Extract

In the complete silence of the sleeping town, his words fell one by one with a kind of muffled solemnity.

A stagecoach flees Rouen during the Prussian occupation of 1870, carrying ten passengers whose social stations range from aristocrat to prostitute, and it is the prostitute alone who shares her food, her warmth, and finally her body to save the others. Maupassant published this devastating story in 1880, in a collection overseen by his mentor Flaubert, who recognized it immediately as a masterpiece. The respectable passengers accept every sacrifice Boule de Suif makes and then turn from her in contempt, eating their own provisions while she weeps with hunger. The irony is surgical, the compassion absolute. Maupassant reveals that bourgeois morality is simply cruelty dressed for church.