A long time ago, I appeared for the pre-medical entrance examination required to get into medical school in India. I didn’t clear it, but a friend did. She is a successful doctor today, though there was a time when she stood on the brink of a nervous breakdown.

A few decades ago, ragging was rampant in India’s professional colleges, particularly in medicine and engineering. Unable to cope with it, she consulted a doctor. I no longer remember whether he was a physician, a psychologist or a psychiatrist. What I do remember is that, along with some medication, he advised her to read Guy de Maupassant.

The memory stayed with me. I even bought a collection of Maupassant’s short stories. Having always been rather sunny by temperament, I assumed that anyone prescribed by a doctor must surely write uplifting fiction. And because I was sunny, I never got around to reading the supposedly uplifting stories.

Then I encountered him in Penguin Little Black Classics number 15, Femme Fatale, a collection of four short stories.

The first story, Cockcrow, is about infidelity, desire and power within a marriage. A woman openly mocks her husband while being equally open about her attraction to another man. After a hunt and an evening of flirtation, she finally spends the night with him. Yet by the following morning, she treats her new lover with the same casual contempt she once reserved for her husband.

I finished the story wondering: who had really won over whom?

The second story gives the collection its title.

Femme Fatale struck me as an even greater tragedy. Paul is hopelessly in love with a woman who neither understands nor returns the depth of his affection. She brushes him aside to spend time with an old female friend, and Maupassant makes the sexual nature of their relationship quite explicit. Paul eventually drowns himself.

I knew the story had been written in the late nineteenth century, but I hadn’t expected such an open depiction of a same-sex relationship.

By this point, I also found myself wondering what that doctor, all those years ago, had seen in Maupassant that made him prescribe his stories.

The third story, Hautot and Son, finally offered me a clue.

It is a warmer story about a son honouring his dying father’s wish by looking after the woman who had been his mistress. There is something unexpectedly tender about it. It was here that I began to suspect that Maupassant wasn’t inventing stories so much as collecting people. He watches ordinary lives with extraordinary attention and quietly turns those observations into fiction.

The final story, Laid to Rest, confirmed that impression.

It is told almost as an anecdote shared among friends. A man recounts how a chance meeting with a woman in a cemetery developed into a three-week affair. When he later returns to the same cemetery, he sees her leaving with another man in exactly the same manner she had once left with him. Only then does he realise that he has stumbled upon a specialised branch of prostitution.

Again, it felt less like an invention than an observation.

And somewhere along the way, I began to understand what that doctor may have meant all those years ago.

Maupassant does not write happy stories. Nor does he write comforting ones. Instead, he reminds us that life has always been messy. Love, desire, betrayal, loneliness and compromise are not modern inventions. They have always been part of the human condition.

I don’t know whether my friend ever got around to reading Maupassant. Ragging eventually became a passing phase in her journey, and today she is a successful doctor.

Perhaps that was the point of the recommendation. Reading Maupassant doesn’t make life happier. It reminds us that human beings have always struggled with one another and with themselves. Our troubles can feel uniquely overwhelming when we are living through them, but they are part of a much older human story.

Perhaps the task isn’t to escape that messiness, but to become resilient enough to live through it.