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.