An Incident in the Life of the Immortal Writer Guy de Maupassant
Sometime between writing a letter to Pope Leo XIII to build luxury tombs for “immortals” like him — “tombs inside which a current of water, either hot or cold, would wash and preserve the bodies”[i] — and writing the short story Boule de Suif (translated to Ball of Tallow, among others) which became part of Evenings at Médan, an anthology of Naturalist literature championed by Emile Zola, Guy de Maupassant’s stars shone brightly on the literary firmament.
During that period of time Maupassant led what most writers would call the ideal life: an enviable combination of wealth, fame, power, and people and, at least for that period of time, health. There were others too with rise as phenomenal, like a certain teenager going by the name of Hugo von Hoffmansthal who appeared and vanished heroically in Vienna a decade or so later, but none equalling Maupassant’s power of sustenance in the fragile public memory.
Born to an aristocratic family in Normandy, France, Maupassant was schooled to become a writer. His mother, well-read in classical literature and a part of the literary coterie, wished for her son to befriend and learn from the legendary writer Gustave Flaubert. The novelist’s influence on Maupassant was evident from an early age. Both the writers apart from sharing a common realist bent in their verse knew the need to balance their personal and public life and valued solitude. Further as Julian Barnes points out in a London Review of Books essay, they “were profoundly suspicious of marriage and emotional entanglement; both were pessimistic and melancholic, oppressed by human stupidity and easily moved to disgust at the whole business of living.” Yet Maupassant had a voice which was distinctly his own, standing tall over his contemporaries who ceded their position immediately after Evenings at Médan to allow him the throne of undisputed prince of the new French literature.
In the succeeding years of his fame, Maupassant began building an identity far removed from the Flaubertian ideals of never tallying money with literature, keeping the writer from influencing the text, and patiently working towards perfecting words before sending them for publishing. Maupassant preferred calling himself marchand de prose, literature became a means to pay for his high living and he believed that if not writing such was his calibre that he could have picked up any other vocation, including painting, and been as successful. In about a decade he composed six complete novels, two unfinished, 300 short stories and a great number of journalistic pieces writing under a pseudonym; the speed as Barnes points out was such: “In 1884 he published more than a story a week; in 1886 three every two weeks.”; and the texts gradually started becoming more and more autobiographical constantly merging fact and fiction.
Accolades followed justly, and the vibrant life continued with many liaisons and improved financial circumstances, after a drop in family fortunes in-between, before syphilis caught on. However, there was still a bastion neither Maupassant nor Honore de Balzac, Flaubert or Zola before him could conquer. The academia remained unmoved by the latest literary star, which is perhaps perfectly normal and very few writers are known to take this to heart. But Maupassant, as Zola described him “the happiest and the unhappiest of men” had to be accepted. Since he had begun as the perfectly formed writer at the age of 28, he had not known defeat and even the slightest possibility of such a thing were met with cocksure disbelief.
So on a night after returning from dinner with his mother, Maupassant decided to stamp his invincibility on the face of the earth. Francois Tassart, his butler who later released a memoir of his life with the writer, heard a pistol shot and rushed to his bedroom only to find the writer delighted to be able to narrate to him, “I am invulnerable, I am immortal.” And as if any substantiation were being asked for he put the barrel to his head again and fired another shot following, “I have just shot myself in the head with a pistol and am unharmed. You don’t believe me? Watch!”
Thus convinced about his immortality both in living and in letters, it didn’t take him long before giving the game a third chance. Picking up a metal letter opener from his desk he went on to perform one of the goriest experiments of all literary lives with the conviction that “the blood would not flow.” “Maupassant without thinking twice moves from theory to practice,” wrote Alberto Savinio describing the incident in his Maupassant and “the Other”, “…stabs his throat in a demonstration of invulnerability to the knife as well…”
He from who followed a legion of writers was never to write again. Spending the rest of his life on bed, amusing himself with news of his madness in Parisian newspapers, trying to shake hands with his own reflection, licking the walls of his room and then one day, as if such is the norm, asking Tassart to hand him a straitjacket as casually as, in the words of Savinio, “you would ask a waiter for a beer.”[i]