Selected Short Stories

Summary

Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following. 'Boule de Suif' (1880), his first masterpiece, follows a coach of respectable citizens, nuns, a democrat and a plump prostitute nicknamed Boule de Suif fleeing occupied Rouen during the Franco-Prussian War. When a Prussian officer refuses to let the coach leave unless she sleeps with him, her fellow travellers, who had happily eaten her food, pressure her to submit; once she has, they shun her. 'The Necklace' (1884) tells of Mathilde Loisel, a clerk's wife who borrows a diamond necklace for a ball, loses it, and spends ten years of drudgery paying for a replacement, only to learn the original was paste. 'Two Friends' shows two Parisian anglers shot as spies by the Prussians during the siege. 'A Piece of String' follows a Norman peasant accused of stealing a pocketbook after he is seen picking up a piece of string; though cleared, he is never believed and dies obsessed with protesting his innocence. 'Madame Tellier's Establishment' takes the women of a provincial brothel to a first communion in the country, where their emotion sets the congregation weeping. 'Mademoiselle Fifi' depicts a sadistic Prussian officer killed by a prostitute he insults. 'The Horla' (1887), in its final diary form, records a man's growing conviction that an invisible being has entered his house, drinks his water and milk while he sleeps, and controls his will. He reads of an epidemic of madness in Brazil, attends a hypnotism demonstration, traps the creature in his room and burns the house, forgetting his servants, and concludes that since the Horla is not dead he must kill himself. Other tales present country cruelty, comic adulteries, ghostly encounters and the bleakness of ordinary lives, all told with the economy Maupassant learned from Flaubert.

Top Lessons

• Hypocrisy of respectability

  In 'Boule de Suif', the bourgeois travellers use and discard the prostitute who is morally their superior. Maupassant exposes the selfishness behind social virtue.

• Irony and fate

  The twist of 'The Necklace' shows how much suffering can rest on a small mistake or pride. Maupassant's endings make earlier details change meaning in retrospect.

• The mind under siege

  'The Horla' presents madness from the inside and leaves open whether the invader is real. It shows how belief, fear and the science of the day can intertwine.

Verified Quotes

Medical Lens

'The Horla' is a key text for the history of psychiatry and literature: its diary format traces fatigue, insomnia, a sense of being drained during sleep, the conviction of an invisible presence controlling the will, and escalating fear, ending in arson and a resolution to die. It draws explicitly on hypnotism and suggestion as demonstrated by physicians of the period (a doctor's demonstration features in the story), reflecting Charcot's and the Nancy school's influence. Readers often connect it to Maupassant's own neurosyphilis, his visual disturbances and his 1892 suicide attempt and asylum confinement, but scholars caution that the story was written before his decline was severe, so the link is biographical context rather than proof. 'A Piece of String' depicts an obsessive preoccupation leading to decline and death. Prostitution in several stories carries the period's anxieties about venereal disease.

• 'The Horla', early diary entries

  Fever-like malaise, insomnia and nightmares of being strangled and drained in sleep.

• 'The Horla', middle entries

  A doctor's demonstration of hypnotic suggestion on the narrator's cousin in Paris.

• 'The Horla', later entries

  Water and milk vanish from the carafe; the narrator's reflection fails to appear in the mirror; he reads of an epidemic of madness in São Paulo.

• 'The Horla', final entries

  He sets fire to his house to destroy the Horla and resolves that he must kill himself.

• 'A Piece of String'

  Hauchecorne's fixation on clearing his name ends in delirium and death.