La Maison Tellier by Guy de Maupassant

A collection of short stories by Maupassant.

Sur l'eau

Amazing story combining Maupassant's waterborne spirit and an early hint of his later supernatural, fantastical phase. 

A bourgeois city dweller goes to rent a house on the river Seine, where he meets a canotier, who tells a story of his passion, the river. Maupassant describes the river in an amazing two paragraphs (below, I translate one of the two):

"The fisherman is bounded on the earth, but in the shadows, when there is no moon, the river is limitless. A sailor does not experience the same for the sea. She is often difficult and wicked, it's true, but she cries, she howls, she is loyal, the great sea; meanwhile, the river is silent and perfidious. She does not moan, she flows forever without a stir, and this eternal movement of the flowing river is more frightening for me than the high waves of the Ocean."

The canotier is on the river at night, and tempted by its tranquility, so he decides to anchor his canoe. A fog descends, river-creatures are silent, and when he attempts to leave, he finds his anchor immobile and stuck. An "hors-la" spirit spooks him during the night; in the morning he discovers that...

Histoire d'une Fille de Ferme

One of Maupassant's stories of rural Normandians. One day, Rose, a farmgirl, feels a visceral desire for some sort of freedom, and then later that day gives in to Jacques, a farmboy who has pursued her for some time. (Maupassant portrays ruralfolk as primitive, un-formed by culture, animal-like.)

They start an amorous liaison, Rose gets pregnant, Jacques leaves, and a bastard child is born and hidden away in her hometown. (The bastard child, a common theme of Maupassant.) 

Motivated by the desire to give her child a better life, Rose works hard, redoubles her efforts so that they cannot but pay her a higher wage; her wages don't get higher but she attracts the eye of her petit-bourgeois boss, who measures her value to the farm and desires her as his wife.

And then...

Le Papa de Simon

In this story Maupassant is sympathetic; he explores the anxiety of the bastard child. Simon, who is fatherless, goes to a new school, where he is bullied by the "children of the fields, who are nearly beasts" and so decides to end his life (this sequence reminded me of Mouchette by Robert Bresson), but is saved by the simple, honest, and admirable ouvrier, Philippe. Maupassant might have been thinking of the Greek drama, Philippe, Simon, and Simon's mother are all "good" characters, and there is a scene where Simon visits the forge where Philippe works to ask him to be his father; the other ouvriers respond in tandem, in a chorus.

Une Partie de Campagne

A Parisian family goes on a vacation to the campagne. There are four, a father, a mother, their daughter, and the daughter's suitor. While picnicking, two young and viril canotiers join them. They take the mother and daughter for a walk, they separate into two pairs, and the daughter has her first romantic experience, symbolically represented by a bird singing with great fervor and drunkenness, but stops to hear below "a profound moan that one took for the departure of a soul."

The daughter marries the suitor some time later, which one of the canotier finds out during a visit to Paris. He goes to the area of the campagne where they met, and he runs into the daughter and her husband. 

"I think about it every evening," she tells the canotier. Un homme marié est un homme cocu, as Maupassant notes in Pierre et Jean (I think).

La Maison Tellier

The titular story. Maupassant displays his devilish sense of irony. 

The Madame is a petit bourgeois character who ran a guesthouse with her husband; now a widow, she runs an establishment with her five girls, who are likened as "boarders." It is a trade that is not stigmatized in the town; it has, in fact, become some sort of an institution for all the male bourgeois to frequent.

The Madame is invited to the baptism of her niece; her brother, a petty bourgeois himself, keeps her in touch as he knows about his sister's success: he hopes to obtain a share for his young daughter. She takes all her boarders to the baptism; the people in the small village are stunned by the arrival of these glamorous city-folk. 

The baptism itself is marked by a divine moment. Rosa, one of Madame's girls, remembers her own baptism and starts to sob, then cry; this is spread to the other girls, and eventually the whole church.

"Like a spark that alights a fire on a ripe field, the tears of Rosa and her friends spread in an instant to the crowd. Men, women, the old, the young, all of them started to tear up, and something surhuman seemed to glide above them, une âme épandue (not sure how to translate this), the prodigious breathe of an invisible and all-powerful being
...
"

(There is more but I will cut it short here.)

After the ceremony the priest approaches them:
"Above all, thank you, all of you, my dear sisters who have come from so far, whose presence among us, whose visible faith, whose lively piety served as a salutary example for us. You all are the edification of my parish; your emotions have warmed all our hearts; without you, perhaps, this great day would not have had this divine character."

"It is sufficient, at times, to have a single elite member of the flock for the Lord to descend to the rest of the herd," said the priest to the prostitute

---