Collection of short stories by Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant, an outstanding French writer, brilliant novelist, whose works are by right considered to be masterpieces of world literature. Maupassant’s works had a great success both in France and abroad; during eleven years of his literary career he created six novels, about 300 short stories and novellas, included into 18 collections. His books breathed new life in the entire genre of short story, due to their dynamics, richness of observation and variety of lifelike pictures. For all their surface simplicity, Maupassant’s stories strike with elegance: they appear a peculiar miniature of the whole scope of the author’s great novels. Ridiculous and charming, absurd and lofty, greedy and generous people are presented by the master of vivid, memorable characters; these are a minor bourgeois, who got lost in Saint-Cloud Park, or an impudent world-weary Prussian officer, indulging in petty entertainment, or two fishermen, who refused to tell the password and was shot by the enemy…