The Works of Guy de Maupassant

VOLUME V

UNE VIE
AND OTHER STORIES

ILLUSTRATED

NATIONAL LIBRARY COMPANY
NEW YORK

Copyright, 1909
By BIGELOW, SMITH & CO.

CONTENTS

Introduction
A Woman's Life (Une Vie)
Hautot Senior and Hautot Junior
Little Rouise Roqué
Mother and Daughter
A Passion
No Quarter
The Impolite Sex
Woman's Wiles

[Pg v]

INTRODUCTION

By Edmund Gosse

The most robust and masculine of recent French novelists is a typicalNorman, sprung from an ancient noble family, originally of Lorraine, butlong settled in the Pays de Caux. The traveler from England towardsParis, soon after leaving Dieppe, sees on his left hand, immediatelybeyond the station of St. Aubin, a handsome sixteenth-century house, theChâteau de Miromesnil, on a hill above the railway. Here, surrounded bythe relics of his warlike and courtly ancestors, Henri René Albert Guyde Maupassant was born on the 5th of August, 1850. He was earlyassociated with the great Norman master of fiction, Gustave Flaubert,who perceived his genius and enthusiastically undertook the training ofhis intelligence. Through 1870 and 1871 the young man served in the waras a common soldier. He was somewhat slow in taking up the profession ofletters, and was thirty years of age before he became in any degreedistinguished. In 1879 the Troisième Théâtre Français produced a shortplay of his, Histoire du Vieux Temps (An Old-World Story), gracefullywritten in rhyme, but showing no very remarkable aptitude for the stage.

It was in 1880 that De Maupassant was suddenly made famous by twopublished volumes. The one was a volume of Verses (Des Vers), twentypieces, most of them of a narrative character, extremely brilliant inexecution, and audacious in tone. One of[Pg vi] these, slightly exceeding itsfellows in crudity, was threatened with a prosecution in law as anoutrage upon manners, and the fortune of the volume was secured. Theearly poems of De Maupassant like those of Paul Bourget, are not withoutsterling merit as poetry, but their main interest is that they reflectthe characteristics of their author's mind. Such pieces as"Fin-d'Amour," and "Au Bord de l'Eau," in the 1880 volume, are simplyshort stories told in verse, instead of in prose. In this same year, Guyde Maupassant, who had thrown in his lot with the Naturalist Novelists,contributed a short tale to the volume called Les Soirées