Night was a very different matter. It was dense, thicker than the very walls, and it was empty, so black, so immense that within it you could brush against appalling things and feel roaming and prowling around a strange, mysterious horror.

ˈsɑ̃] ; 5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular 19th-century French writer considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents. The story "Boule de Suif" ("Ball of Fat" 1880) is often accounted his masterpiece. On January 2 1892 Maupassant tried to commit suicide by cutting his throat and was committed to the celebrated private asylum of Esprit Blanche at Passy in Paris where he died on July 6 1893.

Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (French pronunciation: ​[gi d(ə) mo. Many of the stories are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s and several describe the futility of war and the innocent civilians who caught in the conflict emerge changed. The story "Boule de Suif" ("Ball of Fat" 1880) is often accounted his masterpiece.