Bel-Ami

Georges Duroy, a handsome former soldier back from Algeria with no money and no talent, meets an old comrade who gets him a job at a Paris newspaper. He cannot write, but he is charming, and he discovers that women can open every door. One affair at a time, he climbs to wealth and power, through journalism, politics and a colonial scheme in Morocco.

Published in 1885, Bel-Ami is Maupassant's sharpest novel, a portrait of a cynic and of the newspapers, financiers and politicians of the Third Republic who made him possible. It is fast, witty and still relevant to any age of influence and spin. For Maupassant's shorter fiction, read Boule de Suif.

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) grew up in Normandy, fought in the Franco-Prussian War and worked as a clerk in Paris ministries while learning to write under the guidance of Gustave Flaubert, an old friend of his mother. Boule de Suif, in 1880, made him famous.

In barely ten years he wrote some three hundred short stories and six novels, including Bel-Ami, and became the master of the short story in France. He loved rowing on the Seine and the sea, but illness clouded his last years, and he died in a clinic at forty-two.