Pierre and Jean

In the port of Le Havre, a retired jeweller and his wife have two grown sons: Pierre, a doctor, dark, clever and restless, and Jean, a lawyer, fair, calm and gentle. When an old family friend dies and leaves his whole fortune to Jean alone, Pierre is tormented by jealousy and then by a terrible suspicion: that his brother is the dead man's son, and that their quiet mother once had a secret love. Tracing every memory and every look, he cannot let the question rest, and the family's peace is destroyed.

Guy de Maupassant published the short novel in 1888 with a famous essay on the art of the novel. It is one of his finest works, a tense psychological drama in a few chapters. This translation is by Clara Bell. Maupassant's novel of an ambitious seducer is Bel-Ami, and his most famous story is 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.