Perhaps the best collection of Maupassant

"Tales of the Woodcock" is the third collection of short stories published by Maupassant in 1883.
It consists of 17 new between 5 and 10 pages.
Apart from two or three new (Mad, Wills, A cock crowed) that are smaller than the others, these stories are of excellent quality and they are quite varied in addition although there easily find the favorite themes of Maupassant . These "Tales of the woodcock" differ from other collections also by a more pessimistic tone and some of them describe appalling cruelties to navigate between cynicism, drollery, misery and madness.
The new collection of the most fun is probably "A Normand" which tells the life of a priest of the Norman countryside (which is reminiscent of the Abbe Picot in "Life"), very focused on the drink and who has invented a technique to assess its state of drunkenness "the saoûlomètre" he manufactures wooden figurines saints that people ask him when they encounter a problem. In this tale, Maupassant scratch as always religious devotion of the villagers who led them to adopt ridiculous behavior.

The stories in this collection usually end badly, only two or three out of seventeen have a happy ending. There is also talk of the Prussian occupation of France in 1870 with his dramatic lot of events recounted in "Mad" which shows the cruelty and sadism of the soldiers during the war. The new "This pig Morin" and "Saint-Antoine" realize the shame of the crowd facing an isolated victim, or deal with animals as in "Pierrot"
The poverty of the peasants is the subject of some of these stories. In "In the Fields" Farmers are selling one of their children to a couple of sterile bourgeois. Infidelity is as ubiquitous as in all other works of Maupassant here with an interesting reflection on an influential man of remorse after having impregnated a servant and Breton discovered 30 years later a child was born of this adventure of a night.

To summarize, there is something for everyone. People who like Maupassant will not be disappointed, those who have not yet discovered are likely to appreciate through this news.