I have read very little Maupassant. I understand this story to be a seriously odd record of male perception of female desire.
Margot and Simone ride in a landau along the Rue d’Antibes in Cannes on the evening of a festival in which men and women hurl bouquets of flowers, then instruct their coachman to drive out to a nearby bay – tranquillity, bliss, “but there’s just one thing lacking”. “A little love, you mean?” “Yes.”
For Margot, not to be loved, “even if only by a dog”, would be intolerable. Simone is more picky: she’d rather not be loved at all than by – for example – the coach driver. Margot insists that to be loved by a servant is amusing, and recounts the story of the maid she hired four years previously, Rose: a tall, thin, shy girl, skilled dressmaker, genius as a hairdresser. Rose dressed and undressed Margot, and “after my bath she rubbed and massaged me, while I dozed on my sofa”. But then a police inspector arrived and “they took my maid away” in handcuffs: Rose was a man, an escaped rapist and murderer. Margot claims that she felt no anger at having been deceived, and no shame at having been “handled and touched by this man”, but rather “a deep sense of humiliation as a woman” – because, as I understand it, Rose, a rapist, had rejected her as a sexual being.
A final oddity. I’m pretty sure Maupassant has got the women out of sync at the end, and that in the final paragraph it’s Simone and not Margot who is staring at the brass buttons on the coachman’s livery. Am I wrong? If I’m right, why has no one else noticed?
First published in 1884; variously collected, included in Boule de Suif and Other Stories, Penguin, 1946
A Personal Anthology 