Original Short Stories of Maupassant, Volume 1

G >> Guy de Maupassant >> Original Short Stories of Maupassant, Volume 1


They had not required much pressing, as they had got to know the
Prussians in the three months during which they had had to do with them,
and so they resigned themselves to the men as they did to the state of
affairs.

They went at once into the dining-room, which looked still more dismal in
its dilapidated condition when it was lighted up; while the table covered
with choice dishes, the beautiful china and glass, and the plate, which
had been found in the hole in the wall where its owner had hidden it,
gave it the appearance of a bandits' inn, where they were supping after
committing a robbery in the place. The captain was radiant, and put his
arm round the women as if he were familiar with them; and when the three
young men wanted to appropriate one each, he opposed them
authoritatively, reserving to himself the right to apportion them justly,
according to their several ranks, so as not to offend the higher powers.
Therefore, to avoid all discussion, jarring, and suspicion of partiality,
he placed them all in a row according to height, and addressing the
tallest, he said in a voice of command:

"What is your name?" "Pamela," she replied, raising her voice. And then
he said: "Number One, called Pamela, is adjudged to the commandant."
Then, having kissed Blondina, the second, as a sign of proprietorship, he
proffered stout Amanda to Lieutenant Otto; Eva, "the Tomato," to
Sub-lieutenant Fritz, and Rachel, the shortest of them all, a very young,
dark girl, with eyes as black as ink, a Jewess, whose snub nose proved
the rule which allots hooked noses to all her race, to the youngest
officer, frail Count Wilhelm d'Eyrick.

They were all pretty and plump, without any distinctive features, and all
had a similarity of complexion and figure.

The three young men wished to carry off their prizes immediately, under
the pretext that they might wish to freshen their toilets; but the
captain wisely opposed this, for he said they were quite fit to sit down
to dinner, and his experience in such matters carried the day. There were
only many kisses, expectant kisses.

Suddenly Rachel choked, and began to cough until the tears came into her
eyes, while smoke came through her nostrils. Under pretence of kissing
her, the count had blown a whiff of tobacco into her mouth. She did not
fly into a rage and did not say a word, but she looked at her tormentor
with latent hatred in her dark eyes.

They sat down to dinner. The commandant seemed delighted; he made Pamela
sit on his right, and Blondina on his left, and said, as he unfolded his
table napkin: "That was a delightful idea of yours, captain."

Lieutenants Otto and Fritz, who were as polite as if they had been with
fashionable ladies, rather intimidated their guests, but Baron von
Kelweinstein beamed, made obscene remarks and seemed on fire with his
crown of red hair. He paid the women compliments in French of the Rhine,
and sputtered out gallant remarks, only fit for a low pothouse, from
between his two broken teeth.

They did not understand him, however, and their intelligence did not seem
to be awakened until he uttered foul words and broad expressions, which
were mangled by his accent. Then they all began to laugh at once like
crazy women and fell against each other, repeating the words, which the
baron then began to say all wrong, in order that he might have the
pleasure of hearing them say dirty things. They gave him as much of that
stuff as he wanted, for they were drunk after the first bottle of wine,
and resuming their usual habits and manners, they kissed the officers to
right and left of them, pinched their arms, uttered wild cries, drank out
of every glass and sang French couplets and bits of German songs which
they had picked up in their daily intercourse with the enemy.

Soon the men themselves became very unrestrained, shouted and broke the
plates and dishes, while the soldiers behind them waited on them
stolidly. The commandant was the only one who kept any restraint upon
himself.

Mademoiselle Fifi had taken Rachel on his knee, and, getting excited, at
one moment he kissed the little black curls on her neck and at another he
pinched her furiously and made her scream, for he was seized by a species
of ferocity, and tormented by his desire to hurt her. He often held her
close to him and pressed a long kiss on the Jewess' rosy mouth until she
lost her breath, and at last he bit her until a stream of blood ran down
her chin and on to her bodice.

For the second time she looked him full in the face, and as she bathed
the wound, she said: "You will have to pay for, that!" But he merely
laughed a hard laugh and said: "I will pay."

At dessert champagne was served, and the commandant rose, and in the same
voice in which he would have drunk to the health of the Empress Augusta,
he drank: "To our ladies!" And a series of toasts began, toasts worthy of
the lowest soldiers and of drunkards, mingled with obscene jokes, which
were made still more brutal by their ignorance of the language. They got
up, one after the other, trying to say something witty, forcing
themselves to be funny, and the women, who were so drunk that they almost
fell off their chairs, with vacant looks and clammy tongues applauded
madly each time.

