¹ Translated by Margaret Mauldon as Against Nature (Oxford World’s Classics, 1999).

² Translated by Roger Pearson as A Life (Oxford World’s Classics, 1999).

³ Over which there is a large question mark; see Jacques Lecarme, ‘Le Maupassant de Morand, ou la biographie impossible’, in Louis Forestier (ed.), Maupassant et l’écriture, (Paris: Nathan, 1993), 271–83 (p. 276).

⁴ See Mary Donaldson-Evans, Medical Examinations: Dissecting the Doctor in French Narrative Prose, 1857–1894 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000).

⁵ Leaving out from ‘Thus the critic . . .’ (p. 3) to ‘The artist tries, and either succeeds or fails’ (p. 5).

⁶ On Maupassant’s exploitation of such repetition as a structuring principle, see Jean-Louis Cabanès, ‘Ressassement et progression narrative dans Pierre et Jean’, in Forestier (ed.), Maupassant et l’écriture, 187–96.

⁷ See Timothy Unwin, ‘Jealousy and its Displacements: A Reading of Pierre et Jean’, Essays in French Literature, 30 (1993), 101–13.

⁸ As Mary Donaldson-Evans has suggested in her brilliant ‘Maupassant Ludens: A Re-examination of Pierre et Jean’, Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 9 (1981), 204–19.