where can i find some critizism on de maupassant's "the piece of string"?

Answer 1

This is an excerpt from the first source. The other two also have discussion (and an essay).

"These are the embroilments of a flirtation—an expression which is really the only proper one to apply to our interest in the “sort of stuff” which has enabled such a writer as M. Guy de Maupassant, whose name I have prefixed to these remarks, to be possible. To a serious and well-regu­lated union with such a writer the Ameri­can public must, in the nature of things, shrink from pretending; but nothing need prevent it—not even the sense of danger (often, it must be said, much rather an incentive), from enjoying those desultory snatches of intercourse which represent, in the world of books, the broken opportuni­ties of Rosin a or Juliet. These young ladies, it is true, eventually went much further, and the situation of the Anglo-Saxon reader, when craning over the creaking fourth or fifth floor balcony of a translation, must be understood as that to which the romance of curiosity would have been restricted if the Guardian and the Nurse—in other words public opinion—had succeeded in keeping the affair within limits. M. de Maupassant is an Almaviva who strums his guitar with the expectation of raising the street, and he performs most skilfully under those windows from which the flower of attention at any price is flung down to him. If he is a cap­ital specimen of the foreign writer with whom the critic has most trouble, there could at the same time be no better exhibi­tion of the force which sets this inquiring, admiring spirit in motion."