Pierre and Jean

Guy de Maupassant · 1888 CE · Novel · French · Victorian

Two brothers in a retired Le Havre jeweller's family learn that a dead friend of their parents has left his whole fortune to the younger of them and nothing at all to the elder. The elder, a doctor with no practice and a habit of picking at things, begins asking why, and the question will not stay a question. Its preface, Maupassant's essay on the novel, argues that the writer's business is selection rather than transcription.

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