Guy de Maupassant is better known for his shorter fiction than for his novels and probably his most famous short story (very nearly lengthy enough to be defined as a novella) is 'Boule de Suif', which tells of a coach journey through France during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Travelling on the coach to escape the fighting are several respectable members of society and a prostitute nicknamed Boule de Suif ('Suet Pudding'). The respectable passengers ignore the prostitute in their midst but she wins them over with her friendliness and humanity. The coach is stopped on its journey by a Prussian officer who demands sex from Boule de Suif as the price for allowing all of them to continue their journey. The other passengers beg her to agree and, when she does, and the coach gets underway again, they reject her once more. In the handful of novels he wrote, Maupassant exercises the same unsparing naturalism and ruthless observation of social mores that he shows in 'Boule de Suif'. Of these, the best is probably Bel-Ami. Reminiscent of a number of other French novels of the 19th century, from Stendhal's Scarlet and Black to Balzac's stories of provincials seeking their fortune in Paris, Maupassant's book traces the rise and rise of Georges Duroy. Duroy begins his career as a lowly clerk but he becomes a journalist and uses his wit and his charm to mount further and further up the social ladder. Owing more to his gifts as a seducer of women who can help him than to his talents as a writer, he plunges further and further into the hypocrisy and corruption that characterize the upper echelons of Parisian society. With its richly cynical and satirical portrait of its social-climbing anti-hero and the world in which he operates, Bel-Ami is one of the wittiest and most enjoyable of all 19th-century French novels.

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