Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) grew up in Normandy, fought in the Franco-Prussian War and worked as a clerk in Paris ministries while learning to write under the guidance of Gustave Flaubert, an old friend of his mother. Boule de Suif, in 1880, made him famous.
In barely ten years he wrote some three hundred short stories and six novels, including Bel-Ami, and became the master of the short story in France. He loved rowing on the Seine and the sea, but illness clouded his last years, and he died in a clinic at forty-two.