In the Library
Boule de Suif
Guy de Maupassant, 1880
- Form
- Form Short Story
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Accessible
- Reading time
- Reading time 1 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by Anonymous (1903)
- Chapters
- Chapters 1
- Length
- Length 14k words
£1.99
Read in the app, yours for good. Not yet by post.
The book unlocks on your account as soon as you buy it, so the 14-day right to cancel ends once it is unlocked.
And Boule de Suif still wept, and sometimes a sob she could not restrain was heard in the darkness between two verses of the song.
What buying means
- Yours for good, on every iPhone you sign in to.
- Read in the app’s own reader, with the original beside the translation where there is one.
- Downloaded, so it reads with no signal.
- The same price as in the app. Folio already opens every book on this shelf; buying keeps this one after Folio ends. A refund takes it back.
If you like this, try
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Gustave Flaubert
Flaubert taught Maupassant, and the same provincial hypocrisy that ruins Emma ruins Boule de Suif.
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A Doll's House
Henrik Ibsen
Ibsen strips the same bourgeois respectability bare, and Nora walks out where Boule de Suif can only weep.
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Bel Ami
Guy de Maupassant
Maupassant turns the same unsparing eye on Paris, following a handsome climber who rises through journalism and his mistresses while a whole respectable society pretends not to notice how.
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About the book
Snow on the road out of Rouen, a stalled stagecoach, ten respectable refugees who forgot to pack any food. Only the woman they sneer at, a plump prostitute the others call Butterball, has thought to bring a hamper, and within hours even the two nuns are gratefully accepting her chicken while the bourgeois who scorned her grow warm over her wine. Then a Prussian officer halts the coach at an inn and will not let it go on until she comes to his bed. She refuses, blazing with patriotic fury, and the same passengers who ate her food spend three days reasoning her into it, recasting surrender as sacrifice, as duty, as a kindness. Boule de Suif is the story Flaubert hailed as a masterpiece, and it shuts like a trap: confine these people, starve them a little, and watch how fast virtue rearranges itself around appetite. The cruelty that lasts is not the Prussian's. It is the silence of the good people on the carriage next morning, eating their own provisions, with nothing left to say to her.