In French fiction generations ago there was an ooh-la-la factor comparable with the lingerie of the Can-can. There was a time, before pornography became easily available, when adolescents searched the pages of novels by Guy de Maupassant, such as Bel-Ami, to gleen hints of erotica. There was more than that in what he wrote, of course, and much of it is interesting now as social history with a fine ironical edge.

Peter Owen, one of London's few surviving independent publishers, still feels able to publish books that the marketing men of the giant publishing conglomerates would veto as commercially unviable. Here is one of them, which deserves to be read.

Maupassant died in 1893, at the age of forty-two, demented by tertiary syphilis. He spent fifteen years of his short life as a clerk in the Marine Ministry. Through providential friendship with Flaubert, however, he met Zola, Turgenev, Henry James and many other writers. In a productive literary career lasting only ten years, Maupassant published six novels, three travel books and more than three hundred short stories. In 1995, Peter Owen published Maupassant's Afloat: A Journal of His Days at Sea, also translated by Marlo Johnston. Twelve of the stories in the new collection have never before been published in English.

Maupassant customarily published his stories first in newspapers, especially Le Gaulois and Gil Blas, then, more or less polished, in book form. Obviously written for popular consumption, and written well, some of them are imaginative works of fiction, some are little more than autobiographical fragments. They are all entertaining, and a few of them, such as "The Donkey", a seriocomic account of cruelty and fraud, are quite moving.

The protagonist of the series of stories which gives this collection its title, A Parisian Bourgeois' Sundays, is a civil-service clerk recognisably like the author, before he emancipated himself. "Monsieur Patissot, who was born in Paris and had studied unsuccessfully like so many others at the Henry IV College, had gone into a Ministry thanks to the influence of one of his aunts, who kept the tobacconist's where a divisional head bought his supplies."

In some ways he was a typical bureaucratic conformist. "First of all as an employee, then as a Frenchman, and finally as a man of order, he supported on principle every established government, since he was an enthusiastic upholder of power - apart from that of his bosses." "Whenever he could, he would position himself on the Emperor's route so as to have the honour of removing his hat, and off he would go filled with pride at having saluted the Head of State."

He is so humble and so dissatisfied with his humdrum job, that his modest Sunday expeditions slightly beyond the immediate environs of Paris seem to him to be wonderful adventures. Monsieur Patissot would have been a suitable role for Jacques Tati. The humorous ironies of ordinary situations are sensitively discerned and described in straight-faced understatement.

The gamut of Maupassant's subjects extends from his retreat from Rouen in the Franco-Prussian war to the etiquette required by lovers of short acquaintance when overcome by flatulence in bed.

He reports as vividly on a journey in a hot-air balloon from Paris to Heyst as on affairs with two Italian sisters; when one becomes unavailable, the other serves.

Two of Maupassant's stories are written as letters to an anonymous friend and an anonymous doctor. In the first, "Advice Given in Vain", he recommends methods of disentangling oneself from a clinging woman who still looks good, "but is on the point of becoming past it". "I would like to see special teaching in schools to prepare young pupils for dangers of this kind," Maupassant writes. "You learn Greek and Latin, which are hardly any use to you, yet they don't teach you to defend yourself against women, who are, after all, the biggest danger in our lives." The second letter, "Letter from a Madman", a discussion of the inadequacy of the senses to perceive the realities in a drop of water and the entire universe, is Maupassant's sanest revelation of his own tormented self.

Patrick Skene Catling is a novelist and critic