La Maison Tellier Reading Order

La Maison Tellier (1881) by Guy de Maupassant is the collection that established his mastery of the short story, a gathering of tales organized around the title story (a brothel whose habitués find themselves locked out one evening while the proprietor and her staff attend a first communion in the country) and including some of his most celebrated early work. The volume introduced Maupassant to readers who had known him only as a protégé of Flaubert and as the author of 'Boule de Suif' (which had appeared in Les Soirées de Médan the previous year): La Maison Tellier showed the full range of his talent, from the sardonic social comedy of the title story to the erotic precision of 'Partie de campagne' (a seduction at a picnic on the Seine that would become Renoir's great film) to the ghostly atmospherics of 'Sur l'eau' (on the water, waiting in a fog for the anchor that has caught something below). Maupassant was twenty-eight when the volume appeared and already fully formed: the economy, the precision, the refusal of sentimentality, the capacity for sudden tonal shifts between comedy and horror, between sympathy and cruelty, are all present from the first. The collection is also a social document of extraordinary precision: the world of Normandy farms, Seine-side guinguettes, Paris bourgeois apartments, and Rouen professional life that La Maison Tellier maps is the same world that Flaubert mapped in Madame Bovary, but rendered with a lightness and economy that is entirely Maupassant's own.