, particularly excursions in the country and canoe trips down the Seine, and by women, most often prostitutes and one night stands picked up at his favorite dive, La Grenouillere, made famous by Pierre Augueste Renoir’s celebrating painting. The symptoms of first stage syphilis appeared in 1877, and since it was that time there was no cure for the disease. “It followed its relentless course throughout the rest of his life, causing him migraine, headaches, paralysis of the ocular muscle, hallucinations, and other factors ending when the infection progressed to the central nervous system and the brain, with madness.” (Wallace 200) Maupassant was devoting a great deal of his time to writing, and he had turned to the theater, which allowed him to indulge his taste for farce. His first play, an obscene comedy entitled A La Feuifle de Rose. Maupassant spent several years on the staffs of two Parisian newspapers, the Gil- Blas and the Gaulois, often working under pseudonyms. From 1880 to 1890 he published nearly 300 short stories and six novels, a prodigious literary feat, by constantly reshaping and reworking existing stories and duplicating scenes, descriptions, and vignettes from his newspaper pieces. By the end of May 1880, just weeks after Flaubert's death, Maupassant had become a regular contributor to a respected Paris newspaper, the Gaulois. His first publications were stories written in the 1870s and reworked for the occasion under the global title of Les Dimanches d'un bourgeois de Paris, the Sundays of a Parisian Bourgeois. Harvard published Maupassant's first collection of stories. Approximately half of the stories had appeared in print previously. Maupassant had been working intermittently since 1877, that of his first novel. He interrupted his writing, first to travel to Algeria as a reporter for the Gaulois. Then to continue to write stories for the periodical press. The death of Turgenev, one of Maupassant's...
