Similarly, he refused to write literature which was ‘sympathique et consolant’, calling it ‘Tarte à la crème!’ Of the themes underlying these stories, which are both many and varied, it is not surprising, given Maupassant’s history, to find those of filial and parental relations (‘Monsieur Jocaste’), childlessness and surrogacy (‘Duchoux’), regret and betrayal (‘Regret’ and ‘Femme Fatale’). There is often conflict within them (as in ‘A Bit of the Other’) between the idealism of love and the reality of lived experience. Some of the tales express violent emotions and no writer better presents the dish of revenge stone cold. No story illustrates this more clearly than ‘Mother of Invention’, in which a wife refuses for six long years to tell her husband which of their children is not his, then finally turns the whole situation on its head.

Maupassant’s attitude towards retribution in the form of war was for many years untypical of serving soldiers. While he had little love for the strutting, spike-helmeted Prussians under whose heel the French squirmed when he was a young man, and about whom he had recurring nightmares long after their departure, he is able to present their blue-uniformed hussars as no worse in their attitude towards the civilian population than the Light Infantry of the French army. Such views as he expressed were considered highly unpatriotic but Maupassant stuck to his literary guns with courage and steadfastness, emphasizing in his masterly and lengthy ‘Boule de Suif’, as well as in ‘Mother Sauvage’, both the futility and barbarity of war.

A comparable tension between the primitive and the civilized is brought out in the several stories connected, in one way or another, with hunting, shooting and fishing. A first-class all-round sportsman, Maupassant is incomparable in conveying the thrill of the chase as well as the sights, sounds and particularly the smells of a variety of natural surroundings under differing climates and weathers, as in ‘Cockcrow’ and ‘Love’. He is wonderfully sensual, as in ‘Moonlight’, in his descriptions of night and the river, when all the human perceptions, including the olfactory, are heightened. Indeed, as Henry James writes in Partial Portraits ‘Human life in his pages appears for the most part as a concert of odours.’ Some might argue that not for nothing have the French, of all European nations, come to dominate the culture of perfume. In the areas of both taste and smell and their influence on the mind, on the faculty of memory, and on the emotions, the contributions of Maupassant, Colette and of course others such as Proust, are important to the study of a field still to this day in its infancy.