Mother Sauvage

Guy de Maupassant

Fifteen years had passed since I was at Virelogne. I returned there in the autumn to shoot

with my friend Serval, who had at last rebuilt his chateau, which the Prussians had

destroyed.

I loved that district. It is one of those delightful spots which have a sensuous charm for the

eyes. You love it with a physical love. We, whom the country enchants, keep tender

memories of certain springs, certain woods, certain pools, certain hills seen very often

which have stirred us like joyful events. Sometimes our thoughts turn back to a corner in a

forest, or the end of a bank, or an orchard filled with flowers, seen but a single time on

them for crawfish, trout and eels. Divine happiness! You could bathe in places and you

often found snipe among the high grass which grew along the borders of these small water

courses.

I was stepping along light as a goat, watching my two dogs running ahead of me, Serval, a

hundred metres to my right, was beating a field of lucerne. I turned round by the thicket

which forms the boundary of the wood of Sandres and I saw a cottage in ruins.

Suddenly I remembered it as I had seen it the last time, in 1869, neat, covered with vines,

with chickens before the door. What is sadder than a dead house, with its skeleton standing

bare and sinister?

I also recalled that inside its doors, after a very tiring day, the good woman had given me a

"What's become of those people?"

This was his story:

When war was declared the son Sauvage, who was then thirty-three years old, enlisted,

Livros Grátis

because she had money; they knew it.

She remained entirely alone in that isolated dwelling, so far from the village, on the edge of

the wood. She was not afraid, however, being of the same strain as the men folk--a hardy

old woman, tall and thin, who seldom laughed and with whom one never jested. The

women of the fields laugh but little in any case, that is men's business. But they themselves

have sad and narrowed hearts, leading a melancholy, gloomy life. The peasants imbibe a

little noisy merriment at the tavern, but their helpmates always have grave, stern

countenances. The muscles of their faces have never learned the motions of laughter.

Mother Sauvage continued her ordinary existence in her cottage, which was soon covered

by the snows. She came to the village once a week to get bread and a little meat. Then she

property and resources of each. Four were allotted to the old woman, who was known to be

rich.

They were four great fellows with fair complexion, blond beards and blue eyes, who had

not grown thin in spite of the fatigue which they had endured already and who also, though

in a conquered country, had remained kind and gentle. Alone with this aged woman, they

showed themselves full of consideration, sparing her, as much as they could, all expense

and fatigue. They could be seen, all four of them, making their toilet at the well in their

shirt-sleeves in the gray dawn, splashing with great swishes of water their pink-white

northern skin, while La Mere Sauvage went and came, preparing their soup. They would be

seen cleaning the kitchen, rubbing the tiles, splitting wood, peeling potatoes, doing up all

understanding her pain and her uneasiness--they who had mothers, too, there at home--they

rendered her a thousand little services. She loved them well, moreover, her four enemies,

since the peasantry have no patriotic hatred; that belongs to the upper class alone. The

humble, those who pay the most because they are poor and because every new burden

crushes them down; those who are killed in masses, who make the true cannon's prey

because they are so many; those, in fine, who suffer most cruelly the atrocious miseries of

war because they are the feeblest and offer least resistance--they hardly understand at all

those bellicose ardors, that excitable sense of honor or those pretended political

combinations which in six months exhaust two nations, the conqueror with the conquered.

"There are four who have found a soft place."

we stood next each other in the company, and he told me about you and asked

me to let you know on the same day if anything happened to him.

I took his watch, which was in his pocket, to bring it back to you when the war

is done.

CESAIRE RIVOT,

Soldier of the 2d class, March. Reg. No. 23.

The letter was dated three weeks back.

She did not cry at all. She remained motionless, so overcome and stupefied that she did not

even suffer as yet. She thought: "There's Victor killed now." Then little by little the tears

came to her eyes and the sorrow filled her heart. Her thoughts came, one by one, dreadful,

they had brought back her husband--with the bullet in the middle of the forehead!

But she heard a noise of voices. It was the Prussians returning from the village. She hid her

letter very quickly in her pocket, and she received them quietly, with her ordinary face,

having had time to wipe her eyes.

They were laughing, all four, delighted, for they brought with them a fine rabbit--stolen,

doubtless--and they made signs to the old woman that there was to be something good to

east.

She set herself to work at once to prepare breakfast, but when it came to killing the rabbit,

her heart failed her. And yet it was not the first. One of the soldiers struck it down with a

blow of his fist behind the ears.

still palpitating animal.

She sat down at table with the Prussians, but she could not eat, not even a mouthful. They

devoured the rabbit without bothering themselves about her. She looked at them sideways,

without speaking, her face so impassive that they perceived nothing.

That was not sufficient; she had them written for her on a paper, with the addresses of their

families, and, resting her spectacles on her great nose, she contemplated that strange

When the meal was ended she said to the men:

"I am going to work for you."

And she began to carry up hay into the loft where they slept.

They were astonished at her taking all this trouble; she explained to them that thus they

would not be so cold; and they helped her. They heaped the stacks of hay as high as the

straw roof, and in that manner they made a sort of great chamber with four walls of fodder,

warm and perfumed, where they should sleep splendidly.

outside door noiselessly and went back to look for more bundles of straw, with which she

filled her kitchen. She went barefoot in the snow, so softly that no sound was heard. From

time to time she listened to the sonorous and unequal snoring of the four soldiers who were

fast asleep.

Then a great cry issued from the top of the house; it was a clamor of men shouting

heartrending calls of anguish and of terror. Finally the trapdoor having given way, a

whirlwind of fire shot up into the loft, pierced the straw roof, rose to the sky like the

Nothing more was heard therein but the crackling of the fire, the cracking of the walls, the

falling of the rafters. Suddenly the roof fell in and the burning carcass of the dwelling

hurled a great plume of sparks into the air, amid a cloud of smoke.

A bell, far off, began to toll.

The old "Sauvage" stood before her ruined dwelling, armed with her gun, her son's gun, for

fear one of those men might escape.

When she saw that it was ended, she threw her weapon into the brasier. A loud report

followed.

People were coming, the peasants, the Prussians.

They found the woman seated on the trunk of a tree, calm and satisfied.

that, Victoire Simon, la Sauvage! Do not forget."

The officer shouted some orders in German. They seized her, they threw her against the

walls of her house, still hot. Then twelve men drew quickly up before her, at twenty paces.

She did not move. She had understood; she waited.

heroism of that other mother shot against the wall.

And I picked up a little stone, still blackened by the flames.