Maupassant's breakthrough story, published when he was thirty, tells of a prostitute traveling by coach through Prussian-occupied France with a group of bourgeois passengers. They despise her; they need her; they betray her. In under thirty pages, Maupassant lays bare an entire society's hypocrisy with surgical precision. Flaubert, his mentor, declared it a masterpiece. It established Maupassant as the supreme craftsman of the short form and demonstrated what the genre could achieve in the right hands.