Furthermore, many previous English-language collections, both British and American, include a preponderance of stories (with the exception of ‘Boule de Suif’) showing Maupassant as, if not misogynistic, at least deeply cynical in his portrayal of women. His reputation in Victorian and, even more so, Edwardian Great Britain has been perpetuated by successive generations of editors who present stories emphasizing a cavalier or superior attitude to the opposite sex, cautionary tales, possibly, for the use of unsuspecting milords up against the perceived rouerie feminine or wiles of French minxes under the Entente Cordiale. This collection seeks to redress that previous imbalance by attempting to show the great struggle the writer engages in to resist the commonly held view that it was both necessary and laudable in a man to adopt such an attitude. In reality, there exists in Maupassant deep sympathy for the often ignominious position of women in the society in which he lived, and his portrayal of the female characters in ‘Mother of Invention’ and ‘Minor Tragedy’ for example, is untypical of his times. That women often feature in his tales as devious, fickle, mendacious and greedy there is no doubt. Stories such as ‘Laid to Rest’ and ‘The Million’ amply illustrate this. But so too do the male figures, who, like the females, also frequently exhibit other equally unattractive characteristics. We need look no further than the stupid and brutal count in ‘A Woman’s Confession’ or the insufferably chauvinistic doctor in ‘Madame Husson’s Rose King’ to note Maupassant’s even hand.

In the Normandy farm and peasant life of his time, harsh conditions bred equally harsh and unforgiving social attitudes. But even with increasing education and urbanization, Maupassant witnessed in the capital and at the fashionable resorts frequented by the wealthy an equally brutish ethos which he exposes with both frankness and humour. Under a façade of opulence and sophistication, his characters operate on a level no higher, as Henry James put it, than the gratification of an instinct. That instinct was to follow blindly and unquestioningly the exhortation made earlier in the century by Guizot but frequently attributed to Napoleon III: ‘Enrichissez-vous!’ (‘Get rich!’).

Although Maupassant earned his living through the observation and exposure of the society in which he mixed, he refused all of the many honours which it was keen to award him. Behaving as the polar opposite of Flaubert’s Lheureux, that embodiment of Second Empire values in Madame Bovary, he turned down the Légion d’honneur as well as the offer of membership into the highest ranks of French ‘grands hommes’, the Académie Française.