orn on the 5th of August, 1850, near
Dieppe, in the castle of Miromesnil which he describes in Une Vie....

Maupassant, like Flaubert, was a Norman, through his mother, and through
his place of birth he belonged to that strange and adventurous race,
whose heroic and long voyages on tramp trading ships he liked to
recall. And just as the author of "Education sentimentale" seems to have
inherited in the paternal line the shrewd realism of Champagne, so de
Maupassant appears to have inherited from his Lorraine ancestors their
indestructible discipline and cold lucidity.

His childhood was passed at Etretat, his beautiful childhood; it
was there that his instincts were awakened in the unfoldment of his
prehistoric soul. Years went by in an ecstasy of physical happiness. The
delight of running at full speed through fields of gorse, the charm
of voyages of discovery in hollows and ravines, games beneath the dark
hedges, a passion for going to sea with the fishermen and, on nights
when there was no moon, for dreaming on their boats of imaginary
voyages.

Mme. de Maupassant, who had guided her son's early reading, and had
gazed with him at the sublime spectacle of nature, put, off as long as
possible the hour of separation. One day, however, she had to take the
child to the little seminary at Yvetot. Later, he became a student
at the college at Rouen, and became a literary correspondent of Louis
Bouilhet. It was at the latter's house on those Sundays in winter when
the Norman rain drowned the sound of the bells and dashed against the
window panes that the school boy learned to write poetry.

Vacation took the rhetorician back to the north of Normandy. Now it was
shooting at Saint Julien l'Hospitalier, across fields, bogs, and through
the woods. From that time on he sealed his pact with the earth, and
those "deep and delicate roots" which attached him to his native soil
began to grow. It was of Normandy, broad, fresh and virile, that he
would presently demand his inspiration, fervent and eager as a boy's
love; it was in her that he would take refuge when, weary of life, he
would implore a truce, or when he simply wished to work and revive his
energies in old-time joys. It was at this time that was born in him that
voluptuous love of the sea, which in later days could alone withdraw him
from the world, calm him, console him.

In 1870 he lived in the country, then he came to Paris to live; for,
the family fortunes having dwin