Although he became famous above all for his well-crafted short stories, Guy de Maupassant also wrote poems, plays, and three successful novels: Une Vie (1883; A Woman’s Life, 1888), Bel-Ami (1885; English translation, 1889), and Pierre et Jean (1888; Pierre and Jean, 1890). His preface to Pierre and Jean has attracted a considerable amount of attention over the years because it reveals the profound influence that Gustave Flaubert exerted on Maupassant’s development as a writer. Maupassant was not, however, a major literary theoretician, and many critics have agreed with Henry James’s perceptive comment that Maupassant as a “philosopher in his composition is perceptibly inferior to the story-teller.” Maupassant also wrote several volumes of fascinating letters to such eminent writers as Flaubert, Ivan Turgenev, andÉmile Zola.

Guy de Maupassant is generally considered to be the most significant French short-story writer. Unlike other important nineteenth century French prose writers such as Honoré de Balzac and Flaubert who are better known for their novels than for their short stories, Maupassant created an extensive corpus of short stories that reveals an aesthetically pleasing combination of wit, irony, social criticism, idealism, and psychological depth. Although his short stories deal with readily identifiable situations and character types in France during the 1870’s and 1880’s, they explore universal themes such as the horrors of war and the fear of death, hypocrisy, the search for happiness, the exploitation of women, and contrasts between appearance and reality. His characters illustrate the extraordinary diversity in modern society, from prostitutes to adulterous husbands and wives and from peasants to aristocrats. Even during his lifetime, his short stories were appreciated both within and beyond the borders of France. He had the special ability of conveying to readers the universal elements in everyday situations. He used wit and an understated style in order to create aesthetically pleasing dialogues. His work exerted a profound influence on many major short-story writers, including Thomas Mann, Katherine Mansfield, and Luigi Pirandello.

Between 1880 and 1890, Guy de Maupassant published more than three hundred short stories in a variety of modes, including the supernatural legend, the surprise-ending tale, and the realistic story. Although he is best known for such surprise-ending tales as “La Parue” (“The Necklace”) and is most respected for such affecting realistic stories as “Boule de suif,” literally “ball of fat,” Maupassant also contributed to the sophistication of the traditional horror story by pushing it even further than did Edgar Allan Poe into the modern realm of psychological obsession and madness.

Are the endings of many Guy de Maupassant stories genuine surprises? Should the ending of a short story be a surprise?

Why do Americans have so much more difficulty responding favorably to a story like “Madame Tellier’s House” than do French readers?

What makes the denouement of “The Necklace” anticlimactic?

Is the narrator of “The Horla” unreliable? Is this story told the only way it could be told?

Explain why the short story is or is not “a respectable literary genre.”

The remarks on style quoted earlier reflect the author’s attitude toward his own writing. His story is like an icon painted with perfect phrases.

In describing the stairway of the Bendersky mansion, Babel writes: “On the landings, upon their hind legs, stood plush bears. Crystal lamps burned in their open mouths.” Avoiding all authorial commentary, Babel gives the reader in seventeen words a perfect description of nouveau-riche bad taste. (The word for this in Russian is poshlost’; in German, kitsch.) Babel’s effectiveness as a writer owes much to his laconism and detachment.

The author’s treatment of the sexual theme is enhanced by repetition, until the whole story seems suffused with sexual imagery—as is the inside of the young writer’s head. Three times a Bendersky servant is described as “the high-breasted maid.” “In her open gray eyes,” writes Babel, “one saw a petrified lewdness.” The narrator imagines that she makes love with an “unheard-of agility.” There is often exaggeration, humor, and vivid color in Babel’s images: The narrator and his friends get “as drunk as a flock of drugged geese.” The dinners at the Bendersky house are always noisy: “It was a Jewish noise, rolling and tripping and ending up on a melodious singsong note.”

Maupassant and the narrator’s tale are linked by a motif using images of the sun. In referring to the twenty-nine volumes of Maupassant’s collected works, Babel writes: “The sun with its fingers of melting dissolution touched the morocco backs of the books—the magnificent grave of a human heart.” When the story “The Confession” is retold, Babel informs the reader that “the sun is the hero of this story”: Molten drops of it patter on the red-haired Celeste. When she and Polyte make love, “the gay sun of France pours down on the ancient coach.”

Although the closing summary of Maupassant’s life is both frightening and repellent, one must balance it against a compelling image of the writer’s greatness: Earlier, the narrator refers to the set of Maupassant’s works as “twenty-nine bombs stuffed with pity, genius and passion.”