In the Library
Pierre et Jean
Guy de Maupassant, 1888
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 3.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Clara Bell
- Chapters
- Chapters 10
- Length
- Length 50k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
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It was as a poison flowing in his veins and giving him an impulse to bite like a mad dog.
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- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
Madame Bovary
Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert taught Maupassant to look at a thing until it stops resembling anything else, and this short book is what that lesson finally produced.
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Thérèse Raquin
Émile Zola
Zola does the same thing to a Paris shop: a secret sitting in a room with the people who share it, poisoning the air by simply being known.
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Effi Briest
Theodor Fontane
Fontane builds a quiet tragedy on a discovery like Pierre's, a bundle of old letters that reveals a wife's long-ago affair and breaks a family years after the fact.
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About the book
A dead family friend leaves his fortune to the younger brother and not a franc to the elder, and for about a quarter of an hour everybody in the house is simply pleased. Then Pierre, who is a doctor and has always been the difficult one, begins to wonder why. A barmaid says something careless. He does the arithmetic on the dates. He looks at his brother's fair hair and his own dark hair, and remembers a small portrait that used to stand on his mother's chimney-shelf and is not there any more, and he cannot stop, because a mind on that scent does not run backwards. Guy de Maupassant tells it with no villain in it and no instruction on how to feel: a woman who was loved thirty years ago, and a son who would give everything he owns to unknow what he knows. The last pages put a ship on the water and the family on the jetty waving at it, and nothing in French fiction is quieter or crueller.