The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume VIII

The Story

The volume moves through a sequence of Maupassant pieces, but the excerpted center of gravity is the long psychological story of Pierre Roland and his family, whose lives in Le Havre are quietly rearranged by an unexpected inheritance. Pierre and Jean Roland are adult brothers, both raised under the same roof, yet already marked by difference: Jean is the son others admire, the one whose manners and success make him the standard; Pierre is the one who feels compared, slighted, and never quite at ease in his own home. Their mother, Mme. Roland, works constantly to smooth out the small rivalries between them, while their father, Roland, remains practical, talkative, and absorbed in ordinary pleasures. Into this domestic balance comes Mme. Rosémilly, a young widow who begins to visit in the evenings. She is intelligent, self-possessed, and rich, and at once becomes a possible match for both brothers.

The family’s stability is upset when the old family friend Maréchal leaves his fortune to Jean alone. At first the gift seems merely fortunate, but Pierre’s mind cannot stop turning it over. Why Jean and not him? The inheritance looks less like generosity than a secret judgment. Pierre’s suspicions sharpen into dread as he begins to imagine how the public would read the situation: neighbors, shopkeepers, and acquaintances would compare the two brothers, and the old belief that they are alike by blood would suddenly become uncertain. The question becomes unbearable enough that he resolves to warn Jean and protect his mother’s honor from whatever scandal may be hidden in the bequest.

Pierre’s unease deepens as he revisits Maréchal’s past closeness to the family. He remembers the old man’s visits, the flowers, the small loans of money, the easy intimacy that now looks sinister in hindsight. The memory that ought to reassure him does the opposite: if Maréchal was equally fond of both sons, then the unequal will must mean something concealed and shameful. His agitation pushes him into a confrontation with his mother over a miniature portrait of Maréchal. Mme. Roland has lied about its whereabouts, saying she does not know where it is when in fact she has hidden it in a secret drawer with letters. Pierre instantly understands that the lie is connected to a buried past, and his fury turns into a moral judgment. He feels not only cheated but spiritually betrayed, as if his mother has violated the sacred obligation of motherhood itself.

The family cannot hold this pressure for long. One evening on the breakwater, Pierre watches Jean fishing with Mme. Rosémilly and, from the scene, draws a bitter conclusion about marital deception. His mockery drives Mme. Roland into alarm. She rushes to Jean and, in the panic of the moment, clings to him for protection. That gesture, together with Pierre’s accusations, forces the truth out of her. She confesses that Maréchal was her lover when she was younger, that Jean is his son, and that the inheritance is his because Maréchal has recognized him. She had expected to preserve the family peace by keeping the secret, but the secret itself has become the source of ruin. Jean now faces the truth of his birth, and Pierre faces the collapse of the identity he thought he shared with his brother.

Jean does not react with a simple outbreak of outrage. Once the first shock passes, he behaves with the legal and practical mind he has always possessed. He considers the consequences: he cannot remain in the house with Pierre, and Mme. Roland cannot continue under the same roof with the elder son. He thinks in terms of arrangements, rooms, money, and the possible resignation of the inheritance. Yet even as he reasons, another thought takes hold: if the fortune comes from his real father, is it honest to reject it? The moral and practical questions remain tangled, and there is no clean resolution in the family’s life. Pierre, who had demanded to know the truth, is left with the knowledge that has destroyed his peace.

The later pieces in the volume widen the field from this family drama into related worlds of desire, suspicion, and social irony. In “Relics of the Past,” an older woman speaks back from memory about a love affair that ends in guilt and disappearance, and in doing so reveals an older, freer code of conduct that modern morality condemns. In “An Uncomfortable Bed,” the narrator listens to a grim story of wartime cannibalism, where hunger strips civilization to its bones. In “A New Year’s Gift,” Jacques de Randal treats love almost as a balance sheet and then opens the door to an unexpected visitor on New Year’s Eve. In “Boitelle,” a country boy loses the woman he loves because his parents cannot accept the color of her skin, and the loss shapes the rest of his life. Across these stories, the volume keeps returning to the same pressure points: inheritance, appetite, memory, sexual conduct, pride, and the way social rules turn private feeling into pain.

The People

• Pierre Roland wants certainty, dignity, and some proof that his place in the family is secure. He cannot bear ambiguity, so when Jean inherits from Maréchal, he turns suspicion into obsession. By the end he knows the secret and also knows that knowledge does not save him; it only isolates him further.

