Page:Pierre and Jean - Clara Bell - 1902.djvu/45

Rh BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

''was born in a sixteenth-century house, the Château de Miromesnil, near Dieppe, on the 5th of August, 1850. His father, a stockbroker, claimed descent from the ancient Norman propietors of the castle. Maupassant was educated at Yvetôt and at Rouen, and became a clerk in the Paris Ministry of Marine. He was idle and unsatisfactory as an employé, and in 1870 and 1871 he left his office altogether, serving in the war as a common soldier. He returned, and rose to a high post in the Cabinet de l'Instruction Publique, but his interests now settled around athletic exercises and, more indefinitely, literature. His mother (whose maiden name was Mlle. Laure Lepoitevin) was an intimate friend of Flaubert, who, about 1873, began to notice the powerful elements which lay dormant in the intellect of Guy de Maupassant. But he was disappointed by the early sketches which he induced the young man to compose, and he placed his'' 3