La vie Errante and Other Stories

La Vie Errante and Other Stories is a collection of travel writing and short fiction by Guy de Maupassant, with the long opening piece La Vie Errante or The Wandering Life first published in 1890. The piece is one of Maupassant’s most unusual works and one of his most directly autobiographical. It is the record of a journey he made through the Mediterranean on his yacht Bel Ami, named after his successful novel of 1885, during the period when his mental and physical health were already beginning to fail and when the disease that would end his life was advancing.

The travel narrative follows Maupassant’s voyage from the French Riviera down the Italian coast to Sicily and on to Tunisia and the North African coast. The descriptions of the Mediterranean light, the African coast, the small ports and the open sea are some of the most lyrical sustained writing Maupassant ever produced. He had always been a careful observer of physical detail, particularly of weather and water and landscape, and the long uninterrupted experience of a sea voyage gave him space to write at a slower pace than his short stories usually allowed.

Underneath the travel writing is a darker presence. The book is in part a record of Maupassant’s growing isolation and his sense that his own mind was no longer reliable. There are passages of straight description that are interrupted by reflections on death, on the failure of meaning, on the question of what a writer can offer when the basic terms of consciousness themselves are slipping. These reflections give the book its haunting quality and make it a unique document among Maupassant’s work, somewhere between travel writing and confession.

The collection also includes several shorter stories from the same period in Maupassant’s career, including some of the late supernatural pieces that culminated in Le Horla. The book runs about three hundred pages and is best read with some sense of where Maupassant was in his life when he wrote it. For readers who want to see the late Maupassant beyond the famous short stories and Bel Ami, this is the essential book. It pairs naturally with Sur l’Eau, his earlier book of similar character, and with the late stories collected in Le Horla and other volumes.