Two brothers in a Le Havre shipping family, one of whom inherits a fortune from a friend of their late mother. That is the whole engine: a will, and a younger son who begins, slowly and against his will, to do arithmetic about his own family. Flaubert was his mother's friend and made Maupassant rewrite for seven years before letting him publish; this short novel is what that training produced. Fifty-nine plates of boats, harbors and the Normandy coast by Boudin and Monet run through this story of a Le Havre shipping family, matching its ports and tides picture for picture.
