About this time appeared the first symptoms of the malady which destroyed him; he wrote less, and Le Horla (1887) sug gests that he was already subject to alarming hallucinations.
Restored to some extent by a sea-voyage, recorded in Sur l'eau (1888), he went back to short stories in Le Rosier de Madame Husson (1888), a burst of Rabelaisian humour equal to any thing he had ever written. His novels Pierre et Jean (1888), Fort comme la mort (1889), and Notre coeur (189o) are touched with a profounder sympathy than had hitherto distinguished him ; and this pity for the tragedy of life is deepened in some of the tales in Inutile beaute (189o). With La Vie errante (189o), a volume of travel, Maupassant's career practically closed. Musotte, a theatrical piece written with M. Jacques Normand, was published in 1891. He now began to take an interest in religious problems and for a while made the Imitation his handbook; but by this time inherited nervous maladies, aggravated by excessive physical exercises and by the imprudent use of drugs, had undermined his constitution; his misanthropy deepened and he suffered from curi ous delusions. A victim of general paralysis of which La Folie des grandeurs was one of the symptoms, he purposed passing the winter of 1891 at Cannes, but his reason slowly gave way; in Jan. 1892 he attempted suicide, and was removed to Paris, where he died in painful circumstances on July 6, 1893. He is buried in the cemetery of Montparnasse.
Maupassant began as a follower of Flaubert and of M. Zola, but, whatever the masters may have called themselves, they both remained essentially roinantiques. The pupil is the last of the "naturalists": he even destroyed naturalism, since he did all that can be done in that direction. He had no psychology, no theories of art, no moral or strong social prejudices, no disturbing imagi nation, no wealth of perplexing ideas. Undisturbed by any external influence, his marvellous vision enabled him to become a supreme observer and given his literary sense, the rest was simple. He prided himself in having no invention; he described nothing that he had not seen. It is no paradox to say that his marked limita tions made him the incomparable artist that he was.
Fundamentally he finds all men alike. In every grade of life he finds the same ferocious, cunning, animal instincts at work: it is not a gay world, but he knows no other ; he is possessed by the dread of growing old, of ceasing to enjoy; the horror of death haunts him like a spectre. Maupassant does not prefer good to bad, one man to another; he never pauses to argue about the meaning of life; his one aim is to discover the hidden aspect of things, to relate what he has observed, to give an objective ren dering of it, and he has seen so intensely and so serenely that he is a most exact transcriber. And his style is exceedingly simple and strong; he is content to use the humblest word if only it conveys the exact picture of the thing seen. In ten years he produced some thirty volumes. With the exception of Pierre et Jean, his novels, excellent as they are, scarcely represent him at his best ; a few pieces found among his papers were published posthumously ; Amitie amoureuse (1897), a correspondence dedicated to his mother, is probably unauthentic ; among the prefaces he wrote, only one—an introduction to a French prose version of Swin burne's Poems and Ballads—is likely to interest English readers; and of over two hundred contes a proportion must be rejected. But enough will remain to vindicate his claim to a permanent place in literature as the most perfect master of the short story.
See F. Brunetiere, Le Roman naturalists (1883) ; L. Lemaitre, Les Contemporains (vols. i., v., vi.) ; R. Doumic, Ecrivains d'aujourd'hui (1894) ; an introduction by Henry James to The Odd Number . . . (1891) ; a critical preface by the earl of Crewe to Pierre and Jean (1902) ; A. Symons, Studies in Prose and Verse (1904). There are many references to Maupassant in the Journal des Goncourt, and some correspondence with Marie Bashkirtseff was printed with Further Memoirs of that lady in 19o1. See also J. Rolland, Guy de Maupassant (1924) ; E. Boyd, Guy de Maupassant (1926) ; P. Borel, Le Destin tra gique de Guy de Maupassant, d'apres des documents originaux (1927).