Guy de Maupassant

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.