Guy de Maupassant

'His rise testifies to the decline of a whole society.' Jean-Paul Sartre Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885), is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man, Georges Duroy, christened 'Bel-Ami' by his female admirers, making it to the top in fin-de-siècle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the...