"Life is a slope. As long as you're going up you're looking towards the top and feel happy; but when you reach it, suddenly you can see the road going downhill and death at the end of it all. It's slow going up but quick going down..."
Guy De Maupassant, a protege of Gustave Flaubert, is considered one of the fathers of the modern short story. Boule de Suif, his first published work, is considered by many to be his masterpiece.
Bel-Ami follows the life of a charming but unscrupulous young man, Georges Duroy, and his quest for "greatness and success, fame, wealth and love".
Duroy is a ruthless seducer and deceiver of women who manipulates everyone to his advantage.
One of the finest French novels of its time, it is a novel about money, sex, and power, and the dynamics of a society disturbingly close to our own. Further, it is a devastating satire of the sleaziness of contemporary journalism.
GUY de MAUPASSANT (1850-1893) is generally considered to be among the very finest French writers. He is the author of Deux Amis, Mother Savage, Mademoiselle Fifi, Bel-Ami, Le Horla, Boule de Suif and numerous other novels and short stories. Maupassant died at the age of 42 in a mental asylum in Paris, after his gradual decent into madness caused by syphilis, which the writer contracted in the 1870s.
'His rise testifies to the decline of a whole society.'
-Jean-Paul Sartre
