he did not meditate on the exigencies of his art, the opposite is true, as his chronicles on Zola, Flaubert, and others amply demonstrate.

Maupassant's essay begins with an attack on critics who approach the novel with preconceived notions rather than judging each work on its own terms. In Maupassant's view, the genre can encompass many forms. Readily confessing his immense debt to Bouilhet and Flaubert, he then outlines his objective technique. In his view novice writers should describe the uniqueness of humble objects, for they can achieve originality through their personal vision. They should strive for objectivity even while realizing that their own experiences will necessarily color their descriptions and portrayal of character.

Finally, they should give the illusion of reality without resorting to a pretentious or archaic style: Some critics have seen in this last imperative an attack on the Goncourts, who were known for their "style artiste" artistic style as well as for their virulent attacks on Maupassant in their Journal. But the essay also contains a more subtle criticism of Zola's naturalism, with its claim of absolute objectivity, and suggests that Maupassant wished to disassociate himself once and for all from the naturalist movement. With Pierre et Jean one can take the measure of his progress.

Maupassant's fourth novel was on the whole very well received by his contemporaries, and it remains a critical favorite today, its tightly constructed plot being seen as a vast improvement on previous efforts, where he appears to proceed by an accumulation of incidents. Pierre et Jean also met with great popular success: Although it contains some descriptions of the cities and towns at which he dropped anchor, Sur l'eau is perhaps not a travel journal in the traditional sense, for by far the greatest portion of the work is given to reflections on various subjects, from the intoxicating pleasure of solitude to the slavery of marriage.

Maupassant claimed to have set down in this work his most intimate thoughts, a claim that some critics find suspect in view of the fact that most of the subjects had already been treated in chronicles. Whatever the case, there can be little doubt that the aquatic setting provided him with the distance and solitude necessary to assemble a work that Ernest Boyd, one of his biographers, described as a "prolonged, pathetic plaint of boredom, disillusionment, weariness, and pain. Forestier has remarked on the unusual homogeneity that marks this volume of short stories, both in subject most of the stories focus on women, the couple, and love and tone most adopt a comical perspective.


  1. Christian Humanism: The Compassionate Theology of a Jew Called Jesus;
  2. Shelley and the Marriage Question!
  3. Beautiful Ones;
  4. Parent topics.
  5. It is perhaps no accident that of the fourteen stories that make up this collection, eight were first published prior to Indeed, Maupassant, who was giving his attention to longer narratives, had just about emptied his current bag of stories and had to resort to using some published as far back as in order to complete this volume.

    However, even the later stories are characterized by a tone of amused detachment, and subjects that could well have been treated with more solemnity for example, the corrupting power of money, which is the major theme of the title story, originally published in were rendered here with the good-natured humor of the confirmed cynic. In his personal life, meanwhile, there was much distress. This did not stop him from beginning work on a new novel, Fort comme la mort ; translated as Strong as Death , , and traveling again to Africa, a trip that was to bear fruit in the writing of "Allouma," the lead story in one of the last collections that was to be published during his lifetime, La Main gauche The Left Hand, The title for this volume evokes the expression "mariage de la main gauche" left-hand marriage , which refers to common-law marriages, and, indeed, all but one of the stories feature extramarital liaisons.

    However, perhaps the most interesting stories of this collection are the two set in Africa, "Allouma" and "Un Soir" "One Evening," , for both contain lengthy mediations on women. As the incarnation of the incomprehensible, she becomes a symbol of woman--so often the mysterious other in Maupassant's work--and of the indigenous population of her country, which cannot be tamed or understood by the "conquering" French colonists: That Maupassant used the figure of a woman to express his anticolonial sentiments is highly significant. Moreover, for all of its apparent differences, the other story set in Africa, "Un Soir," also recounts the anguish of suspicion and the frustrating impenetrability of women, and, once again, reference is made to the eyes.

    Upon suspecting his mistress of infidelity, the protagonist attempts to discern the truth in her glance: The revenge he exacts upon a defenseless octopus forms the substance of this strange narrative. Whereas in the early work, women are often portrayed either as victims or as "possessions" of men, the general shift in subject from peasant women and prostitutes to high-society women is accompanied by an increasing tendency to portray women as tormentors and men as victims. Maupassant's last two novels, Fort comme la mort and Notre cour ; translated as The Human Heart , , differ from previous works not only in the milieu they describe--that of the indolent rich--but also in the increasingly active role played by women, who, innocently or knowingly perfidious, cause untold suffering in their male admirers.

    Maupassant began work on Fort comme la mort in the spring of ; a study of the manuscript reveals extensive corrections, suggesting that he had still not mastered his new, "sentimental" style. The rigorously indifferent persona he projected in the early works was clearly more "natural" to him; what is more, his illness impeded his progress, and he was unable to meet even his self-imposed deadlines.

