Bed 29 and Other Stories — Guy de Maupassant, Folio Society

A courtesan lies dying in a military hospital, in the bed that gives this collection its title. She is not sorry. She has spent the occupation taking Prussian officers to her room one after another, knowing exactly what she was giving them, and she considers it service to France. When her old lover, an officer, finds her there and recoils, she tells him what she has done. He has nothing to say to it.

That is Maupassant. Twenty-six stories here, most of them set in the Normandy he came from or in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, and nearly all of them concerned with the small cruelties that ordinary people commit without much noticing. He was Flaubert's protégé and learned economy from him — no story here outstays its welcome, and several turn on a single sentence near the end that rearranges everything that came before it. He wrote around three hundred of them in a decade, along with six novels, and was dead at forty-two.

The Folio Society edition of 1993, translated by Donald Adamson with sixteen drawings by Helen Smithson. Bound in full printed cloth in dark cream: a soldier drawing his sabre on the front board with a single tree on the horizon behind him, a woman standing on the spine, and on the rear board, a bed. Set in Scotch Roman and printed on Monument Wove paper. 221 pages, with the original brown slipcase.

Condition: Very good. The boards are clean and unmarked, the binding is tight and square, and the pages and plates are bright throughout with no foxing and no inscriptions. There is a mark to the cloth at the foot of the spine, which is not visible when the book is housed in its slipcase. The slipcase itself is sound and unsplit.

Free UK delivery. Hand-packed in stiff card and packing paper, as everything here is.