Maupassant today: re-reading "Coco", "La parure" and "Le vagabond"

Abstract

In Maupassant’s plentiful and admirable production, I have selected the short stories Coco and La parure, that belong to the Contes du jour et de la nuit, as well as Le vagabond, a part of Le Horla, in order to demonstrate Maupassant’s contemporary interest. I have chosen these texts not only because of my personal taste, but also because I had proposed two of them as guided readings to my Final Year students in a Spanish bilingual High School a few years ago. Analysing these three tales, we notice that Maupassant’s art retains its literary attraction and that his subjects are valid today: mistreatments against animals are punished nowadays, but they still happen, and the absolute need to appeal to the others and to be admired, now sharpened by the media, or the misfortune derived from unemployment, are contemporary concerns in 2017.