The Necklace and Other Tales by Guy De Maupassant

Author:Guy De Maupassant [Maupassant, Guy de]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58836-277-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2003-12-14T16:00:00+00:00

MADEMOISELLE FIFI

The Prussian commandant, Count von Farlsberg, a major, was almost done reading his mail in the depths of a big easy chair upholstered in tapestry; his booted feet were propped on the elegant marble of the fireplace, where, during the three months that he’d been occupying the Château d’Uville, his spurs had been digging two deep gashes, a bit deeper every day.

A cup of coffee was steaming on an inlaid pedestal table, which was stained by liqueurs, burned by cigars, notched by the penknife of the conquering officer, who, sometimes, pausing in the midst of sharpening a pencil, would scrawl figures or drawings on the graceful marble, whatever struck his capricious fancy.

Having read his mail and skimmed the German newspapers that his orderly had just brought him, he stood up; and, after tossing three or four huge chunks of green wood into the fire (for these gentlemen were gradually denuding the park in order to keep warm), he stepped over to the window.

A torrential rain was pouring down, a Norman rain that seemed to be hurled by some furious hand, a slanting rain, as thick as a curtain, virtually forming a wall with oblique stripes, a lashing, splattering, inundating rain, a typical rain of the Rouen area, that chamber pot of France.

The officer gazed and gazed at the sodden lawns and, farther away, at the swollen, overflowing Andelle River; his fingers were drumming a Rhenish waltz on the pane when a sudden noise made him whirl around: it was his second-in-command, Baron von Kelweingstein, whose rank was the equivalent of captain.

The major was a giant, with broad shoulders and a long, fan-shaped beard covering his chest like a sheet; his entire solemn person was the very image of a military peacock, a peacock spreading his tail all the way to his chin. His eyes were blue, cold, and gentle, one cheek was scarred from a saber cut he had received in Prussia’s war with Austria; and he was said to be an honorable man as well as an honorable officer.

The captain, a short man with a ruddy face and a big, tightly belted paunch, had a fiery crew cut, which, in certain lights, made his face and his head look as if they had been rubbed with phosphorous. He had once lost two front teeth during a night of debauchery—though he couldn’t remember how—and the gap made him splutter his garbled speech, which was not always understood. The top of his head was bald—a monkish tonsure with a short fringe of gilded, shiny, curly hair around that hoop of naked skin.

The commandant shook the captain’s hand, and he tossed down his coffee (his sixth cup that morning) while listening to his subordinate’s report on the incidents that had occurred; then both men walked over to the window, declaring that things didn’t look so cheery. The major, a quiet sort, with a wife at home, was highly adaptable; but the captain baron, an obstinate Lothario, a denizen of low dives,

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