For many writers, including the austere James in his Partial Portraits, they are ‘a collection of masterpieces’. He conveys no disrespect in adding that ‘as a commentator, Monsieur de Maupassant is slightly common while as an artist he is wonderfully rare’. In the eyes of his friend Turgenev, through whom his name became well known in Czarist Russia, he is an admired and esteemed colleague. Later, Joseph Conrad in his Notes on Life and Letters was to join the ranks of the many who acknowledge him as the master of the short story and see the consummate simplicity of his technique as stemming from moral courage. Like Elizabeth Bowen, who translated him and recognized him as a quintessentially French writer, Conrad notes that he ‘neglects to qualify his truth with the drop of facile sweetness’ and ‘forgets to strew paper roses over the tombs’. Later writers still, like Maugham and Hemingway, acknowledge with gratitude their debt to him. Ultimately, however, his reputation at the beginning of the twenty-first century depends, Gentle Readers, on those like yourselves in whose hands this book now lies.

Further Reading

On Maupassant’s life and work

Chaplin, Peggy, Guy de Maupassant: Boule de Suif (Durham: University of Durham Press, 1988)

Conrad, Joseph, Notes on Life and Letters (London: Dent, 1921)

Galsworthy, John, Castles in Spain and Other Screeds (New York: Scribner’s, 1921)

Ignotus, Paul, The Paradox of Maupassant (London: University of London Press, 1966)

James, Henry, Partial Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1888)

Lerner, M. G., Maupassant (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1975)

Steegmuller, F., Maupassant (London: Collins, 1950)

Sullivan, E. D., Maupassant: The Short Stories (London: Edward Arnold, 1962)

On contemporary French literature, culture and history

Magraw, Roger, France 1815–1914: The Bourgeois Century (London: Fontana, 1983)

Moretti, Franco, Atlas of the European Novel (London and New York: Verso, 1998)

Rigby, Brian (ed.), French Literature, Thought and Culture in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan, 1993)

Watson, Janell, Literature and Material Culture from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999)

Zeldin, Theodore, France 1848–1945 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1973)

On nineteenth-century Paris

Benjamin, Walter, Charles Baudelaire: A lyric poet in the era of high capitalism (London: Verso, 1983)

—— The Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA, and London: Belknap, 1999)

Burton, Richard, The Flâneur and his City (Durham: University of Durham Press, 1994)

Prendergast, C., Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992)

Seigel, Jerrold, Bohemian Paris (London: Penguin Books, 1987)

Translator’s Note

The stories are taken from the text of the standard two-volume Bibliothèue de la Pléiade edition of Maupassant Contes et Nouvelles edited by Louis Forestier and published by Gallimard in 1974.

BOULE DE SUIF1