Jean Rhys had some anxieties over whether the significance of this reference would be understood: she wrote to Selma Vaz Dias in 1953, when she sent her an early version of this story:

Fort comme la mort is unusual in Maupassant's oeuvre in having as its subject an artist working in Paris. Rhys’ experience of France, where she lived for most of the twenties and first began writing for publication, and of French writers, in particular the premodernists like Flaubert, Maupassant and Rimbaud, played a vital and emancipatory role in her development. According to Carole Angier, she began each of her first four novels in Paris. France and French writers were of crucial importance to early Anglo-Saxon modernism, particularly on the eve of the First World War, but Rhys’ response to French artistic culture was particularly long-lasting and intense. By the end of twenties, Pound was more interested in Confucius, and Eliot in Christianity. Many of the expatriates living in Paris in the twenties and thirties had little contact with the French or (and here Ford was certainly an exception) interest in French writers. Rhys had a very different view of her years in France from Shari Benstock's dire picture of her outcast wanderings: she had no regrets about being an ‘outsider among outsiders’ in the expatriate community. Even if she was in the thirteenth arrondissement because she couldn't afford the Faubourg St Germain, she preferred the Parisian half-world to that of the expatriates. In 1964, she wrote to Diana Athill about a book she had read on Paris in the twenties by someone ‘not an Englishman’: