Guy de Maupassant

A French writer, born in Normandy in 1850 and dead in Paris in 1893, generally regarded as the greatest short-story writer in the French language. He worked as a government clerk through the 1870s while Gustave Flaubert taught him to write, broke through in 1880 with the story Boule de Suif ('Ball of Fat'), and then in about ten years produced roughly three hundred stories and six novels, including Bel-Ami, his novel of the Paris press. Syphilis destroyed his mind and he died at forty-two in an asylum at Passy, on the western edge of Paris.

Yes, and it is the central fact of his career. Maupassant's mother had been a childhood friend of Gustave Flaubert, the novelist of Madame Bovary, and from the early 1870s the young clerk brought his manuscripts to Flaubert's Paris apartment on the rue Murillo to be corrected. The apprenticeship ran about seven years. Flaubert refused to let him publish too soon, told him that a writer's first duty is to dig out whatever is original in himself, and in December 1878 used his connections to move him from the navy ministry to a better post at the education ministry.

Roughly three hundred short stories, alongside six novels and a large body of newspaper journalism — nearly all of it produced in the single decade from 1880 to 1890. Most of the stories appeared first in Paris newspapers, principally Le Gaulois, which he joined in May 1880, and Gil Blas, which he joined in October 1881, before being gathered into collections.

'Ball of Fat' — a coach of respectable French travellers escaping the Prussian advance in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, and the prostitute travelling with them whom they persuade to sleep with an enemy officer so the coach can pass, and whom they then treat as untouchable for having agreed. It was published on 17 April 1880 in Les Soirées de Médan ('Evenings at Médan'), a collective volume of war stories by Émile Zola and the younger writers who met at his house outside Paris, was the outstanding success of that book, and made Maupassant's name overnight. Flaubert read it and died three weeks later.

Georges Duroy, a penniless ex-railway clerk with good looks and no scruples, who rises from a hack job on a Paris newspaper to running it, using a succession of women as steps; 'Bel-Ami', handsome friend, is what they call him. Serialized in the newspaper Gil Blas in 1885, the novel is a portrait of the press, politics and finance of the Third Republic — the parliamentary regime that followed France's defeat of 1870 — as a single corrupt machine — and one of its characters says outright that it is still through women that a man gets ahead fastest.

That is the story, and it is an anecdote attributed to him rather than a documented routine. Maupassant genuinely opposed the tower: he was among the artists who signed the protest printed in the newspaper Le Temps on 14 February 1887, three weeks after construction began on what was to be the entrance arch of the 1889 world's fair. The tower's own official history then records that once it was built he said he often lunched on the first floor, because it was the only place in the city where he would not see it. Nobody can now establish how often he actually went.

Of late-stage syphilis. He was infected in the mid-1870s and diagnosed in January 1877; the disease eventually reached his brain. On 2 January 1892 he cut his throat with a paper knife and survived, and four days later he was committed to the asylum of Doctor Émile Blanche at Passy, on the western edge of Paris. He died there on 6 July 1893 of general paresis — the paralysis and mental collapse of the disease's final stage — a month short of forty-three.

In a rising sequence of addresses that tracks his income exactly. As an unpaid ministry trainee from 1872 he had a dark ground-floor room at 2 rue Moncey, below Place Clichy; in July 1876 he moved to 17 rue Clauzel. After Boule de Suif made him money came 83 rue Dulong, then 10 rue de Montchanin in July 1884, then 14 avenue Victor-Hugo in December 1889 and 24 rue Boccador in July 1890 — by which time he was living in the expensive streets west of the Champs-Élysées that his own novels describe.