Young, attractive and very ambitious, George Duroy, known to his friends as Bel-Ami, is offered a job as a journalist on La Vie francaise and soon makes a great success of his new career. But he also comes face to face with the realities of the corrupt society in which he lives - the sleazy colleagues, the manipulative mistresses and wily financiers - and swiftly learns to become an arch-seducer, blackmailer and social climber in a world where love is only a means to an end. Written when Maupassant was at the height of his powers, Bel-Ami is a novel of great frankness and cynicism, but...

An intensely personal story of suspicion, jealousy, and family love, this novel shows the influence of such masters as Zola and Flaubert on Maupassant's writings.
For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as...

Set in the Paris of society women, prostitutes and small-minded bourgeousie, and the isolated villages of rural Normandy that de Maupassant knew as a child, the thirty-three tales in this volume are among the most darkly humorous and brilliant short stories in nineteenth-century literature. They focus on the relationships between men and women, as in the poignant fantasy of 'A Parisian Affair', between brothers and sisters, and between masters and servants. Through these relationships, Maupassant explores the dualistic nature of the human character and his stories reveal both nobility,...

every heart imagines itself the first to thrill to a myriad sensations which once stirred the hearts of the earliest creatures and which will again stir the hearts of the last men and women to walk the earth'
What is a life? How shall a storyteller conceive a life? What if art means pattern and life has none? How, then, can any story be true to life? These are some of the questions which inform the first of Maupassant's six novels, A Life (Une Vie) (1883) in which he sought to parody and expose the folly of romantic illusion. An unflinching presentation of a woman's life of failure and...

Originally published in 1914, this book was produced as part of the Cambridge Modern French series, which aimed to provide teachers with notable French texts and exercises for use during lessons. Six stories by Maupassant are included, with exercises and a glossary at the end of the text. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in French literature and the history of education.

Guy de Maupassant: Bel-Ami Erstdruck 1885. Hier in der Ubersetzung von Georg von Ompteda. Vollstandige Neuausgabe. Herausgegeben von Karl-Maria Guth. Berlin 2015. Umschlaggestaltung von Thomas Schultz-Overhage unter Verwendung des Bildes: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Monsieur Louis Pascal, 1891. Gesetzt aus Minion Pro, 11 pt."