A set of Maupassant's earliest efforts, and they really are a mixed bag in every way. Most of the pieces here are quite short and pleasant with a couple of stand-outs among them ("Jadis" in particular is really great as a kind of imagined pre-Revolutionary response to the romanticism of the era) which leaves the three longer stories. "Dimanches d'un bourgeois" is quite aimless in its episodic plot and never seems to find an interesting mode in which to settle other than hapless japes and farcery that I didn't manage to find particularly funny. "Doctor Heraclius Gloss" is worse still, outright obnoxious and tedious enough that it took me several days to get through it only to find the pay-off to be completely unworthy of the hassle - little wonder it didn't see publication within Maupassant's lifetime. That leaves "Boule de Suif", one of Maupassant's best-known stories and with good reason as it's a small masterpiece that easily trumps anything else in this collection, a clinical and acutely observed attack on French society and the class system at the end of the Second Empire and the festering corruption that allowed for its defeat by the Prussians. The tragedy that those who are most patriotic and most given to self-sacrifice in service of their country are the most spat upon and downtrodden by its rulers remains as true today as it was then. ( )