    Despite these difficulties, he managed to complete the novel in about eight months. Although it is not highly regarded today, Maupassant's fifth novel was hailed at the time of its appearance as the first work that exposed a chink in the armor of its author's celebrated indifference. The principal theme, the pain of aging, is treated with compassion and sensitivity.

    The main character, Olivier Bertin, is a salon artist whose specialty is portraiture. The novel describes his love affair with one of his subjects, the Parisian socialite Any de Guilleroy, their mutual pain at the ravages of aging, which includes for Bertin a frustrating artistic sterility, and Bertin's gradual realization that he has fallen in love with Any's daughter, Annette, who appears to him like a younger version of her mother.

    The anguish of this unrequited autumnal love is described with particular poignancy, as is that of Bertin's waning talent, and critics have been quick to point to the well-documented decline in Maupassant's creative imagination as a source for this novel. Sullivan goes so far as to suggest that the novel itself, by its very weaknesses and by a "confusion of method," bears witness to this decline. Maupassant's early novels are rigorously objective.

    With Pierre et Jean , his first psychological novel, he retained the objective method to the extent possible, making ample use of gesture, dialogue, and interior monologue to expose his characters' thoughts, and religiously avoiding overt identification with one or another of his characters. It is as if the task of writing a psychological novel focused on the Parisian aristocracy reputedly inspired by Paul Bourget could not be carried out without adopting an "alien" perspective, that of the artist.

    Whereas Maupassant felt at ease in the worlds he had described previously--those of the peasants, the petty functionaries, the clientele of the spa--the aristocratic milieu remained foreign to him, despite the many hours he spent in high society. Unfortunately, in his attempt to combine the psychological approach with the objective in an analysis of this milieu, Maupassant was not entirely successful, although both novels have much to recommend them.

    By choosing an artist as protagonist, Maupassant was following in the footsteps of many nineteenth-century French authors, among them Balzac, Edmond and Jules de Goncourt , Huysmans, and Zola. More significant, however, is his decision to highlight the period of his hero's decline, for in so doing he was able to express his anxieties regarding the value of his art and the impending demise of his talent. Moreover, by making his artist a bachelor, he was able to portray convincingly the unhappiness of the older man, who, having shunned marriage in a spirit of fierce independence, finds that his solitude weighs heavily upon him in his declining years.

    The irony is that Bertin has not managed to avoid the ultimately destructive company of women. And despite the rather sympathetic feminine portraits found in Fort comme la mort indeed, the descriptions of Any's suffering--although tinged with irony--are poignant , one cannot ignore the impression that Bertin's artistic sterility, while attributed primarily to age, also results at least in part from the negative influence of the opposite sex. If he originally owed his success as a portrait artist entirely to his female subjects, who inspired him by their beauty, the torture inflicted upon him by Any and Annette, however innocent, leads first to the death of his creative powers, then to his biological death.

    This theme is further developed in Notre cour , the last of Maupassant's completed novels. Cold, artificial, and incapable of real love, she nevertheless inspires love in others, and she feeds hungrily upon the attention of her suitors. In the end he returns to his Paris socialite, but he takes Elisabeth along for comfort. Her effect upon them has been decisive: For his part, Mariolle has exchanged all aesthetic ambitions for the unique goal of winning her heart: The novel records Mariolle's wretched slavery to her and to the superficial world of which she is a symbol.

    While this is certainly true, it is significant that Maupassant chose to emphasize the plight of Mariolle--of all his characters, the one most completely destroyed, dispossessed of the creative impulse, by his contact with a woman. He belonged to her more than she belonged to herself. And she was happy. Her role as a heartless allumeuse tease, but in the sense of one who inflames desire in others is underlined not only by the anglophonic resonances of her name, Burne Maupassant knew English and had traveled to England in , but by other references to fire in the novel.

    Consumed by his love for this woman, Mariolle no longer exists except in relationship to her. With Notre cour , the sun was setting upon Maupassant's creative life, and the intense despair he felt is reflected in the hopelessness of the situation depicted in his last completed novel. She plants a seed of doubt in her husband's head by suggesting that one of her children is not his, thereby dispossessing him of his confidence and peace of mind for six years, until she reveals that she has lied. Considering Maupassant's obsessive preoccupation with the illegitimate son and the horror of pregnancy, as expressed in Une Vie and Mont-Oriol , it is perhaps easy to understand why the woman who refuses to submit to the laws of biological reproduction would be presented as an ideal.

    The last--and no doubt one of the most chilling--of Maupassant's stories about illegitimacy appears in the same collection. A Christ figure who is forced to accept the responsibility for producing a child who appears as the incarnation of vice, the priest takes his own life. The collection includes another tale of dispossession recounted in the fantastic mode, "Qui sait?

