“Words dazzle and deceive because they are mimed by the face. But black words on a white page are the soul laid bare.”
The
story under analysis is written by a popular 19th-century French
writer Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). He belonged to the naturalistic school; is generally considered the greatest French short story writer. In his short stories Guy de Maupassant
painted a fascinating picture of French life in the 19th century.
During the 1880s Maupassant created 300 short stories,
six novels, three travel books, and one volume of verse. In tone, his
tales were marked by objectivity, highly controlled style, and sometimes
by sheer comedy. Usually they were built around simple episodes from
everyday life, which revealed the hidden sides of people. Among
Maupassant's best-known books are Une Vie (A Woman's Life, 1883), about the frustrating existence of a Norman wife and Bel-Ami (1885), which depicts an unscrupulous journalist. Pierre Et Jean (1888) was a psychological study of two brothers. Maupassant's most upsetting horror story, Le Horla (1887), was about madness and suicide. As a poet Maupassant made his debut with Des Vers (1880). In the same year he published in the anthology Soirées de Medan
(1880), edited by E. Zola, his masterpiece, "Boule De Suif" ("Ball of
Fat", 1880).
Interesting to know!!!
Maupassant had suffered from his 20s from syphilis. The disease later caused increasing mental disorder – also seen in his nightmarish stories, which have much in common with Edgar Allan Poe's supernatural visions. Critics have charted Maupassant's developing illness through his semi-autobiographical stories of abnormal psychology, but the theme of mental disorder is present even in his first collection, La Maison Tellier (1881), published at the height of his health.
On January 2, in 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat and was committed to the celebrated private asylum of Dr. Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died on July 6, 1893.
“If I could, I would stop the passage of time. But hour follows on hour, minute on minute, each second robbing me of a morsel of myself for the nothing of tomorrow. I shall never experience this moment again.”
