Guy de Maupassant's Tales of Insanity - A Collection of Short Stories
()
About this ebook
Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant was a French writer and poet considered to be one of the pioneers of the modern short story whose best-known works include "Boule de Suif," "Mother Sauvage," and "The Necklace." De Maupassant was heavily influenced by his mother, a divorcée who raised her sons on her own, and whose own love of the written word inspired his passion for writing. While studying poetry in Rouen, de Maupassant made the acquaintance of Gustave Flaubert, who became a supporter and life-long influence for the author. De Maupassant died in 1893 after being committed to an asylum in Paris.
Read more from Guy De Maupassant
Famous Modern Ghost Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Necklace and Other Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Big Book of Christmas Tales: 250+ Short Stories, Fairytales and Holiday Myths & Legends Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Very French Christmas: The Greatest French Holiday Stories of All Time Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Guy de Maupassant MEGAPACK ®: 144 Novels and Short Stories Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Harvard Classics: All 71 Volumes Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsTRICK OR TREAT Boxed Set: 200+ Eerie Tales from the Greatest Storytellers: Horror Classics, Mysterious Cases, Gothic Novels, Monster Tales & Supernatural Stories: Sweeney Todd, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Frankenstein, The Vampire, Dracula, Sleepy Hollow, From Beyond… Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBoule De Suif: Bilingual Edition (English – French) Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/513 Short Scary Stories: Masterpieces of the greatest writers Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5The Necklace and Other Short Stories Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Une Vie: A Woman’s Life Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings
Related to Guy de Maupassant's Tales of Insanity - A Collection of Short Stories
Related ebooks
Guy de Maupassant's Tales of Murder - A Collection of Short Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGuy de Maupassant's Tales of Tragedy - A Collection of Short Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGuy de Maupassant's Tales of Unwanted Children - A Collection of Short Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFor Senior Officers Only: (Prisoner # 170650) Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Continued Pursuit Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBloodbursts Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsMy Own Story Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsCrime and Punishment Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5What Do I Know?: People, Politics and the Arts Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Intent Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsA Free, Unsullied Land Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Worst Man in the World Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Murder of Harriet Monckton Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant - Volume VIII: "Patriotism is a kind of religion; it is the egg from which wars are hatched" Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFor the Children Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGuy de Maupassant's Tales of Friendship - A Collection of Short Stories Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsBill Carlisle, Lone Bandit: An Autobiography Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDaughter: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Talking with Psychopaths: Letters from Serial Killers Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Stockholm Manifesto Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsIn Search of the Free Individual: The History of the Russian-Soviet Soul Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Habit of Widowhood Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsReflections: The World of Paul Monette Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDead Opposite: The Lives And Loss Of Two American Boys Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Obituary for a Bad Man Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Capgras Shift Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsFag Hag Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsSex Changes: A Memoir of Marriage, Gender, and Moving On Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
Psychological Fiction For You
Tropic of Cancer Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Trial Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Post Office: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Crime and Punishment Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Last Flight: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Good Daughter: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5My Dark Vanessa: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Yellow Wallpaper Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Grapes of Wrath Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Life of Pi: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Club: A Reese's Book Club Pick Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Persuasion Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Life She Was Given: A Moving and Emotional Saga of Family and Resilient Women Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Housemaid Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We Have Always Lived in the Castle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Sour Candy Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Head Full of Ghosts: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5You: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Golden Notebook: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Notes on an Execution: An Edgar Award Winner Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Cement Garden Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Curse of the Reaper: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Fifth Mountain: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A Certain Hunger Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Misery Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Our Town: A Play in Three Acts Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Candy House: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Foucault's Pendulum Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The St. Ambrose School for Girls Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Poisonwood Bible: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Reviews for Guy de Maupassant's Tales of Insanity - A Collection of Short Stories
0 ratings0 reviews
Book preview
Guy de Maupassant's Tales of Insanity - A Collection of Short Stories - Guy de Maupassant
Guy de Maupassant’s Tales of Insanity
A Collection of Short Stories
Copyright © 2016 Read Books Ltd.
This book is copyright and may not be
reproduced or copied in any way without
the express permission of the publisher in writing
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Contents
Guy De Maupassant
A Parricide
A Stroll
A Tress of Hair
Bertha
Clair De Lune
Denis
Madame Hermet
Mademoiselle Cocotte
The Inn
Guy De Maupassant
Henri-René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, France. He came from a prosperous family, but when Maupassant was eleven, his mother risked social disgrace by trying to secure a legal separation from her husband. After the split, Maupassant lived with his mother till he was thirteen, and inherited her love of classical literature, especially Shakespeare. Upon entering high school, he met the great author Gustave Flaubert, and despite being something of an unruly student proved himself as a good scholar, delighting in poetry and theatre.
