Boule de Suif

Maupassant Guy De

Description

A scathing satire of bourgeois prejudice and hypocrisy and a compelling snapshot of France during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, `Boule de Suif' - here presented with five other major stories by the author of Bel Ami - was declared a masterpiece by Flaubert and is widely considered to be Maupassant's finest short story. A carriage transporting ten passengers fleeing from Rouen is stopped at a village inn by Prussian soldiers, who decide to detain them until one of their party, the prostitute Boule de Suif, consents to sleep with their officer. When Boule de Suif refuses to do so on account of her principles and patriotic sentiments, the solidarity initially manifested by her fellow travellers becomes increasingly tested as the deadlock continues, and the strained relationship between her and her "respectable" counterparts gradually worsens. A scathing satire of bourgeois prejudice and hypocrisy and a compelling snapshot of France during the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, `Boule de Suif' - here presented with five other major stories on the lives of prostitutei - was declared a masterpiece by Flaubert and is widely considered to be Maupassant's finest short story.

Sujets

• Short story

Informations

• Publié par: Alma Books
• Date de parution: 28 août 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780714548975
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Boule de Suif and Other Stories
Guy de Maupassant
Translated by Andrew Brown


ALMA CLASSICS


alma classics an imprint of
alma books ltd 3 Castle Yard Richmond Surrey TW10 6TF United Kingdom 101pages.co .uk
‘Boule de Suif’ first published in French in 1880; ‘The Confession’ first published in French as ‘La Confession’ in 1883; ‘First Snow’ first published in French as ‘Première neige’ in 1883; ‘Rose’ first published in French in 1884; ‘The Dowry’ first published in French as ‘La Dot’ in 1884; ‘Bed 29’ first published in French as ‘Le Lit 29’ in 1884 This collection first published by Hesperus Press Ltd in 2003 This edition first published by Alma Books Ltd in 2018
Cover image © nathanburtondesign.com
Translation, introduction and notes © Andrew Brown, 2003, 2018
isbn : 978-1-84749-764-2
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not be resold, lent, hired out or otherwise circulated without the express prior consent of the publisher.


Contents
Introduction
Boule de Suif
Boule de Suif
The Confession
First Snow
Rose
The Dowry
Bed 29
Note on the Text
Notes


