Boule de Suif

In the winter of 1870, with Rouen occupied by the Prussian army, ten travellers squeeze into a coach to escape to Le Havre: wine merchants, a factory owner, a count and countess, two nuns, a democrat and a plump prostitute everyone calls Boule de Suif. When the respectable passengers grow hungry, she shares her basket of food with them. Then a Prussian officer at an inn refuses to let the coach leave unless she spends the night with him.

Published in 1880 in a collection of war stories by Zola's circle, this long story made Maupassant famous overnight, and Flaubert called it a masterpiece. It is a merciless portrait of hypocrisy, of good people who use someone and then despise her. For Maupassant's novel of ambition, read Bel-Ami.

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.