Guy de Maupassant

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on 5 August 1850 in Normandy, the region that supplied the setting for much of his fiction. His parents separated when he was a boy, and he was raised mostly by his mother, Laure, who was a childhood friend of the novelist Gustave Flaubert. He went to school in Rouen, served in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, and then spent most of the next decade as a clerk in government ministries in Paris, rowing on the Seine at weekends.

Throughout those years Flaubert acted as his literary mentor, reading his work and making him rewrite it. Maupassant’s first great success, “Boule de Suif” (1880), a story about a prostitute and her fellow coach passengers during the Prussian occupation, appeared in a collection by several writers of Émile Zola’s circle and made him famous almost overnight. In the decade that followed he wrote around three hundred stories and six novels, including Bel-Ami (1885). Most are realist: precise, unsentimental and often cruel portraits of peasants, clerks, soldiers, wives and the Paris middle classes. His economy of construction made him one of the most imitated short-story writers in the world.

Running through that work, though, is a smaller body of stories about fear, obsession, hallucination and madness. They became more frequent as his health declined. Maupassant had contracted syphilis as a young man, and in his last years it attacked his nervous system. After a suicide attempt in January 1892 he was committed to a private clinic in Paris, where he died on 6 July 1893, a month short of his forty-third birthday.

That biography makes his horror hard to read at a distance. The Horla (1887), the final version of a story he wrote twice, is the diary of a man who comes to believe an invisible being is living in his house, drinking his water and taking over his will. It is one of the great studies of a mind failing, and one of the ancestors of the modern invisible-monster story. A Tress of Hair is a short study of an obsession with a relic of the dead, and The Apparition is a classic old man’s ghost story with no explanation at all.

Read “The Apparition” first, then “The Horla.”