Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories

b’It was raining as it only rains in Normandy, as though great gouts of water were being sprayed by some angry, giant hand.’/b

Maupassant believed that we delude ourselves into believing that we are not animals acting upon instinct but rational creatures capable of idealistic beliefs and actions and survive only on the drug of self-deception. Maupassant’s disgust with creation was only equalled by his contempt for human hypocrisy, and in these tales he takes a scalpel to our illusions and cuts to the bone. But his clinical pessimism is redeemed by a sense of the absurd and a warmer compassion for ’humanity bleeding’. Unsentimental but always honest, he persuades us that life is an incomprehensible, cosmic farce.

This translation of twenty tales shows Maupassant at his bitter, bawdy, chilling best. It features some of his grimmest and most famous stories such as A Vendetta and The Grove of Olives, and it also reflects both his moods and his mastery of the short story. The Little Keg is rich in comic invention, while the disturbing Who Can Tell? draws its power from the strange forces which drove its author into madness.

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Guy de Maupassant

David Coward writes widely on the history, literature, and culture of France. A regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, London Review of Books, and national newspapers, he won the Scott-Moncrieff Prize for Translation in 1996. He is the author of A History of French Literature (2002), and for Oxford World’s Classics has translated and edited works by Dumas, Diderot, Sade, and Beaumarchais.