He continued to publish short stories and a further four novels but, despite the respect and prestige he now commanded, there was a marked and growing worry in his mind. His health was beginning to deteriorate mentally as well as physically. He began hallucinating, imagining he had a doppelgänger on his tracks, and wrote increasingly on the subject of derangement and madness. Symptoms of megalomania began to manifest themselves, and his younger brother’s madness and then death exacerbated his already fragile condition. The eye trouble from which he had for long suffered became increasingly serious and he began to entertain thoughts of suicide. Numerous doctors, including his friends Dr Blanche and Dr Cazalis, were consulted as he shuttled between the place he now owned in Cannes, and Nice where he had installed his sick and ageing mother. Eventually, the balance of his mind became so disturbed that he attempted to kill himself by cutting his throat. In January 1892 he was voluntarily admitted to a maison de santé in Passy, near Paris, where he died on 6 July of the following year at the age of forty-three.

Of the roughly 330 stories Maupassant wrote during his life, most were produced during his decennium mirabile 1880–90, that is to say the decade between the death of Flaubert and the beginning of the belle époque. My selection represents, therefore, approximately one-tenth of his total output and contains some of the most familiar as well as the finest of his oeuvre. It differs from previous anthologies in English in two important respects. First, although a good, representative proportion of the best-known stories set in Normandy is included (such as ‘Boule de Suif’, ‘Hautot & Son’, ‘The Christening’), many of the stories here show Maupassant writing about the lives of those earning their living in the increasingly important urban settings of the time, notably Paris. In ‘The Jewels’, for example, Monsieur Lantin’s future wife and her mother have moved from the provinces to the capital in order to better themselves. The two peace-loving anglers caught up in the war in ‘Two Friends’ earn their livings as a Parisian watchmaker and haberdasher respectively. The collection also includes accounts of the demimonde vacationing at Riviera resorts such as Nice and Biarritz (as in ‘Rose’), as well as those travelling to other similar destinations, using the relatively recently established railway system beginning to link French citizens in ways hitherto undreamt of (‘Train Story’, ‘Idyll’ and ‘Encounter’).