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Updated: May 15, 2025
"Mademoiselle Elizabeth Rousset?" he said. Boule de Suif started and turned round. "That is my name." "Mademoiselle, the Prussian officer wants to speak to you at once." "To me?" "Yes, if you really are Mademoiselle Elizabeth Rousset." She hesitated, thought for a moment, and then declared roundly: "That may be, but I'm not going."
Boule de Suif had a child being brought up by peasants at Yvetot. She did not see him once a year, and never thought of him; but the idea of the child who was about to be baptized induced a sudden wave of tenderness for her own, and she insisted on being present at the ceremony.
They were talking in a low voice and presently stood still; Boule de Suif apparently defending the entrance of her room with much energy. Unfortunately Loiseau was unable to hear what they said till, at the last, as they raised their voices somewhat, he caught a word or two. Cornudet was insisting eagerly. "Look here," he said, "you are really very ridiculous what difference can it make to you?"
The ten people had finished its contents without difficulty amid general regret that it did not hold more. Conversation went on a little longer, though it flagged somewhat after the passengers had finished eating. Night fell, the darkness grew deeper and deeper, and the cold made Boule de Suif shiver, in spite of her plumpness.
Take up Maupassant and in his best tales and novels, such as La Maison Tellier, Boule de Suif, Une Vie, Fort Comme la Mort, to mention a few, you will be surprised at the fluidity, the artful devices to elude the harshness of reality, the pessimistic poetry that suffuses his pages after reading Huysmans's immitigable exposition of the ugly and his unflinching attitude before the unpleasant.
Boule de Suif did not answer, and joined the rest of the party. As soon as they returned she went to her room, and was seen no more. The general anxiety was at its height. What would she do? If she still resisted, how awkward for them all! The dinner hour struck; they waited for her in vain.
Boule de Suif flushed crimson to the ears, and the three married women felt unutterably humiliated at being met thus by the soldier in company with the girl whom he had treated with such scant ceremony. Then they began to talk about him, his figure, and his face.
He held forth in turn, with dogmatic self-assurance, in the style of the proclamations daily pasted on the walls of the town, winding up with a specimen of stump oratory in which he reviled "that besotted fool of a Louis-Napoleon." But Boule de Suif was indignant, for she was an ardent Bonapartist.
The girl stood still, stupefied with astonishment; then, plucking up courage, accosted the manufacturer's wife with a humble "Good-morning, madame," to which the other replied merely with a slight and insolent nod, accompanied by a look of outraged virtue. Every one suddenly appeared extremely busy, and kept as far from Boule de Suif as if tier skirts had been infected with some deadly disease.
When he had finished Boule de Suif, with a spontaneous impulse, with an emotion they never forgot, filled with enthusiasm at this revelation, they all rose and, without superfluous words, acclaimed him as a master.
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