Strong as Death-像死一般坚强（英文版）:
Chronologically "Strong as Death/Fort comme la Mort" (first published in 1889) is the penultimate novel by Maupassant and the subject-matter of his late literary productions was much more narrow than that of his early ones. The plot in which a painter first falls in love with a countess, but later is tormented by his love for her daughter, because the daughter bears a physical resemblance of the mother (in her juvenile period the daughter looked absolutely identical to the mother, when the painter-s love toward the latter started to grow) gives a lot of material for musing on the topic of love. The title is borrowed from the Bible, where the love is said to be as "strong as death". Nevertheless, the main idea here seems to be not that people of art tend to fall desperately in love and that their love may take eccentric forms, but that delving into something monotonous allows no room for novelty and, consequently, may destroy creative forces.
Henri Ren Albert Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) was a popular 19th-century French writer. He is one of the fathers of the modern short story. As a protg of Flaubert, his short stories are characterized by their economy of style and their efficient effortless dnouement. In 1880 he published his first masterpiece, Boule de Suif, which Flaubert characterized it as "a masterpiece that will endure. " This was Maupassant-s first piece of short fiction and was followed by short stories such as Deux Amis (1882) and Mademoiselle Fifi (1882). He also wrote six short novels. A number of his stories often denote the futility of war and the innocent civilians who, caught, emerge changed - many are set during the Franco-Prussian War of the 1870s. In his novels, he concentrated all his observations scattered in his short stories. His second novel was Bel-Ami; or, The History of a Scoundrel, which came out in 1885. His other works include: La Maison Tellier (1881), Une Vie (1883), Miss Harriet (1884), Mont-Oriol (1887), Pierre et Jean (1888), Fort Comme la Mort (1889) and Notre Coeur (1890).
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