Collected Works of Guy De Maupassant: The Short Stories

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Notes

René-Albert-Guy de Maupassant was born on August 5, 1850 at the Château de Miromesnil, near in France-From his early education in a strict Catholic boys’ school, he retained a marked hostility to religion, and to judge from verses composed as a boy, he deplored the ecclesiastical atmosphere, its ritual and discipline-Maupassant is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story: He delighted in clever plotting, and served as a model for O Henry - His stories about expensive jewellery ("The Necklace", "La parure") are imitated with a twist by Somerset Maugham ("Mr Know-All", "A String of Beads") and Henry James ("Paste")-Taking his cue from Balzac, Maupassant wrote comfortably in both the high-Realist and fantastic modes; stories and novels such as "L'Héritage" and Bel-Ami aim to recreate France in a realistic way-especially the wars, whereas many of the short stories (notably "Le Horla" and "Qui sait") describe apparently supernatural phenomena - The supernatural in Maupassant, however, is often implicitly a symptom of the protagonists' troubled minds; Maupassant was fascinated by the burgeoning discipline of psychiatry; this interest is reflected in his fiction - His stories are sometimes but not always sad, sometimes funny, sometimes realistic, but whatever the case, they also frequently contain an unusual twist at the end which readers have found delightful for generations –Excerpted, in part, from Pierre Bayard, Maupassant, juste avant Freud (Paris: Minuit, 1998)