Introduction
‘Boule de Suif’ was the story which first earned Maupassant the approval of his mentor Gustave Flaubert, who told him it was “a masterpiece ! […] highly original in conception […] in an excellent style”. Maupassant had learnt his realism from Flaubert – indeed, several of the inhabitants of Rouen had reason to take umbrage at what they felt were uncomfortably accurate depictions of them in this story. As for the rout of the French in the Franco-Prussian War, the period in which ‘Boule de Suif’ is set, and the unheroic behaviour of Rouen itself, which in previous centuries had put up a fight but now capitulated with relative haste, Maupassant himself, who observed the events of 1870–71 first hand, said he had been relatively indulgent towards his at times unheroic fellow citizens.
Who, or what, is ‘Boule de Suif’? Maupassant’s titles, like those of many of his nineteenth-century fellow realists, are often prosaic, matter-of-fact, deliberately nondescript. Abstract nouns and the names of people and places predominate in novels such as A Life , Pierre and Jean , Bel-Ami and Mont-Oriol . His short stories have names such as ‘Fear’, ‘The Hand’, ‘My Uncle Jules’, ‘Miss Harriet’, ‘A Coward’ and so on. ‘Boule de Suif’ is also a name – or rather the nickname given to a Rouen prostitute (her “real” name is Élisabeth Rousset): she has earned this sobriquet because of her plumpness. But it works on several other levels. Boule can mean pretty much anything round: être rond comme une boule is to be podgy. Suif means, among other things, animal fat. So a suitable equivalent in English for the colloquial boule de suif would need to suggest a mouth-watering plenitude, both tasty (but maybe a little bland) and potentially sexy (but also quite homely): “Butterball”, perhaps (the title chosen for an earlier edition of this translation) or, even better, “Little Dumpling”. This latter has the additional virtue of echoing the word “dumpy”, itself apparently linked to an old word dump , meaning something thick and round. Is “Boule de Suif” an appetizing nickname for a prostitute? (It is probably not one that she has chosen for herself.) The question is important because Maupassant’s story is about the profound intersection between food and sex. This is a theme that, especially in more recent treatments, comes with a decadent, perverse edge of corruption and cannibalism, as in films such as La Grande Bouffe , or The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover , or Hong Kong director Fruit Chan’s 2004 Ji ǎ ozi , known in English as Dumplings . Maupassant himself tackles the overlap of sex and food more straightforwardly in various other stories. One is ‘Idyll’: on a train journey, a wet nurse (fat, like Boule de Suif), whose infant charges are absent so that her plenitude of milk is making her feel uncomfortable and even ill, finds a companion who, it turns out, is only too glad to receive her surplus nourishment as he has not eaten for two days: she provides him with succour by allowing him to suckle at her over-full breasts.
Boule de Suif’s fatness, dumpiness, podginess is the centre of her story, but none of these English words really work: “fat” sounds too much as if the story were anachronistically about fat-shaming, which is not the whole truth, even if the heroine’s image and fate do exemplify the ways in which fat is feminist issue. Her rotundity, however we name it (her bouledesuifitude , perhaps – erotic and nurturing, maternal and whorish, an excess that can also, for a sated eye or stomach, prove a defect), is not immediately seen as significantly diminishing her allure. Her body is something for a man to consume, in every sense: bits of her are, as we say, good enough to eat. “She was small, round all over, as fat as lard, with puffed-up fingers congested at the joints so they looked like strings of short sausages; with a glossy, taut skin, and a huge and prominent bosom straining out from beneath her dress, she nonetheless remained an appetizing and much sought-after prospect, so fresh that she was a pleasure to see.”
But there is another element in the equation. It is not just food and sex which overlap, providing us with life and sustenance, supplying our needs and desires: language too is an ingredient in the rich simmering stew of human appetites and longings. The nickname “Boule de Suif” is more replete with significance than may at first appear. In particular, the word “suif” latches on to a network of connotations that give the story its often bittersweet flavour. Suif comes from Latin sebum , meaning tallow, and refers mainly to the animal fat of ruminants, usually removed by a butcher prior to the preparation of food. All this adds a slightly sinister, dehumanizing, maybe animal touch to our heroine’s name. Suif can then be used to make candles, or to treat leather. Suiffeux is a pejorative adjective meaning “fat” or “greasy” (as in hair). In colloquial language, un suif is a reprimand, and sometimes a quarrel or fight, while être en suif is to be at loggerheads; recevoir un suif is to get a dressing down, a telling-off; chercher du suif is to be spoiling for a fight and un suiffard is a quarrelsome person. It also means a toff, or swell, as well as a cheat (at cards).
In this way the whole story lies in its name. It all seems to unfold from the way a boule de suif or ball of fat catalyses the people around her into a fraught debate on how to respond to an enemy occupier in wartime – a debate in which class (toffs and swells, whores, and middle-class cheats) plays a major part. For when we meet Boule de Suif, she is travelling in a coach with a broad assortment of middle- and upper-class characters, as well as two nuns and a somewhat more man-of-the-people “democrat”. At first, they instinctively close ranks against her: she is their “other”. The coach journey is long and slow. Outside, it is a freezing-cold winter, the coach is slowed down by the heavy snow and it is difficult to obtain food from the local farms because the peasants are reluctant to supply any: the Franco-Prussian War is raging, and the French are in the process of losing it. Unlike her fellow travellers, Boule de Suif has had the foresight to bring a supply of provisions for herself: chicken, pâté, fruit, various titbits, bread and four bottles of wine. She starts eating. Immediately she becomes an object of hatred. How selfish she must be! The women, starving with hunger, are spoiling for a fight ( chercher du suif ): they would happily chuck her off the coach, or even kill her – or at least voice their hostility, give her a telling-off ( un sui f ). But she generously shares her food, and their view of her immediately softens. The chill in their aristocratic and bourgeois hearts melts, like a tallow candle in the new human warmth that Maupassant counterpoints with the frozen landscape of war-torn Normandy. (The scene where they all gobble down the food she has provided is beautifully depicted in the 1934 Soviet film version directed by Mikhail Romm: a long sequence of close-ups shows the grease from the chicken running down their sweaty cheeks, as their eyes gleam with satisfied appetite and their teeth and jaws tear and chomp and chew.)
So the toffs ( suiffards ) realize that Boule de Suif is not such an outsider after all: she is capable of a graciousness and charity they would not have expected. She is closer to them than may at first seem likely. She is prone to the sentimental pieties and social conservatism often associated with women of her trade (indeed, women in general) as depicted in nineteenth-century fiction: she likes going to church, enjoys a prayer or two, relishes a baptism – even though she has given up her own child for fostering – and is a fierce defender of Napoleon III. She can be just as feisty and quarrelsome ( suiffard ) as the other characters, well able to kick up a row and cause a scandal ( faire du sui f ). Finally, as the party of travellers is detained in an inn by the occupying Prussians, they resort to playing cards: two of them (the Loiseau couple) cheat – so ensuring that yet another meaning of the word suiffard is covered.
So ‘Boule de Suif’ is partly about a fat woman, while her name, and the story overall, have their own semantic plumpness, bulging out of the stays and corsets that truss up the body, spilling out of any strait-laced moral message. Still, it is undeniable that Maupassant se