Maupassant Magic

Written by Guy de Maupassant

Narrated by Peter Joyce

Possessed of a... voracious sexual appetite, bitter and frequently disillusioned by the history of his country and the foibles of its people is not a description that does justice to the tortured soul that was Guy de Maupassant. He was also a compassionate and deeply patriotic man, volunteering to fight for his country in the Franco-Prussian War at the age of 20 and again saw action reporting on the French campaign in Tunisia in 1881. Unfortunately these irreconcilable internal conflicts eventually led to syphilis, hallucination, attempted suicide, madness and an early death in an asylum at the age of 43-most of which horror was self predicted in ‘The Horla’. During his short life, however, he wrote over 300 short stories-as well as 6 novels and the vast canon of his original and unusual tales placed him at the pinnacle of world literature as the master storyteller. The stories presented here are: A Piece of String, The Chairmender, The Diamond Necklace, The Little Soldiers, Two Fishermen, Boule de Suif (Fatball), Madame Tellier’s House, The Dowry, A Coward, The Horla.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Assembled Stories
• Release date: Jan 11, 2006
• ISBN: 9781860152986

Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant was a nineteenth-century French author, remembered as a master of the short story form, who depicted human lives, destinies, and social forces in disillusioned and often pessimistic terms. He was a protégé of Gustave Flaubert, and his stories are characterized by economy of style and efficient, seemingly effortless dénouements. Born in 1850 at the late–sixteenth century Château de Miromesnil, de Maupassant was the first son of Laure Le Poittevin and Gustave de Maupassant, who both came from prosperous bourgeois families. Until the age of thirteen, de Maupassant lived with his mother at Étretat in Normandy. The Franco-Prussian War broke out soon after his graduation from college in 1870, and he enlisted as a volunteer. In his later years he developed a constant desire for solitude, an obsession for self-preservation, and a fear of death and paranoia of persecution. In 1892, de Maupassant attempted suicide. He was committed to the private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died in 1893.