Acknowledged throughout the world as one of the masters of the short story, Guy de Maupassant was also the author of a collection of poetry, a volume of plays, six novels, three travel journals, and many chronicles. However, he clearly excelled in the short-story form, and the remarkable ease with which he manipulated this genre can be measured by the fact that he produced some three hundred short stories in the single decade from 1880 to 1890, a period during which he also produced most of his other works. Maupassant himself would have preferred fame as a novelist, and his publications chronology confirms a growing obsession with the longer form: five of his six novels were published during the second half of the decade. Indeed, he doubtless would have benefited from greater critical attention had he cultivated the novel even more. Even his most ardent admirers feel compelled to temper their accolades with disparaging remarks about the short-story form, echoing the sentiments of Jules Lemaître, who considered Maupassant "un écrivain à peu près irréprochable dans un genre qui ne l'est pas" (an almost irreproachable writer in a literary form that is not irreproachable).
