Guy de Maupassant was born in 1850 at Miromesnil Castle in the Seine-Maritime department. Encouraged by Gustave Flaubert, he turned to the naturalistic-pessimistic novella; at first more depicting the milieu, later with a strongly psychological basic attitude, with fidelity to reality and imagination. In just a few years, the veteran of the Franco-Prussian War wrote almost 300 novellas, several novels and a wealth of newspaper articles, including The House of Tellier (1881), Miss Fifi (1882), Yvette (1884), The Horla (1887), Bel ami (1885) and Our Heart (1890). Guy de Maupassant died in mental derangement in Paris in 1893.