With this book you have in your hands, in my humble opinion, the best collection consists of Guy de Maupassant himself. Apart from the new "On the water" and "Spring" which I find a little lower, the other really flirt with the peaks. We are not meeting these new too kilometer as happened to him later to write in to ensure a comfortable pension. Much of the author's flagship themes is already present (prostitution, adultery, anguish, not assumed kinship, marriage trap, duplicity of greed) in this collection that chronologically comes first in the production of the author (I put aside the somewhat special case of "Boule de tallow"). "The Tellier House" is a new transgression, voluntary and complete reversal of commonly accepted moral codes, particularly at the time of Maupassant. It is thus knowingly exposed to shock, indignant readership. In this new, the brothel is presented as a public institution of salvation, the notables as a kind of vermin ready to indulge in the vilest debauchery and whose assiduous prostitutes would maintain within acceptable limits of their bestial tendencies . The casseroles are in the modest country church where communion is celebrated, the best status sparking devout piety of the rest of the population, not prone to bliss. The priest himself, the oldest of the diocese, claims to have never met in his long career, such a moment of grace. Outputs of "juice" city, from rural humble, the motley battalion of prostitutes takes on the appearance of opulence and respectability and thoroughly ironic Maupassant's famous maxim attributed to Emperor Vespasian: "money does no smell. " "The grave" ventures into the shady alleys cemeteries and strange encounters that it can do. This new announcement succulent "The dead" in the book The Left Hand. Maupassant runs with his penchant for the obituary and especially its endless denunciation of hypocrisy as messages in stone as scholarly attitudes adopted by the weeping (honest) s. "On the Water" is an insertion in the field of anxiety and fear, or even paranoia. One can probably argue that this story is far from the best that the author has written in this register. Personally I find winded and artificial. It explores the thousand frightening fantasies that can nourish our brain when night falls and it leaves us alone at the edge of the waters (besides canoe here on the water) among the swarming kind of night. This theme has been exploited with perhaps more happiness in the album child Scritch scratch dip laps!. "Story of a Farm Girl" is a new slightly longer than average in Maupassant, tracing the fate unfortunately quite common for girls impregnated by fellows unable to assume their antics, even to pay during the life price of the fad. Here the author offers us a rather unexpected ending and, once will not hurt (it is especially the brand of the young Maupassant, still not completely pessimistic), a happy ending. "Family" is a new magnificent, tone caustic, sarcastic and biting, drooling to Balzac the best time. The author tells us there family relationships devoid of love (but not the sense of profit) to the death of an old cantankerous grandmother. Alternately, everybody goes to the great mill, the first of which, the stepdaughter, stingy and bad, which competes ploys to pluck the old while rolling her sister. The son, big bellied who missed his life as paper pushers in a department, are not spared by the friend Maupassant who spent a number of years in such administration (on this subject, I find that there is a similarity with the real course of Gogol and wonderful news of Petersburg). I forget of course the doctor, notoriously incompetent, and grandchildren. Although far from the best known of the collection, if I had to give my vote to only one, I would choose that one. Funny, satirical and fine, of Maupassant as the dream. "Dad Simon" is another excellent news, acid and moving, about the burden placed on the shoulders of a natural child, ridiculed by his classmates because he has no papa. Sublime. "Une partie de campagne" tells the more or less easy conquest (depending on whether one or the other) of a mother and her daughter by two fine young boaters at the famous weekends on the Seine which Maupassant was so fond and that makes us live so frequently. "Spring" is one of many variations on the theme of Maupassant: "never marry" and that one can probably closer to Balzac and his comic Little miseries of married life. "The wife of Paul" deals with the ideas of the time, the issue of homosexuality (female as well).
