TheLadder/tools/story-to-pack/probe/maupassant

Maupassant reference set: Original Short Stories, Volume IV

A hand-made comparison baseline for the story-to-pack pipeline, the fourth beside O. Henry (../v2/claude/), Wharton (../wharton/) and Jacobs (../jacobs/). Every summary, predicament, group and option here was written by Claude reading the scenes. No local inference was used. Compare the local-model runs against it. Do not treat it as ground truth: it is one careful reading.

File	What it is
corpus/original-short-stories-vol4.txt	Project Gutenberg #3080 plain text (public domain English translation)
split_gutenberg.py	→ stories.json (12 stories) and chunks.json (137 scenes, same 320-word paragraph rule as ../chunk.py, tail ≥ 80)
dump.py	python3 dump.py A B prints scenes A..B for reading
claude/batches/sNN.json	per story: {chunk, story, summary, predicament}, the same schema as the sibling probes
claude/groups_src.py	the groups, options and per-story protagonist standing
claude/build.py	checks everything, then writes claude/records.json and claude/groups.json
claude/page.py	→ claude/REFERENCE.html, the readable page

Rebuild: python3 split_gutenberg.py && cd claude && python3 build.py && python3 page.py.

Splitting

Titles are matched on the flush-left body headers after the indented contents block. Two body headers differ from their contents entry, THE TRIP OF LE HORLA and FAREWELL!, and are mapped explicitly. PART I-PART V headings (The Story of a Farm Girl) and one bracketed editorial note (the Horla piece's first-publication line) are dropped. The tail rule drops two closing paragraphs, as it would anywhere: The Marquis de Fumerol loses its 21-word frame close ("the story of all conversions in extremis") and The Trip of the Horla its 76-word thanks to the pilot.

What is in it

• 137 predicaments: one sentence each (median 20 words, min 16, max 24), written to the redescribe.py rules: no names, jobs, places or story-only objects. The topic_words leak check flags 52 of 137. Four are false positives by sense ("judge" as a verb, "room" as space, "party" as a group of travellers). Five use "house". The rest are role words, kept on purpose because the design's cast is roles: servant and employer (15 and 10, nearly all The Story of a Farm Girl and The Gamekeeper, where the servant-employer tie is the predicament), husband and wife, lover, rival, guest, visitor, owner.
• 13 groups, each a situation that recurs in two or more stories (11 of the 13 reach three or four). Each scene sits in at most one group: 92 are assigned and 45 fit nothing that recurs. Under the catalogue's single recurrence rule (../catalogue/recurrence.log: at least 5 scenes, 3 stories, no story over 50%) only 4 survive: G02, G04, G06 and G11. Eight groups have one story supplying more than half their scenes.
• Unassigned scenes are concentrated where the corpus is not narrative: 10 of the 14 scenes of The Trip of the Horla (balloon reportage), and scene-setting frames at the start of The Gamekeeper, The Wreck and The Wolf.

Options

3 to 5 per group, 61 in all. 52 come from what someone in a scene did (scene:N), 5 are archetypes and 4 fill gaps. 5 scene options cite a scene outside their own group (87, 68, 26, 15, 129). Each is the scene next to or near a member in the same story, where the character acts on the predicament: the same pattern the Wharton reference found. groups.json marks each one in_group: false.

Moves

Spine paths with a direction only (+, -, risk, set). There are no magnitudes, as the design requires. Skill labels proposed for this corpus: pride and shrewdness.

• pride is self-regard and the wish to be seen well. The corpus turns on it more than on daring: the clerk's wife who would rather stay home than look poor, the carpenter who must kneel to his rival, the lover who writes yearly and never says what matters. Many options move it down (bowing, going as you are, owning up), which Jacobs' nerve rarely did.
• shrewdness is peasant and petty-official calculation: announcing a death early to save a day's work, a half-truth sworn to a suspicious master, a small lie to stall a lender. It replaces Jacobs' cunning, which read as plotting; here the calculation is small, habitual and self-deceiving.

Stage

Stage comes from protagonist standing, judged per story, not per scene, recorded in STANDING in groups_src.py: four stories low (the peasant and servant stories and The Inn), six middle, two high (The Marquis de Fumerol, The Wolf). The Gamekeeper is told by a landowner but its predicaments are the old servant's, so it ranks low. Groups split 4 low, 7 middle, 2 high.