• Jean Roland begins as the favored brother, the one others admire and compare to Pierre. He is practical, restrained, and capable of adapting when the truth arrives. The inheritance reveals that his family story is not what he thought, and he ends by thinking less like a son than like a lawyer arranging the consequences.

• Mme. Roland wants to preserve peace between her sons and protect the family from shame. She has hidden her past for years, perhaps believing silence will spare everyone. When the secret is exposed, she is not merely embarrassed; she is morally cornered, and the result is the collapse of the life she has tried to maintain.

• Roland wants comfort, routine, and small pleasures, and he remains largely blind to the deeper currents in his household. He is not the center of the tragedy, but his easy sociability and innocent chatter make the later revelation feel even more devastatingly domestic.

• Mme. Rosémilly wants companionship and a sensible future. She is young, rich, and self-possessed, and both brothers court her partly in rivalry. She serves as a practical mirror for the household: realistic, attractive, and less fragile than the family imagines.

• Maréchal matters less as a present actor than as a hidden source of meaning. He is generous, affectionate, and quietly decisive even after death. His legacy forces the truth into the open and gives the whole story its central wound.

In Its Own Voice

Pierre’s suspicion begins with a sentence that turns an inheritance into a threat:

“Can it be Jean's inheritance?”

Mme. Roland’s confession later explains why the family can no longer pretend innocence:

“I have never seen one or the other of them since, monsieur, and thus I have lived for the last twenty years.”

And the older woman in “Relics of the Past” gives the volume one of its clearest statements of social memory and private conduct:

“You have become a race of serfs, a race of common people.”

What It's Really About

At the center of these stories is the instability of the family as a moral institution. Maupassant keeps showing how much is built on silence: the Roland household survives because a past affair stays buried, because rivalry is softened into manners, because appearances are protected until they fail. The inheritance in the main story is not just money; it is a test that exposes how fragile paternity, brotherhood, and maternal authority really are when they rest on what cannot be openly said. Pierre’s horror comes not only from the possibility of illegitimacy, but from the feeling that the people he trusted have organized his whole life around a concealed truth.

The stories also insist on the violence of interpretation. Characters rarely know facts immediately; they read gestures, remarks, inherited objects, rumors, and small accidents until those fragments harden into conviction. Pierre sees the portrait, the hidden letters, the difference between the brothers, and the look between Jean and Mme. Rosémilly, and each detail deepens his certainty that he has been deceived. But the reader also sees how fear distorts him. Maupassant is interested in the moment when a person’s interpretation becomes emotionally truer than the facts can support, and that moment often destroys any possibility of calm.

Several of the other pieces extend this concern into other forms. “Relics of the Past” compares older sexual freedom with modern ideas of honor and shows how each generation frames desire differently. “Boitelle” turns prejudice into domestic law: love is not rejected because it is false, but because it is unacceptable to the household and the village. “An Uncomfortable Bed” strips away social polish altogether, leaving only the brutality of hunger and survival. Again and again, Maupassant seems to ask what remains when feeling, custom, appetite, and self-respect collide. The answer is rarely noble. It is often humiliating, practical, and final.

Why Read It Today

The volume suits readers who like fiction that watches people closely and does not soften their motives. It moves from the intimate scale of a family room to the larger, bleaker field of social custom, and it does so with a coolness that can feel bracing. The main story especially rewards anyone interested in jealousy, family resemblance, hidden parentage, and the moral logic people build around blood. It is also strong on scene: the streets of Havre, the drawing-room, the breakwater, the beach, the sea light, and the little domestic habits all make the drama feel physically grounded.

What stays with you is the way ordinary life becomes unbearable when secrecy enters it. A portrait in a drawer, a remark in a café, a glance between two people fishing, a legacy in a will: these are small things, but they are enough to break a household. The later stories keep that same tension alive in different keys, from sexual confession to wartime horror to social prejudice. That variety makes the volume rich, but also uneven in tone; some pieces are severe, others ironic, others almost cruelly comic. Readers should also expect period assumptions about gender, marriage, class, and race that are plainly of their time. The pleasure lies partly in seeing those assumptions exposed as fragile, but they are there.

This is a collection for readers who do not mind being left with discomfort rather than reassurance. Its power comes from how exactingly it observes private life at the point where it stops being private.