The captain, who no doubt wished to impart an appearance of gallantry to
the orgy, raised his glass again and said: "To our victories over
hearts." and, thereupon Lieutenant Otto, who was a species of bear from
the Black Forest, jumped up, inflamed and saturated with drink, and
suddenly seized by an access of alcoholic patriotism, he cried: "To our
victories over France!"

Drunk as they were, the women were silent, but Rachel turned round,
trembling, and said: "See here, I know some Frenchmen in whose presence
you would not dare say that." But the little count, still holding her on
his knee, began to laugh, for the wine had made him very merry, and said:
"Ha! ha! ha! I have never met any of them myself. As soon as we show
ourselves, they run away!" The girl, who was in a terrible rage, shouted
into his face: "You are lying, you dirty scoundrel!"

For a moment he looked at her steadily with his bright eyes upon her, as
he had looked at the portrait before he destroyed it with bullets from
his revolver, and then he began to laugh: "Ah! yes, talk about them, my
dear! Should we be here now if they were brave?" And, getting excited, he
exclaimed: "We are the masters! France belongs to us!" She made one
spring from his knee and threw herself into her chair, while he arose,
held out his glass over the table and repeated: "France and the French,
the woods, the fields and the houses of France belong to us!"

The others, who were quite drunk, and who were suddenly seized by
military enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of brutes, seized their glasses, and
shouting, "Long live Prussia!" they emptied them at a draught.

The girls did not protest, for they were reduced to silence and were
afraid. Even Rachel did not say a word, as she had no reply to make. Then
the little marquis put his champagne glass, which had just been refilled,
on the head of the Jewess and exclaimed: "All the women in France belong
to us also!"

At that she got up so quickly that the glass upset, spilling the
amber-colored wine on her black hair as if to baptize her, and broke into
a hundred fragments, as it fell to the floor. Her lips trembling, she
defied the looks of the officer, who was still laughing, and stammered
out in a voice choked with rage:

"That--that--that--is not true--for you shall not
have the women of France!"

He sat down again so as to laugh at his ease; and, trying to speak with
the Parisian accent, he said: "She is good, very good! Then why did you
come here, my dear?" She was thunderstruck and made no reply for a
moment, for in her agitation she did not understand him at first, but as
soon as she grasped his meaning she said to him indignantly and
vehemently: "I! I! I am not a woman, I am only a strumpet, and that is
all that Prussians want."

Almost before she had finished he slapped her full in the face; but as he
was raising his hand again, as if to strike her, she seized a small
dessert knife with a silver blade from the table and, almost mad with
rage, stabbed him right in the hollow of his neck. Something that he was
going to say was cut short in his throat, and he sat there with his mouth
half open and a terrible look in his eyes.

All the officers shouted in horror and leaped up tumultuously; but,
throwing her chair between the legs of Lieutenant Otto, who fell down at
full length, she ran to the window, opened it before they could seize her
and jumped out into the night and the pouring rain.

In two minutes Mademoiselle Fifi was dead, and Fritz and Otto drew their
swords and wanted to kill the women, who threw themselves at their feet
and clung to their knees. With some difficulty the major stopped the
slaughter and had the four terrified girls locked up in a room under the
care of two soldiers, and then he organized the pursuit of the fugitive
as carefully as if he were about to engage in a skirmish, feeling quite
sure that she would be caught.

The table, which had been cleared immediately, now served as a bed on
which to lay out the lieutenant, and the four officers stood at the
windows, rigid and sobered with the stern faces of soldiers on duty, and
tried to pierce through the darkness of the night amid the steady torrent
of rain. Suddenly a shot was heard and then another, a long way off; and
for four hours they heard from time to time near or distant reports and
rallying cries, strange words of challenge, uttered in guttural voices.

In the morning they all returned. Two soldiers had been killed and three
others wounded by their comrades in the ardor of that chase and in the
confusion of that nocturnal pursuit, but they had not caught Rachel.

Then the inhabitants of the district were terrorized, the houses were
turned topsy-turvy, the country was scoured and beaten up, over and over
again, but the Jewess did not seem to have left a single trace of her
passage behind her.

When the general was told of it he gave orders to hush up the affair, so
as not to set a bad example to the army, but he severely censured the
commandant, who in turn punished his inferiors. The general had said:
"One does not go to war in order to amuse one's self and to caress
prostitutes." Graf von Farlsberg, in his exasperation, made up his mind
to have his revenge on the district, but as he required a pretext for
showing severity, he sent for the priest and ordered him to have the bell
tolled at the funeral of Baron von Eyrick.

