Music, this complex and mysterious act, precise as algebra and vague as a dream, this art made out of mathematics and air, is simply the result of the strange properties of a little membrane. If that membrane did not exist, sound would not exist either, since in itself it is merely vibration. Would we be able to detect music without the ear? Of course not. Well, we are surrounded by things whose existence we never suspect, because we lack the organs that would reveal them to us. [Was He Mad?]

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.