When Maupassant met the schoolboy Proust in 1885, it was, of course, in Paris. During Maupassant’s lifetime the capital was enjoying what might be described as its defining moment. His parents’ generation, and he as a young man under the Second Empire, had witnessed the virtually wholesale destruction of the old, medieval Paris and its transformation under the Baron Haussmann into the architecturally elegant and logically planned city we know today. Accompanying industrialization, radical changes in its social life were well under way, with the nineteenth-century equivalent of shopping malls established in the glassed-in arcades, department stores opening for the first time and, on the wide new boulevards, large terrace cafés to replace the earlier, smaller and more private cercles.

The newly laid out city parks and buttes or escarpments were happy hunting grounds for both the flâneur and the pick-up. Shops, which hitherto had been smaller, more intimate venues for negotiation became places of display, often with pretty women at the counters acting as attraction. A new, and to him suspect, spirit of exhibitionism was beginning to manifest itself, culminating in what he regarded as the ultimate monstrosity of the Eiffel Tower, built for the Paris Exhibition of 1889. In ‘A Parisian Affair’, a story in which the wife of a country solicitor daringly seeks in Paris the excitement missing in her home life, he is quick to note the proliferation of objects and bibelots with which the crowded, cluttered, overstuffed and overdecorated interiors of home are filled. He speculates, again before his time, on the meaning behind these emblems of acquisition and collection. Stories such as ‘Encounter’ and ‘New Year’s Gift’ hint at the reification and commodification of girls and women as he gives telling glimpses of the fake princesses, the mock marquises and, of course, their moneyed manipulators. The time is ripe for manipulators such as Svengali and Professor Higgins, types whose names, associated with baser motives, are legion under the Third Republic.

Mesmerism, hypnotism, magnetism, spiritualism and even vampirism are buzzwords of the day, and Maupassant in these stories provides examples of his belief that the instruments of perception possessed by humankind are wholly unreliable. His forays into the world of the supernatural in stories such as ‘The Horla’ and ‘Who Knows?’ are linked to the new theories of evolution being explored by the scientific and literary naturalists of the time. To a writer like Maupassant, these tentative explorations into human psychology often lurch away from the scientific to the horrific. Uncertainty and doubt concerning the unknown and the unconscious assume the terrifying aspect of hallucination and madness. Though his aim is to tear off the mask which obscures and distorts, stories reveal the mortal fear engendered by the prospect of seeing what lies beneath. In most of the tales, however, a strong sense of fun and vitality is conveyed and an intoxicating joie de vivre leaps off the page. Vigour, energy and raunchiness characterize his richly comic vision of the human condition.