Not long after he graduated from college in 1870, the Franco-Prussian War broke out, and Maupassant enlisted voluntarily. Afterwards, he moved to Paris, where he spent ten years as a clerk in the Navy Department, and began to write fiction under the guidance of Flaubert. At Flaubert’s home he met a number of distinguished authors, including Émile Zola and Ivan Turgenev. In 1878, Maupassant became a contributing editor of several major newspapers, including Le Figaro, Gil Blas, Le Gaulois and l’Écho de Paris, writing fiction in his spare time.
In 1880, Maupassant published his first – and, according to many, his best – short story, entitled ‘Boule de Suif’ (‘Ball of Fat’). It was an instant success. He went on to be extremely prolific during the 1880s, working methodically to produce up to four volumes of short fiction every year. In 1883 and 1885 respectively, Maupassant published Une Vie (A Woman’s Life) and Bel-Ami, both of which rank among his best-known works. In 1887, by then a very famous and very wealthy literary figure, he published what is widely regarded as his finest novel, Pierre et Jean.
As well as being a well-known opponent of the construction of the Eiffel Tower, Maupassant was a solitary, withdrawn man with an aversion to public life. In his later years, as a result of the syphilis he had contracted earlier in life, he developed a powerful fear of death and became deeply paranoid. In early 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat, and was committed to a private asylum in Paris. He died here some eighteen months later, aged 42. He penned his own epitaph: I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.
Some years later, in his autobiography, Friedrich Nietzsche called Maupassant one of the stronger race, a genuine Latin to whom I am particularly attached.
A Parricide
The lawyer had presented a plea of insanity. How could anyone explain this strange crime otherwise?
One morning, in the grass near Chatou, two bodies had been found, a man and a woman, well known, rich, no longer young and married since the preceding year, the woman having been a widow for three years before.
They were not known to have enemies; they had not been robbed. They seemed to have been thrown from the roadside into the river, after having been struck, one after the other, with a long iron spike.
The investigation revealed nothing. The boatmen, who had been questioned, knew nothing. The matter was about to be given up, when a young carpenter from a neighboring village, Georges Louis, nicknamed the Bourgeois,
gave himself up.
To all questions he only answered this:
I had known the man for two years, the woman for six months. They often had me repair old furniture for them, because I am a clever workman.
And when he was asked:
Why did you kill them?
He would obstinately answer:
I killed them because I wanted to kill them.
They could get nothing more out of him.
This man was undoubtedly an illegitimate child, put out to nurse and then abandoned. He had no other name than Georges Louis, but as on growing up he became particularly intelligent, with the good taste and native refinement which his acquaintances did not have, he was nicknamed the Bourgeois,
and he was never called otherwise. He had become remarkably clever in the trade of a carpenter, which he had taken up. He was also said to be a socialist fanatic, a believer in communistic and nihilistic doctrines, a great reader of bloodthirsty novels, an influential political agitator and a clever orator in the public meetings of workmen or of farmers.
His lawyer had pleaded insanity.
Indeed, how could one imagine that this workman should kill his best customers, rich and generous (as he knew), who in two years had enabled him to earn three thousand francs (his books showed it)? Only one explanation could be offered: insanity, the fixed idea of the unclassed individual who reeks vengeance on two bourgeois, on all the bourgeoisie, and the lawyer made a clever allusion to this nickname of The Bourgeois,
given throughout the neighborhood to this poor wretch. He exclaimed:
"Is this irony not enough to unbalance the mind of this poor wretch, who has neither father nor mother? He is an ardent republican. What am I saying? He even belongs to the same political party, the members of which, formerly shot or exiled by the government, it now welcomes with open arms this party to which arson is a principle and murder an ordinary occurrence.
"These gloomy doctrines, now applauded in public meetings, have ruined this man. He has heard republicans—even women, yes, women—ask for the blood of M. Gambetta, the blood of M. Grevy; his weakened mind gave way; he wanted blood, the blood of a bourgeois!
It is not he whom you should condemn, gentlemen; it is the Commune!
Everywhere could be heard murmurs of assent. Everyone felt that the lawyer had won his case. The prosecuting attorney did not oppose him.
Then the presiding judge asked the accused the customary question:
Prisoner, is there anything that you wish to add to your defense?
The man stood up.
He was a short, flaxen blond, with calm, clear, gray eyes. A strong, frank, sonorous voice came from this frail-looking boy and, at the first words, quickly changed the opinion which had been formed of him.
He spoke loud in a declamatory manner, but so distinctly that every word could be understood in the farthest corners of the big hall:
"Your honor, as I do not wish to go to an insane asylum, and as I even prefer death to that, I will tell everything.
"I killed this man and this woman because they were my parents.
"Now, listen, and judge me.
"A woman, having given birth to a