Guy de Maupassant is the greatest French novelist, a master of storytelling with an unexpected ending. “Hardly was there another writer so sincerely believing that all good, all the meaning of life, lies in a woman—in love… and hardly had there ever been a writer who so clearly and precisely showed all the terrible sides of that very phenomenon which seemed to him the highest and giving the greatest good in life,” wrote Leo Tolstoy (Foreword to Guy de Maupassant’s works).