Human cruelty is nothing new. It has been a demon we have had to battle since the dawn of our kind. Yet, we also have the capacity to defeat our callousness and inhumanity (a term that drips with irony). This short powerful short story illustrates the depth our inner evil.

Note: while this story shares a name with a Disney animated movie they are in no way related.

One of the true masters of the short story, Guy de Maupassant was born in France in 1850. After serving in the Franco-Prussian War de Maupassant was taken in by well-known French author Gustav Flaubert where he was exposed to some of the greatest writers of the era. His stories were (and still are) so popular that the only Shakespeare has had more stories adapted into movies.