    Œuvres complètes

    The narrator of this tale, returning home one night to see all of his possessions leaving his house under their own power, commits himself to an asylum. The three tales just summarized, considered among the finest of Maupassant's entire production, thus accurately reflect his bleak vision at the close of his career, a vision brought into even sharper focus when one considers the nostalgia for the carefree days of rowing on the Seine evoked in "Mouche" "Fly," , another story in this collection.

    Tu me fais enfermer! C'est toi qui est fou, tu m'entends! C'est toi le fou de la famille! You're having me locked up! You're the one who's crazy, do you understand! You're the crazy one in the family! Despite their fragmentary state, these unfinished works are valuable to the Maupassant scholar for several reasons. One detects an eleventh-hour realization on Maupassant's part that he had reached an impasse with the high-society psychological novel. The return to the war of , a Norman setting, and an objective technique brings the reader full circle. The novel's heroine, a provincial countess on the eve of giving birth to her second child, sees her home invaded by brutal Prussian soldiers who proceed to beat her into submission, maiming her fetus.

    A violent diatribe against the sadistic Divinity that could permit such cruelty and injustice was to have been included in the novel, echoing similar sentiments uttered by other characters throughout Maupassant's fiction as in "Moiron" [] , but with particular vehemence in the last works. If Maupassant's suffering heroes are often portrayed as Christ figures, the figure of God the Father is always presented as malevolent. As the summer of approached, Maupassant was again seized with his old wanderlust.

    Tassart, who followed him through the south of France, takes note in his journal of his master's repeated consultations with physicians in a desperate attempt to arrest the progress of his illness. He also notes, not without alarm, his master's repeated sexual encounters, and the exhaustion that followed them.

    One can trace the same progression in his fictional universe. Maupassant made an unsuccessful attempt at taking his life on the night of January On 7 January he was interned at Dr. Blanche's mental hospital in Passy, near his beloved Seine. For the next eighteen months, he knew a terrifying succession of hallucinations, seizures, convulsions, and attacks of delirium. He died on 6 July , at the age of forty-two, of third-stage syphilis. Since , thanks largely to the structuralist interest in narratology, there has been a growing appreciation of the extraordinary complexity of the short-story form, and Maupassant, as one of its most successful practitioners, has been rehabilitated, so to speak.

    Two volumes of stories Contes et nouvelles appeared in and The publication of a volume devoted to the novels Romans in is probably even more significant, since, with the sole exception of Pierre et Jean , which was the object of a series of scholarly articles in the s, his novels, although popular during his lifetime, were until recently not deemed original enough to merit scholarly scrutiny.

    Despite this evidence of a growing respect for his novelistic accomplishments, the judgment of posterity still seems to favor his short fiction. Eschewing the representation of narrowly focused social and political problems, Maupassant captured in his art the timeless joys and tragedies of human existence, and his characters, as recognizable today as they were one hundred years ago, have withstood the test of time. The photographic appeal of his narratives continues to attract playwrights and filmmakers, and many of his stories have been adapted for screen and stage.

    Maupassant, always a popular favorite, is no longer regarded as facile, a writer to be read in one's youth and then put aside for more "serious" authors, but a worthy object of study in his own right. Nizet, , pp. A Centennial Bibliography, London: Mercure de France, Georges Normandy, Maupassant Paris: Normandy, Maupassant intime Paris: Normandy, La Fin de Maupassant Paris: Editions de France, Stanley Jackson, Guy de Maupassant London: Paul Morand, Vie de Maupassant Paris: Borel, Maupassant et l'androgyne Paris: Editions du Livre Moderne, A Lion in the Path New York: Editions du Seuil, Armand Lanoux, Maupassant le bel ami Paris: Michael Lerner, Maupassant New York: Henri Troyat, Maupassant Paris: Marie-Claire Bancquart, Boule de suif et autres contes normands Paris: Bancquart, Maupassant conteur fantastique Paris: Philippe Bonnefis, Comme Maupassant Lille: Presses Universitaires de Lille, Charles Castella, Structures romanesques et vision sociale chez Maupassant Lausanne: Editions de l'Age d'Homme, Henry James, Partial Portraits London: Jacques Lecarme and Bruno Vercier, eds.

    Presses Universitaires de Vincennes, Edward Sullivan, Maupassant the Novelist Princeton: Princeton University Press, Barron's Educational Series, Presses Universitaires de France, Leo Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant London: Juris Druck und Verlag, Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant. French Writer - Mary Donaldson-Evans University of Delaware. Nineteenth-Century French Fiction Writers: Naturalism and Beyond, Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol.