Guy de Maupassant a sauvé la vie d'un poète anglais à Etretat !

Serge Van den Broucke, historian and heritage journalist, recounts... The autumn of 1868 brought to Étretat, in Normandy, one of those singular presences whose memory small seaside towns long preserve, even when the witnesses have passed away. Among the still-rare villas, the grassy valleys sloping down to the English Channel, and the high chalk cliffs eroded by the tides for millennia, a young English poet with flamboyant red hair was living in semi-retirement, about whom the locals were unsure what to think. His name was Algernon Charles Swinburne. And there, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, a teenager who would become one of the greatest French writers saved him from certain death. This audacious boy was Guy de Maupassant!