Born in Normandy, Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) is the author of over three hundred short stories and six novels, including Bel Ami and Pierre et Jean. He is widely considered to be one of the fathers of the modern short story. Sandra Smith is the translator of Camus' The Stranger and Irène Nemirovsky's Suite Française, which won her the French American Foundation and Florence Gould Foundation Translation prize and the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize. She lives in New York. Robert Lethbridge is Emeritus Honorary Professor of nineteenth-century French Literature at Cambridge University and Professor Emeritus of French Language and Literature at the University of London. He was formerly Master of Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge. He is the author of Maupassant: ‘Pierre et Jean’ and has edited Pierre et Jean and Bel- Ami for Oxford University Press’s World Classics series. The majority of his publications have been devoted to the work of Émile Zola and the relationship between literature and the visual arts in late nineteenth-century France.