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Boule de Suif: Selfish Privilege Exploits the Generosity of Outcasts

During the Franco-Prussian War, ten occupants of a carriage fleeing Rouen share food provided by Elizabeth Rousset, a patriotic courtesan known as Boule de Suif. When a Prussian officer detains the coach at Normandy until she surrenders to his advances, her aristocratic companions press her to yield for their own convenience. Once freed to travel, the wealthy travelers ostracize her and eat their lavish meals without offering her a single bite while she weeps quietly in the dark.

The Necklace: A Vanity Borrowed Destroys Decades of Honest Effort

Mathilde Loisel borrows a diamond necklace from her wealthy friend Madame Forestier to attend a high-society ball in Paris. After losing the ornament on her return home, Mathilde and her husband ruin themselves financially by taking out loans to buy a thirty-thousand-franc replacement. Ten years of grueling labor age Mathilde prematurely, only for her to discover that the original lost item was a cheap glass fake worth five hundred francs.

The Horla: Unseen Intruders Dismantle Sanity Through Quiet Terror

A French gentleman near Rouen begins suffering from nightly fevers and inexplicable exhaustion while watching his water glass empty on its own beside his bed. He realizes an invisible entity named the Horla has colonized his residence and now controls his thoughts. Burning his home down to destroy the parasite results only in the deaths of his trapped servants, leaving him convinced that suicide is his sole remaining escape.

A Piece of String: Suspicion Transforms Innocence Into Fatal Guilt

Maitre Hauchecorne stoops to pick up a worthless bit of string in Goderville, unaware that his rival Maitre Malandain reports him for picking up a lost pocketbook containing five hundred francs. Though the pocketbook is later returned by a farmhand, the townspeople refuse to believe Hauchecorne was harmlessly gathering cord. His obsessive self-justification only convinces the villagers of his guilt, driving him into feverish delirium and eventual death.

Book

Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant

Unsparing portraits of nineteenth-century French life expose human vanity, hypocrisy, tragic irony, and psychological dread.

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