How this corpus sits against the 36-entry catalogue

The brief was sharper, not duplicate, territory beside Wharton's high-society scheming. Six groups have no entry close to them, six are a sharper cut of an existing entry, and one mostly repeats one.

New situation types (nothing in the catalogue like them):

• G03 A relative's death, counted as a cost. A dying relative is weighed in lost working days (The Moribund) or in damage to the family's political name (The Marquis de Fumerol). The catalogue has no event where the pressure is a relative's dying.
• G05 Called to account. Examined by someone whose judgement you need, you present yourself better than the facts allow: the carpenter who is honest except for padded bills, the soldier who denies the debts. This is self-justification, not being caught (caught_out) or confessing (owning_up).
• G07 Meeting someone time has changed. A reunion where one side no longer recognises the other: the friend who takes the aged clerk's wife for a stranger, the idealised woman turned stout mother, the young caretaker gone white-haired. Nearest are homecoming and past_comes_back, but neither is about the shock of change.
• G10 Passion past the point of caution. Rage or obsession about to do what cannot be undone: the shamed boy's arson, the keeper's shot, the hunter strangling the wolf. The catalogue has no revenge or rage event.
• G11 Danger closing in, and others depend on you. A shared physical peril where others look to you: whether to tell them, how to keep their spirits up, whether to go out alone. dread is private fear; this is responsibility.
• G13 Haunted by someone you failed. Guilt that has begun to feel like punishment: the survivor who stopped searching, the barren wife who blames an old sin.

Sharper cuts of existing entries:

• G01 Keeping up appearances before people who matter, from pretence, overlooked and station. It is not pretending to be someone else. It is dreading being seen as what you are, and paying real money not to be. This is what The Diamond Necklace gives. It is the same story as the famous "The Necklace", in another translation. Its borrowing and its ball (73-76) are the core members.
• G02 A cover-up that costs more than the truth, from hiding_from_close and your_scheme. The new element is escalation out of all proportion to the cause. A day's work saved leads to bribed officials and mourners at a living man's bedside. A lost necklace leads to ten years of debt. A hidden child leads to a forced marriage.
• G04 Bowing to the one who holds your living, from strings, compromise_for_money and power_over_you. The price is not a wrong act but self-abasement before someone you despise or have mocked: the atheist's public communion, the rake's endured sermons, the servant's coerced marriage. This is where the corpus's rural hardship exploited by the more powerful sits.
• G06 Taking the common for the fine, or the fine for the common, from pretence, wrongly_judged and station. It covers low standing mistaken for high and the reverse: the inspector taken for the ship's owner, the soldier who takes a judge's salon for a brothel, the paste necklace, the shunned uncle who proves dignified. The class resentment the brief asked about surfaces here (71: the soldier gloating at a chance to blackmail his respectable brother-in-law) rather than as a group of its own. Tried as a separate "resentment expressed sideways" group, it held only 3 scenes whose predicaments were about something else, so it was dropped rather than forced.
• G08 Parted for a long season from someone you love, from unspoken and homecoming, with separation rather than silence as the pressure. A mother parted from her child is in it as well as lovers.
• G12 Alone too long, from dread. The fear comes from isolation, not from a threat.

Mostly a duplicate: G09 Suddenly smitten is courtship, close to unspoken, and only two stories.

How this corpus differs

It is small: 12 stories and 137 scenes, against Jacobs' 157. Its registers are mixed. Six stories are the social irony the brief was after (The Moribund, The Story of a Farm Girl, Theodule Sabot's Confession, The Wrong House, The Diamond Necklace, The Marquis de Fumerol). Three are frame-told hunting or disaster tales (The Gamekeeper, The Wreck, The Wolf), one is Alpine horror (The Inn), and one is a reverie on age (Farewell). The Trip of the Horla is not the horror novella of that name: it is reportage of a balloon flight in a craft named Le Horla, with almost no predicament. Most of the social-irony material lands in G01-G06. The survival and horror stories supply G10-G13, which is why the new-type list leans toward rage, peril and guilt as much as vanity.