Guy de Maupassant

There was a man who once said the Eiffel Tower was such an eyesore that he had lunch every day in its restaurant just so he wouldn’t have to look at it. That man was Guy de Maupassant. Now, if this little anecdote makes you grin, buckle up. There’s a whole lot more to this gloriously peculiar Frenchman who, despite being one of the founding fathers of the modern short story, lived his life like a man auditioning for the role of tortured genius in a particularly stylish 19th-century soap opera.

Maupassant didn’t just write stories. He conjured them, chiselled them, hurled them at the public like perfectly formed literary grenades. In just over a decade, he wrote more than 300 of them. Some are tiny masterpieces of human observation; others are dark, twisted portraits of paranoia, delusion and the sheer bloody ridiculousness of being alive. He was basically the literary equivalent of that friend who tells a story at dinner, and by the end, half the table is laughing and the other half is questioning everything they thought they knew about love, death and the human condition.

He came from Normandy, born in 1850, and was raised in a landscape of salt air, stormy skies and suspiciously brooding cows. It was a region that clung fiercely to its own traditions, and Maupassant kept a foot in that earthy world of peasants and provincial life even while orbiting the glittering salons of Paris. His stories are full of farmers, fishermen, petty officials, disillusioned soldiers, weary courtesans and cynical priests. Rarely heroes. Always human. Often absurd.

Flaubert, who was a family friend, spotted something early on. Not just talent, but that rare, slippery thing: voice. He mentored Maupassant with the kind of rigour that would get you arrested for psychological abuse today. Endless rewrites. Merciless edits. Yet it paid off. Flaubert taught him that every word mattered, that you should be able to slice a sentence open and see it still pumping blood. And Maupassant took that advice to heart, writing with a kind of scalpel-precision that made his stories gleam like polished bone.

He started with poetry, as many sensitive young men of the 19th century did, but it was short fiction that truly clicked. His breakthrough came with “Boule de Suif,” a story about a prostitute caught between patriotism and hypocrisy during the Franco-Prussian War. It caused a literary scandal, which, in Paris at the time, was basically how you knew you were doing something right. From there, the stories poured out. Tales of war, greed, madness, lust, cowardice, longing. Always with that wicked glint in the eye.

There was something very modern about Maupassant, even when he was writing about farmhands or faltering aristocrats. He didn’t moralise. He didn’t soften edges. He let people be as awful and complicated as they usually are. One minute you’re reading a gentle tale about a man walking home through the countryside, and the next, you’re in a psychological horror spiral where nothing makes sense and your narrator may or may not be possessed by a malevolent invisible being. Cheers, Guy.

That story, by the way, is “Le Horla,” and it remains one of the most unnerving things ever written. Not because of gore or ghosts, but because it quietly peels back the veil between sanity and madness until you’re not quite sure which side you’re on. Maupassant wrote it while he was, quite frankly, losing the plot. Syphilis had wormed its way into his brain, and paranoia had begun to set up camp. He believed he was being watched. He claimed a doppelgänger haunted him. He stopped trusting mirrors. And yet, even as the world around him blurred into hallucination, he kept writing with terrifying clarity.

He was, to put it mildly, eccentric. He loved speed. He owned several yachts and adored sailing, particularly in the Mediterranean, where he could escape both the critics and the creeping spectre of his own mind. He also had a rather morbid fear of death, especially of being buried alive, which led to all sorts of bizarre instructions regarding his funeral. Spoiler: he still died. That bit he couldn’t rewrite.

Women fascinated him. He never married, but he kept detailed journals of his encounters with prostitutes, which historians alternately describe as “colourful” and “deeply unsettling.” He saw marriage as a trap, a form of social taxidermy. His stories often reflect this, skewering the institution with the kind of dry, unsentimental wit that makes you wonder whether he ever actually smiled.

He worked for years as a government clerk, which he hated with the white-hot fury of a man born to do literally anything else. The bureaucracy bored him so much he started sneaking away to write stories during office hours. Imagine your colleague is quietly producing literary masterpieces while you’re trying to fix the bloody typewriter ribbon.

Despite his cynicism, there’s tenderness in Maupassant’s work too. A sense of the quiet ache beneath the daily nonsense. Stories like “The Necklace” and “The Piece of String” tap into something very universal: the way tiny decisions spiral into absurd consequences, how pride undoes us, how the world shrugs indifferently while we unravel. He didn’t need big plots. Just a single moment, beautifully dissected.

He could be very funny, in that particularly French way where comedy and cruelty dance together in the same sentence. He understood that humans are basically ridiculous, and he made sure we knew it too. There’s a story about a man so obsessed with the health benefits of cold baths that he ruins his life. Another about a woman who fakes grief so well, she ends up believing it herself. Tragedy, farce, existential crisis – all in a few pages. Maupassant was the original micro-doser of literary despair.

He wasn’t much for literary theory or movements. Naturalism, realism, impressionism – he floated among them but refused to pledge allegiance. He preferred the world as it was: flawed, absurd, grotesque. He didn’t want to explain it. He wanted to reflect it, like a funhouse mirror that somehow told the truth.

In his final years, the lines between fiction and hallucination blurred completely. He became convinced people were plotting against him. He thought he was being poisoned. One day, he tried to slit his own throat, but he botched it and was committed to an asylum. There, in a private clinic in Passy, he faded out of the world like one of his own tragic characters. He died in 1893, aged just 42. A meteor of a man, burned out far too fast.

And yet the stories remain. Sharper than ever. You read Maupassant now, and it doesn’t feel like dust and corsets. It feels like now. People scheming, yearning, pretending, failing. The strange machinery of human interaction grinding on, as ludicrous and heartbreaking as it’s ever been.

There’s a particularly odd charm in how this gloomy, suspicious, mirror-hating man could understand humanity so clearly. He saw us, not through rose-tinted lenses or with moral judgement, but with a kind of amused fatalism. We are what we are, his stories say. And what we are is frequently absurd.

Maupassant didn’t change the world. He didn’t want to. But he did make it clearer, for those willing to squint through the haze of pretence. He captured moments, precise and brutal and often a bit hilarious. He reminded us that madness might lurk just beneath the surface. That pride goeth before an existential pratfall. That sometimes the most terrifying thing isn’t a monster under the bed, but the quiet voice in your own head, whispering just how pointless it all is.

And yet, somehow, in the face of all that, you keep reading. Maybe even laughing. Because Guy de Maupassant, oddball and genius, made it okay to look at the mess and say, “Yes, well, that tracks.”

Even if you have to eat lunch inside the Eiffel Tower to keep your sanity.