Produced by Susan Carr, Juliet Sutherland and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net The Works of Guy de Maupassant VOLUME V UNE VIE AND OTHER STORIES _ILLUSTRATED_ NATIONAL LIBRARY COMPANY NEW YORK Copyright, 1909, By BIGELOW, SMITH & CO. CONTENTS PAGE A Woman's Life (Une Vie) 1 Hautot Senior and Hautot Junior 268 Little Louise Roque 287 Mother and Daughter 335 A Passion 341 No Quarter 352 The Impolite Sex 361 Woman's Wiles 369 * * * * * INTRODUCTION By Edmund Gosse The most robust and masculine of recent French novelists is a typical Norman, sprung from an ancient noble family, originally of Lorraine, but long settled in the Pays de Caux. The traveler from England towards Paris, soon after leaving Dieppe, sees on his left hand, immediately beyond the station of St. Aubin, a handsome sixteenth-century house, the Chateau de Miromesnil, on a hill above the railway. Here, surrounded by the relics of his warlike and courtly ancestors, Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant was born on the 5th of August, 1850. He was early associated with the great Norman master of fiction, Gustave Flaubert, who perceived his genius and enthusiastically undertook the training of his intelligence. Through 1870 and 1871 the young man served in the war as a common soldier. He was somewhat slow in taking up the profession of letters, and was thirty years of age before he became in any degree distinguished. In 1879 the Troisieme Theatre Francais produced a short play of his, _Histoire du Vieux Temps_ (An Old-World Story), gracefully written in rhyme, but showing no very remarkable aptitude for the stage.