Guy de Maupassant 
Discovery 

Set aboard a steamship sailing from Le Havre to Trouville, ‘Discovery’ is a short and funny story, with a moral tucked away in the dialogue.When the narrator meets his old friend, Henri Sidoine, the latter rants about the number of English people on board. With the kind of ire that Basil Fawlty (played by John Cleese) reserved for his guests, Sidoine gives full rein to his loathing of the English although, as it turns out, he fell in love with, and married, an Englishwoman. Is his argument genuinely about the self-proclaimed "lords of the sea", or is he revealing more about himself than he means to? An incisive tale with plenty of clever observations, ‘Discovery’ will delight fans of nautical short stories such as Ernest Hemingway’s ‘After the Storm’. —