Guy de Maupassant - Mulheres na Vida

"There is only one way to express a thing, only one word to say it, only one adjective to qualify it, and only one verb to animate it," Flaubert told Maupassant, and he fulfilled it far better than his master. It is easy, in a writer who left three hundred short stories and narratives published, to organize groups dominated by a specific theme, a literary genre, some way of understanding the men he knew most closely. And if the choice here favors six stories where female prostitution plays a decisive role, it is due to the fact that three of the author's most prestigious texts belong to this "group": Mademoiselle Fifi, The Tellier House, Ball of Fat; And this is also due to the no less important circumstance that the author himself, during his adult life, was an excessively sensual individual, a collector of three hundred lovers—as he described himself—and that he died prematurely, a victim of an illness acquired during nights of delirium, fearlessly given over to the promiscuity of Parisian brothels. […] Guy de Maupassant, with a life of only forty-three years, achieved widespread recognition in French literature. His three hundred short stories and novellas are constantly reprinted today, far more than the books of his contemporaries who found so many faults in them, who, with such persistent ill will, criticized him; and they are accompanied by six novels, two of which—Une vie (1883) and Bel-Ami (1885)—can be considered essential examples among the most striking forms of naturalism, then led by the haughty superiority of the "master" Émile Zola. Alberto Savinio, author of a decidedly unkind and highly unfair Maupassant and "l'Altro," makes an undeniable discovery in his diatribe: "Maupassant's life itself resembles a Maupassant novel." [Aníbal Fernandes]