Pierre et Jean Reading Order

Pierre et Jean (1888) by Guy de Maupassant is his only true novel-length work (as opposed to the long nouvelles that some of his other 'novels' are) and the most concentrated — a domestic drama of jealousy, inheritance, and paternity set in Le Havre, in which the young lawyer Jean Roland discovers that a wealthy family friend has left him his entire estate, setting off a chain of psychological inquiry by his older brother Pierre into the circumstances of the bequest and the truth about their mother's past. The preface to Pierre et Jean, in which Maupassant systematically elaborates his theory of the psychological novel as a study of inner truth rather than outer action, is the best statement of his aesthetic and one of the essential documents of French literary theory in the 1880s. The novel itself is a perfect technical execution of those principles: a small domestic situation made large by the precision with which Maupassant follows the deterioration of the family relationships under the pressure of Pierre's growing knowledge. The Norman coastal setting — Le Havre, the pilot boats in the harbor, the fog — is Maupassant at his most powerfully atmospheric, and the final scene, in which Pierre leaves on a ship and watches the shore of France recede, is one of the most economical expressions of permanent exile in French fiction.