Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant

In fact, however, the beginnings had been much more simple, and they had confined themselves, beneath the trees of Medan, to deciding on a general title for the work.

And the issue, in collaboration, of these tales in one volume, in which the master jostled elbows with his pupils, took on the appearance of a manifesto, the tone of a challenge, or the utterance of a creed. In the quiet of evening, on an island, in the Seine, beneath poplars instead of the Neapolitan cypresses dear to the friends of Boccaccio, amid the continuous murmur of the valley, and no longer to the sound of the Pyrennean streams that murmured a faint accompaniment to the tales of Marguerite’s cavaliers, the master and his disciples took turns in narrating some striking or pathetic episode of the war. After a juvenile diatribe against romanticism and a passionate attack on languorous literature, the writer extolled the study of real life, and announced the publication of the new work. It was signed by a name as yet unknown: Guy de Maupassant. In the month of April, 1880, an article appeared in the Le Gaulois announcing the publication of the Soirees de Medan. These words of Maupassant to Jose Maria de Heredia on the occasion of a memorable meeting are, in spite of their morbid solemnity, not an inexact summing up of the brief career during which, for ten years, the writer, by turns undaunted and sorrowful, with the fertility of a master hand produced poetry, novels, romances and travels, only to sink prematurely into the abyss of madness and death. I entered literary life as a meteor, and I shall leave it like a thunderbolt. Translated by A.E.Henderson, Alber Cohn McMaster and Louise Charlotte Garstin Quesada. Complete Original Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant

Selected Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant