English core #5 Context

Guy de massuantes

• Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant was popular French writer. He was born on August 5 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil, and died on July 6 1893.

• He wrote 300 short stories, 6 novels, three travel books. His first published story, "Boule de Suif" ("Ball of Fat",1880), is often considered his masterpiece.

• He was the first son of Laure Le Poittevin and Gustave de Maupassant, both from prosperous bourgeois families. When Maupassant was 11 and his brother Hervé was five, his mother, risked social disgrace to obtain a legal separation from husband.

• After the separation, Laure Le Poittevin kept her two sons. Maupassant’s mother the most influential figure in the young boy’s life. Until the age of thirteen, Guy happily lived with his mother, to whom he was deeply devoted to. At age thirteen, he was sent to the seminary of Yvetot, near Rouen for classical studies.

• Next year, in autumn, he was sent to the Lycée Pierre-Corneille in Rouen where he proved a good scholar indulging in poetry and taking a prominent part in theatricals. In October 1868, at the age of 18, he saved the famous poet Algernon Charles Swinburne from drowning off the coast of Étretat.

• He graduated from college in 1870. In 1871, he left Normandy and moved to Paris where he spent ten years as a clerk in the Navy Department.

• The decade from 1880 to 1891 was the most fertile period of Maupassant's life. Made famous by his first short story, his talent and practical business sense made him wealthy.

• In 1881 he published his first volume of short stories under the title of La Maison Tellier; it reached its twelfth edition within two years. In 1883 he finished his first novel, Une Vie (translated into English as A Woman's Life), 25,000 copies of which were sold in less than a year. His second novel Bel Ami, which came out in 1885, had thirty-seven printings in four months.

• On January 2, 1892, Maupassant tried to commit suicide, and was committed to the private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy, in Paris, where he died on July 6, 1893, by cutting his throat.

"The Necklace" or "The Diamond Necklace" is a short story by Guy De Maupassant, first published on 17th February 1884 in the French newspaper Le Gaulois. The story has become one of Maupassant's popular works and is well known for its ending.