"Mademoiselle Fifi and other stories"

[fiefoe]

So far, half of them are about German occupation during the Franco-Prussian war.  (The war connects many dots: Bismarck, Krupp, the Dreyfus Affair, the Paris Commune, Daudet's "The Last Lesson", etc.)

Maupassant has a very clinical way of describing things -- mostly bad things happening to people. I feel worst for the doomed fishing buddies in "Two Friends".  "The Model" is perhaps exemplary of the writer's attitudes towards women, which doesn't make me think too highly of him.