Contrary to all expectation, the priest showed himself humble and most
respectful, and when Mademoiselle Fifi's body left the Chateau d'Uville
on its way to the cemetery, carried by soldiers, preceded, surrounded and
followed by soldiers who marched with loaded rifles, for the first time
the bell sounded its funeral knell in a lively manner, as if a friendly
hand were caressing it. At night it rang again, and the next day, and
every day; it rang as much as any one could desire. Sometimes even it
would start at night and sound gently through the darkness, seized with a
strange joy, awakened one could not tell why. All the peasants in the
neighborhood declared that it was bewitched, and nobody except the priest
and the sacristan would now go near the church tower. And they went
because a poor girl was living there in grief and solitude and provided
for secretly by those two men.

She remained there until the German troops departed, and then one evening
the priest borrowed the baker's cart and himself drove his prisoner to
Rouen. When they got there he embraced her, and she quickly went back on
foot to the establishment from which she had come, where the
proprietress, who thought that she was dead, was very glad to see her.

A short time afterward a patriot who had no prejudices, and who liked her
because of her bold deed, and who afterward loved her for herself,
married her and made her a lady quite as good as many others.




A DUEL

The war was over. The Germans occupied France. The whole country was
pulsating like a conquered wrestler beneath the knee of his victorious
opponent.

The first trains from Paris, distracted, starving, despairing Paris, were
making their way to the new frontiers, slowly passing through the country
districts and the villages. The passengers gazed through the windows at
the ravaged fields and burned hamlets. Prussian soldiers, in their black
helmets with brass spikes, were smoking their pipes astride their chairs
in front of the houses which were still left standing. Others were
working or talking just as if they were members of the families. As you
passed through the different towns you saw entire regiments drilling in
the squares, and, in spite of the rumble of the carriage-wheels, you
could every moment hear the hoarse words of command.

M. Dubuis, who during the entire siege had served as one of the National
Guard in Paris, was going to join his wife and daughter, whom he had
prudently sent away to Switzerland before the invasion.

Famine and hardship had not diminished his big paunch so characteristic
of the rich, peace-loving merchant. He had gone through the terrible
events of the past year with sorrowful resignation and bitter complaints
at the savagery of men. Now that he was journeying to the frontier at the
close of the war, he saw the Prussians for the first time, although he
had done his duty on the ramparts and mounted guard on many a cold night.

He stared with mingled fear and anger at those bearded armed men,
installed all over French soil as if they were at home, and he felt in
his soul a kind of fever of impotent patriotism, at the same time also
the great need of that new instinct of prudence which since then has,
never left us. In the same railway carriage were two Englishmen, who had
come to the country as sightseers and were gazing about them with looks
of quiet curiosity. They were both also stout, and kept chatting in their
own language, sometimes referring to their guidebook, and reading aloud
the names of the places indicated.

Suddenly the train stopped at a little village station, and a Prussian
officer jumped up with a great clatter of his sabre on the double
footboard of the railway carriage. He was tall, wore a tight-fitting
uniform, and had whiskers up to his eyes. His red hair seemed to be on
fire, and his long mustache, of a paler hue, stuck out on both sides of
his face, which it seemed to cut in two.

The Englishmen at once began staring, at him with smiles of newly
awakened interest, while M. Dubuis made a show of reading a newspaper. He
sat concealed in his corner like a thief in presence of a gendarme.

The train started again. The Englishmen went on chatting and looking out
for the exact scene of different battles; and all of a sudden, as one of
them stretched out his arm toward the horizon as he pointed out a
village, the Prussian officer remarked in French, extending his long legs
and lolling backward:

"I killed a dozen Frenchmen in that village and took more than a hundred
prisoners."

The Englishmen, quite interested, immediately asked:

"Ha! and what is the name of this village?"

The Prussian replied:

"Pharsbourg." He added: "We caught those French scoundrels by the ears."

And he glanced toward M. Dubuis, laughing conceitedly into his mustache.

The train rolled on, still passing through hamlets occupied by the
victorious army. German soldiers could be seen along the roads, on the
edges of fields, standing in front of gates or chatting outside cafes.
They covered the soil like African locusts.

The officer said, with a wave of his hand:

"If I had been in command, I'd have taken Paris, burned everything,
killed everybody. No more France!"

The Englishman, through politeness, replied simply:

"Ah! yes."

He went on:

"In twenty years all Europe, all of it, will belong to us. Prussia is
more than a match for all of them."

The Englishmen, getting uneasy, no longer replied. Their faces, which had
become impassive, seemed made of wax behind their long whiskers. Then the
Prussian officer began to laugh. And still, lolling back, he began to
sneer. He sneered at the downfall of France, insulted the prostrate
enemy; he sneered at Austria, which had been recently conquered; he
sneered at the valiant but fruitless defence of the departments; he
sneered at the Garde Mobile and at the useless artillery. He announced
that Bismarck was going to build a city of iron with the captured cannon.
And suddenly he placed his boots against the thigh of M. Dubuis, who
turned away his eyes, reddening to the roots of his hair.

