Pierre and Jean

Two brothers live comfortably in a French seaside town until an old family friend dies and leaves his entire fortune to Jean, the younger. The bequest unsettles Pierre, the elder, who cannot stop asking why their mother’s friend would favor one son over the other. Suspicion hardens into a private torment as he begins to doubt his mother’s faithfulness and his brother’s parentage. Maupassant keeps the story tight and unsparing, watching jealousy corrode a family from the inside. He prefaced the novel with a famous essay on the craft of fiction, and the book itself stands as one of his finest studies of ordinary people undone by a single question. This free PDF and EPUB edition includes the complete text.