Quotes and Images From The Short Stories of Maupassant

Quotes and Images From The Short Stories of Maupassant is an anthology drawn from the short fiction of Guy de Maupassant, presenting selected passages, descriptive set pieces, and characteristic lines from across his enormous body of short stories. Maupassant produced something like three hundred short stories in the brief working life that ended with his collapse in 1892 and his death the following year, and collections of this kind have appeared periodically since to give readers a quick way into the range of his work.

The quotes and images in the anthology come from the most famous of his collections, including La Maison Tellier, Contes de la Bécasse, Les Soeurs Rondoli, Yvette, Le Horla, and the various other short story books he published through the 1880s. The selections tend to fall into recognisable categories. There are passages of Norman peasant life, where Maupassant was at his most direct and where his ability to render the speech and gesture of country people made him one of the great French regional writers. There are passages from the Parisian and demimonde stories, where he watched the life of journalists, bureaucrats, courtesans, and minor functionaries with the same clinical eye. There are passages from the war stories, particularly the work set during the Franco Prussian War in which Maupassant had served as a young soldier. And there are passages from the supernatural tales, particularly the late stories that explored the breakdown of perception and the borders between sanity and madness.

The value of an anthology like this is that it lets a reader sample the range of Maupassant’s voice in a single short volume before deciding which of the larger collections to explore. The disadvantage is that the short stories themselves are so compressed that excerpting them loses a great deal of their effect. The descriptive set pieces work better as quotes than the actual narrative passages, because the descriptions stand on their own while the narrative requires the full structure of the story to make its point.

The book is short and reads quickly. For readers wanting more, the natural next steps are any of the full collections, particularly Boule de Suif and Other Stories or The Horla and Other Stories, which gather the most famous of the longer pieces in good English translations.