Le Rosier de Madame Husson by Guy de Maupassant (1887)

​Not the best collection of short stories by Guy de Maupassant—this collection might be the one I liked the least of all of his works that I read. (Or maybe Maupassant does not have the same hold on me as he once had, for whatever reason.)
 
The best short story is “Le Rosier de Madame Husson,” from which the collection of stories adopted as its title. The first-person narrator, Raoul Aubertin, comes to pass the small French village of Gisors when the train malfunctions; he takes the opportunity to visit an old friend in the town, the doctor Marambot. Life in the provinces has changed his friend, now an old, well-fed (too much so), and overweight gourmand. (Another one of Maupassant’s stories begins in a similar fashion; an urbanite visits an old schoolmate who moved to the provinces; the schoolmate was once a sensitive soul with a penchant for philosophical ideas; he finds that the provinces have transformed him into a dull and overweight glutton.)
 
The doctor Marambot graciously welcomes the stranded Raoul Aubertin into his home for an exquisite breakfast where he stuffs him to near-suffocation. After the meal, the doctor takes his visitor around for a stroll and lectures him on the great history of Gisors with its now 4,000 inhabitants. Maupassant renders the doctor’s parochialism all the more farcical with fake (according to the critical introduction to the collection) historical studies of Gisors, like Gisors, ses origins, son avenir [Gisors, its origins and its future] and Gisors, de César à nos jours [Gisors, from Caeser to today].
 
For the provincial doctor Marambot, the idea of Gisors expands in importance to the extent of Paris and France.  
 
“Une petite ville, en somme, c’est comme une grande… Quand on connaît toutes les fenêtres d’une rue, chacun d’elles vous occupe et vous intrigue davantage qu’une rue entière à Paris" (p. 53). [In short, a small village is like a big city… When one knows all of his neighbours in a street, each household occupies and intrigues you more than an entire road in Paris].
 
"L’esprit de clocher, mon ami, n’est pas autre chose que le patriotisme naturel. J’aime ma maison, ma ville et ma province par extension…" (p. 56). [Parochialism, my friend, it is nothing other than a natural patriotism. I love my home, my village, and my province by extension…].
 
Doctor Marambot’s aggrandizing eulogy of Gisors is interrupted by a teetering-tottering drunkard, to whom he exclaims “voila, le rosier de Madame Husson.” The rosier de Madame Husson, doctor Marambot explains, is a local signifier for drunkards. He recounts the tale of Madame Husson.
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Madame Husson was an old virtuous lady who once lived in Gisors. She was involved in doing good deeds and, frustrated by extra-marital pregnancies, sought to find a method to protect the good virtue of Gisors. Taking the example of towns nearby Paris, where they coronated virtuous young women as rosières of the village, she decided to hold a similar contest in the village. Unable to find a single virtuous young maiden (speaking to the looseness of village morals), she finds a male rosier instead of a female rosière to be coronated.
 
The male rosier is the chaste Isidore, the 20-year-old son of the fruit-seller, who is large and maladroit, fearful, slow. He wins 500 francs as the rosier; a procession commences and Isidore is accompanied by the whole town. A splendid dinner follows, full of yellow cider, red wine, and plates upon plates of food. Isidore stuffs himself as he has never done before. He disappears the next day. He returns after eight days of drinking in Paris and stays an irremediable drunk.
 
The pride of Gisors—Isidore the virtuous and chaste rosier—ends up a drunk. The honourable title—le rosier de Madame Husson—ends up signifying the local drunks. Maupassant, with his delicious sense of irony, fashions a mirror to reflect the doctor Marambot’s boastful lectures on Gisors.

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