The Englishmen seemed to have become indifferent to all that was going
on, as if they were suddenly shut up in their own island, far from the
din of the world.

The officer took out his pipe, and looking fixedly at the Frenchman,
said:

"You haven't any tobacco--have you?"

M. Dubuis replied:

"No, monsieur."

The German resumed:

"You might go and buy some for me when the train stops."

And he began laughing afresh as he added:

"I'll give you the price of a drink."

The train whistled, and slackened its pace. They passed a station that
had been burned down; and then they stopped altogether.

The German opened the carriage door, and, catching M. Dubuis by the arm,
said:

"Go and do what I told you--quick, quick!"

A Prussian detachment occupied the station. Other soldiers were standing
behind wooden gratings, looking on. The engine was getting up steam
before starting off again. Then M. Dubuis hurriedly jumped on the
platform, and, in spite of the warnings of the station master, dashed
into the adjoining compartment.

He was alone! He tore open his waistcoat, his heart was beating so
rapidly, and, gasping for breath, he wiped the perspiration from his
forehead.

The train drew up at another station. And suddenly the officer appeared
at the carriage door and jumped in, followed close behind by the two
Englishmen, who were impelled by curiosity. The German sat facing the
Frenchman, and, laughing still, said:

"You did not want to do what I asked you?"

M. Dubuis replied:

"No, monsieur."

The train had just left the station.

The officer said:

"I'll cut off your mustache to fill my pipe with."

And he put out his hand toward the Frenchman's face.

The Englishmen stared at them, retaining their previous impassive manner.

The German had already pulled out a few hairs, and was still tugging at
the mustache, when M. Dubuis, with a back stroke of his hand, flung aside
the officer's arm, and, seizing him by the collar, threw him down on the
seat. Then, excited to a pitch of fury, his temples swollen and his eyes
glaring, he kept throttling the officer with one hand, while with the
other clenched he began to strike him violent blows in the face. The
Prussian struggled, tried to draw his sword, to clinch with his
adversary, who was on top of him. But M. Dubuis crushed him with his
enormous weight and kept punching him without taking breath or knowing
where his blows fell. Blood flowed down the face of the German, who,
choking and with a rattling in his throat, spat out his broken teeth and
vainly strove to shake off this infuriated man who was killing him.

The Englishmen had got on their feet and came closer in order to see
better. They remained standing, full of mirth and curiosity, ready to bet
for, or against, either combatant.

Suddenly M. Dubuis, exhausted by his violent efforts, rose and resumed
his seat without uttering a word.

The Prussian did not attack him, for the savage assault had terrified and
astonished the officer as well as causing him suffering. When he was able
to breathe freely, he said:

"Unless you give me satisfaction with pistols I will kill you."

M. Dubuis replied:

"Whenever you like. I'm quite ready."

The German said:

"Here is the town of Strasbourg. I'll get two officers to be my seconds,
and there will be time before the train leaves the station."

M. Dubuis, who was puffing as hard as the engine, said to the Englishmen:

"Will you be my seconds?" They both answered together:

"Oh, yes!"

And the train stopped.

In a minute the Prussian had found two comrades, who brought pistols, and
they made their way toward the ramparts.

The Englishmen were continually looking at their watches, shuffling their
feet and hurrying on with the preparations, uneasy lest they should be
too late for the train.

M. Dubuis had never fired a pistol in his life.

They made him stand twenty paces away from his enemy. He was asked:

"Are you ready?"

While he was answering, "Yes, monsieur," he noticed that one of the
Englishmen had opened his umbrella in order to keep off the rays of the
sun.

A voice gave the signal:

"Fire!"

M. Dubuis fired at random without delay, and he was amazed to see the
Prussian opposite him stagger, lift up his arms and fall forward, dead.
He had killed the officer.

One of the Englishmen exclaimed: "Ah!" He was quivering with delight,
with satisfied curiosity and joyous impatience. The other, who still kept
his watch in his hand, seized M. Dubuis' arm and hurried him in
double-quick time toward the station, his fellow-countryman marking time
as he ran beside them, with closed fists, his elbows at his sides, "One,
two; one, two!"

And all three, running abreast rapidly, made their way to the station
like three grotesque figures in a comic newspaper.

The train was on the point of starting. They sprang into their carriage.
Then the Englishmen, taking off their travelling caps, waved them three
times over their heads, exclaiming:

"Hip! hip! hip! hurrah!"

And gravely, one after the other, they extended their right hands to M.
Dubuis and then went back and sat down in their own corner.