Yvette

Yvette is a collection of short fiction by Guy de Maupassant, published in 1884 with the title novella as its centerpiece. Maupassant was at the height of his short fiction career when this collection appeared, with Boule de Suif and the early Contes de la Bécasse already behind him and the novel Bel Ami still to come. Yvette is one of his most affecting novellas and one of the pieces that shows what he could do at greater length than the short story.

The title novella is set in the Parisian demimonde, the half world of courtesans, kept women, and the men who maintained them, which Maupassant knew well from his years as a young clerk in the city. Yvette is the daughter of a successful courtesan known as the Marquise Obardi. She has grown up in her mother’s salon, surrounded by the elegant and dissolute company her mother attracts, but she is herself young and innocent in a way her mother no longer remembers. The novella follows her gradual discovery of what her mother actually is, of what her own future is being prepared for, and of her own response to that discovery. The conclusion is one of the most quietly devastating things Maupassant wrote.

The other stories in the collection are in the typical Maupassant manner. There are several short pieces about peasant life in his native Normandy, where Maupassant was at his most direct. There are several Parisian stories in the same demimonde setting as Yvette. There are one or two of the supernatural or weird tales that Maupassant was beginning to write more often in the 1880s and that would culminate in Le Horla a few years later.

The book runs about three hundred pages and is one of the better single collections to read for anyone wanting an introduction to the middle period Maupassant. The title novella is among his strongest longer pieces. For readers who want more, the natural follow ons are Bel Ami, the great Parisian novel from the next year, and the late short story collections particularly The Horla and The Necklace and other anthologies of his most famous shorter pieces.