Pierre and Jean

In the quiet seaside town of Le Havre, the retired jeweller Gérôme Roland and his wife Louise have raised two grown sons who could hardly be more different: Pierre, the proud, restless elder brother, newly qualified as a doctor, and Jean, the placid younger one, a lawyer and the family’s easy favourite. Into their settled evening world comes a single piece of news — a long-standing friend of the household, Léon Maréchal, has died and left his entire fortune not to both brothers but to Jean alone.

The strangeness of the bequest lodges in Pierre’s mind and will not let him go. Why Jean, and not him, and not both? Almost against his will he begins to wonder, then to investigate, then to dread what his investigating will prove — that Maréchal was more than a friend to his mother, and that the brother he has known all his life may be no full brother at all. Maupassant follows the suspicion as it spreads through Pierre like a slow poison, souring his love for his mother and turning a windfall that should have gladdened the family into the instrument of its quiet ruin.

The shortest of Maupassant’s six novels and widely held to be his most perfectly made, Pierre and Jean takes a single emotion and follows it to the floor of the human heart. There are no subplots and almost no incident; the whole drama is interior, tracked with the cool, exact, unmoralising prose he learned from his mentor Flaubert. Published in 1888 with his famous essay Le Roman — a key statement of realist art — it is at once a masterclass in compression and a study of jealousy, legitimacy, and the secrets a respectable family cannot afford to speak.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation of the 1888 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s making and lasting power, a biographical note on Guy de Maupassant, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.