French author, Guy de Maupassant died from syphilis on this day in 1893. He was aged 42.
Syphilis was at that time a very common disease in Europe, and Maupassant had moved into the tertiary stage which was a death sentence in that era. Ever the writer, he observed his own deterioration and the powerful story La Horla is about his hallucinations. The disease attacked his eyes, gave him headaches, then his nervous system began to deteriorate. Hashish, morphine, ether and cocaine were all tried, but were hopeless. “I don’t want to survive myself”, he wrote, knowing his mind was going. Cures were tried in Switzerland and around France. In 1891 he tried to cut his own throat with a paper knife, and his valet had to remove the bullets from his gun. Horrifyingly, he continued to sleep with women throughout the progress of his disease (though evidently, tertiary syphilis is not infectious).
In January 1892 he was interred in the Maison de Santé, run by Dr Blanche, in Passy. His physical functions deteriorated rapidly and soon he could not even feed himself. His obsessions with sex and with money grew out of control, he turned violent and had to be restrained in a straight-jacket. For a while he was convinced he was a dog, so howled and licked the walls. Then he grew certain that his urine was full of diamonds and had to be held back. He took on a quarrel with the God he didn’t believe in and accused his valet of stealing from him. Maupassant’s life ended in misery, confusion and illness.
Maupassant was a protégé of Gustave Flaubert and regarded him as his literary Master. For Flaubert, he did research work, and through him he met many other writers of the day – Ivan Turgenev, Alphonse Daudet, and Émile Zola. He joined many of them for riotous lunches, where they told dirty stories, wrote their own pornography and recounted their adventures in brothels.
Guy de Maupassant wrote over three hundred short stories, six novels, poems, travel books, articles, four plays and pornography. He was a hugely influential writer, establishing the modern short story form and writing stories that have been hard for others to equal when it comes to quality, intriguing twists in the tail, and an almost photographic realism. He has been labelled the greatest French short-story writer.
My Reader’s Guide includes more details about Guy de Maupassant, his life, and one of his most famous short stories, The Necklace.
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