Guy de Maupassant: Short Stories, Style and What to Learn
1850 to 1893
Quick answer: Guy de Maupassant craft file: the cold camera eye, the turn in the last line, and the stories to read first, from "Boule de Suif" to "The Necklace".
Quick facts
- Born: 1850, Normandy, France
- Died: 1893, Paris, aged 42
- Wrote in: French
- Known for: "The Necklace", "Boule de Suif", "The Horla"
- Signature move: The final sentence that turns the whole story over
- Start with: "The Necklace" (1884), then "A Piece of String" (1883)
Maupassant published roughly three hundred short stories between 1880 and 1891, most of them first in newspapers, where a reader had one column of attention to give. That deadline shaped the form he perfected: set the situation in a paragraph, move in straight lines, land the ending on the last sentence. He is the writer to study when your stories sag in the middle.
He also carried a discipline from Flaubert, who made him watch a thing until he could say what made it different from every other thing of its kind. The result is prose that reads as if a very good camera had opinions.
What he actually does on the page
He sets up a story as an economist would. "The Necklace" (1884) opens with Mathilde Loisel's poverty of status, gives her a borrowed necklace and a ball, loses the necklace, and then spends a single paragraph on ten years of debt. Nothing is dramatised that can be summarised, so the last exchange with Madame Forestier has all the room it needs.
He observes without pity and without cruelty. In "A Piece of String" (1883) the peasant Hauchecorne picks up a bit of string in the market square, is accused of stealing a wallet, is cleared, and is destroyed anyway, because the village prefers the better story. Maupassant records the process the way one records weather.
He uses the frame, a dinner table or a train carriage, to make a tale feel overheard. "Boule de Suif" (1880) puts ten travellers in a coach fleeing the Prussians and lets their manners toward the prostitute who feeds them tell you everything about class. "The Horla" (1887) uses a diary so that the narrator's certainty and the reader's doubt can rise together.
The signature move
The reversal in the last line is the move everyone remembers, and "The Necklace" is the model, but notice how it is earned. Madame Forestier's revelation that the original necklace was paste works only because Maupassant has kept her offstage for ten years of story time and has made Mathilde's suffering concrete: the scrubbed floors, the haggling, the coarsened hands. The twist does not reverse the plot; it reverses the value of everything the plot cost. Storytelling & Structure is scored out of 25 on Writory, and this is the cleanest lesson in the whole tradition on making an ending pay for the middle.
Stories to read first
Seven stories, in rough order of difficulty.
What to steal for your own stories
Exercises built from the stories above.
What not to copy
Once you know the trick, the twist can become a tic, and Maupassant's weaker newspaper pieces prove it; a story that exists only to spring its last line dies on a second reading. His women are often studied as appetites or victims, his peasants as specimens, and the coldness that looks like honesty in "A Piece of String" looks like contempt elsewhere. Keep the economy and the stare; supply your own warmth.
Life at a glance
- 1850: Born in Normandy; the coast and its farms become the setting of a third of his stories
- 1870: Serves in the Franco-Prussian War, the source of "Boule de Suif" and "Two Friends"
- 1872: Takes a clerk's post in Paris; Gustave Flaubert, a family friend, begins correcting his pages
- 1880: "Boule de Suif" appears in Les Soirees de Medan and makes his name; Flaubert dies the same year
- 1883: First novel, Une Vie; "A Piece of String" and "Two Friends" published
- 1884: "The Necklace" appears in Le Gaulois
- 1887: The final version of "The Horla"
- 1893: Dies in a Paris asylum after a breakdown brought on by syphilis
What writers can take from this
- Summarise anything that can be summarised so that the one scene that matters gets space.
- Plan the ending first and then decide what the middle must cost.
- Keep the narrator's pity out of the sentences; let the reader supply it.
- Use a frame (a dinner, a train) when you want a story to feel confided rather than written.
- Study a real object for five minutes before describing it.
Try it yourself
Someone borrows a thing of small value from a neighbour and loses it. Write the story of what replacing it costs them over one year, in no more than 1,000 words, with the year of repayment compressed into a single paragraph. The last line must change what the reader thinks the loss was worth.
Questions
What is Guy de Maupassant's best short story?
"The Necklace" (1884) is the most taught, and "Boule de Suif" (1880) is the one French readers rank highest. "The Horla" (1887) is his masterpiece of the uncanny.
How did Maupassant influence the short story?
He set the standard for the tightly plotted, objectively told story with a reversal at the end. O. Henry, Somerset Maugham and a century of magazine fiction descend from him, and Chekhov is often read as his opposite.
Is Maupassant hard to read?
No. The stories are short, direct and plainly told, and good English translations are in the public domain. The difficulty is emotional rather than verbal.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working writers. Updated September 2026.
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