Maupassant's Empty Frame: A New Look at "Boule de Suif"

John Moreau

French Forum, Volume 34, Number 2, Spring 2009, pp. 1-16 (Article)

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/frf.0.0074

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/371643
John Moreau

Maupassant’s Empty Frame

A New Look at “Boule de Suif”

Narrative framing is an important technique in Guy de Maupassant’s

fiction. For example, as Angela S. Moger discusses, Maupassant fre-
quently employs a physician as tale-teller—in such stories as “La
Rempailleuse” and “En Voyage”—partly in order to produce an effect
of naturalistic detachment.1 What I will focus on in this essay, how-
ever, is quite different. On the surface, Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif”
does not possess any such frame; it is told entirely by an anonymous
third-person voice that at no point betrays a separate existence. Yet
it is not how “Boule de Suif” itself unfolds that matters so much as
how its characters produce narrative from within the story. From this
perspective, not only is “Boule de Suif” framed, it is all frame, to the
exclusion of an “inner” narrative. In this case, the effect of framing is
not one of objectivity or credibility. Here there is no benign, authorita-
tive speaker whose function it is to bolster the truth-value of a primary
series of events. On the contrary, in “Boule de Suif,” the monolithic
voice of the frame overtakes and eventually replaces its content. How
is it possible to have a frame with nothing at its center? As I will dem-
onstrate, Maupassant achieves this effect through a series of ironic
references to a much older tradition of literary framing, namely the
frame-narrative as developed by Boccaccio, Chaucer and Marguerite
de Navarre. Moreover, in his intertextual reworking of these medieval
and Renaissance authors, Maupassant turns frame-narrative conven-
tion on its head in another way: the framing practices of these clas-
sic tale-collections tend to suggest a community of raconteurs linked
metonymically to the social collectivity or nascent national group.
Yet while Maupassant alludes to the discursive cooperation of classic
 2 / French Forum / Spring 2009 / Vol. 34, No. 2

frame-narratives, he does so precisely not to bolster a sense of solidar-

ity, but to highlight the distance between such idealized communities
and the realities of exclusion that inevitably underlie them.
Maupassant references the Western European frame-narrative
genre quite broadly in “Boule de Suif,” but the most fruitful com-
parisons to be made are with the three most influential avatars of that
genre, namely Boccaccio’s Decameron, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
and Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron. The framing device shared
by all three tale-collections may be defined in the following way: a
group of fellow travelers, male and female, united by a common ge-
ography and a common language, decide to take turns telling stories.
In each text, a diverse cast of characters produces a corresponding
multiplicity of narratives, resulting in stories that are funny, titillating,
moralizing and/or poignant. Moreover, in each case, the situation of
travel provides a context for the act of storytelling. For Boccaccio,
the flight from plague-ridden Florence is both literal and figurative:
though geographically, the travelers do not venture far from the city,
the provisional kingdom they construct in the Tuscan countryside
through cooperative narrative is worlds away. The “destination” is the
spiritual comfort and moral fortitude brought about by the telling of
tales. For Chaucer and Marguerite de Navarre, the literal aspect of
travel becomes more pronounced. The pilgrims en route to Canterbury
use storytelling as a means of mutual aid in getting where they are go-
ing. Through humor and moral exemplarity, storytelling soothes their
aches and pains, allays their fears, holds boredom at bay and wards off
the temptations of the road. Likewise, the travelers of the Heptaméron
recite stories both moralizing and humorous to keep their spirits high.
Held up at an abbey because of flooding and a stingy abbot who won’t
pay properly for bridge repairs, Marguerite’s narrators combine their
voices to create narratives that will pass the time through laughter,
emotional catharsis and moral example.
To varying degrees, these three tale-collections also hinge upon
the cohesion of their respective social groups. Boccaccio’s tale-tellers
are all drawn from the young Florentine nobility and create a fantas-
tic court in which each member of the group takes turns as queen or
king for the day. Chaucer’s pilgrims, on the other hand, represent a
rollicking socio-economic microcosm of fourteenth-century English
society, brought together through the leveling-device of pilgrimage.
 Moreau: Maupassant’s Empty Frame / 3

Although Chaucer paints highly critical portraits of certain groups

through his tale-tellers and through their exchange of conflicting ide-
ologies, the overall effect is one of a community in dialog. As for
Marguerite de Navarre, her conteurs, like Boccaccio’s, are all aris-
tocrats. Yet Marguerite amplifies the gender equity of Boccaccio and
Chaucer, and unlike them has an equal number of men and women in
her frame. Furthermore, as Timothy Hampton argues, the frame of the
Heptaméron may be read as a reflection of nascent French national
identity.2 In all three tale collections, social cohesion extends to lan-
guage as well, since all are monuments of their respective vernaculars,
a literary accomplishment mirrored in the frames through the staging
of spoken language.
Maupassant’s “Boule de Suif” recalls this frame-narrative tradi-
tion in a number of ways. First, the composition of the novella itself,
as part of Les Soirées de Médan, is telling. For while the six stories
produced by the writers of the Médan group were not published with
any sort of fictional frame, the history of their composition and the
self-perpetuating myth that surrounds it does suggest such an encad-
rement. The group’s aim was to produce a collection of stories about
the Franco-Prussian War (which had been over for nearly a decade by
the publication of the Soirées in 1880). As in Boccaccio or Marguerite
de Navarre, then, the compilation evokes the destiny of a collectivi-
ty—the French nation—through its handling of a crisis. The Soirées
differ from, say, the project of Boccaccio’s Florentine refugees in that
their bleak outlook generally refuses moral exemplarity or the tonic
of laughter. Yet what might be termed the founding myth of the en-
terprise conjures up a space not unlike the alternate civilization of the
Decameron. The rural setting of Médan seemingly provided an idyl-
lic retreat where creative energies could fuse; indeed, the very title
Soirées implies a nightly recitation of stories by each of the six writers
in turn. As Maupassant himself recounts,

Comme les nuits étaient magnifiques, chaudes, pleines d’odeurs de feuilles, nous
allions chaque soir nous promener dans la grande île en face. [. . .] Or, par une nuit
de pleine lune, nous parlions de Mérimée dont les dames disaient, ‘Quel charmant
conteur! Et Huysmans prononça à peu près ces paroles: ‘Un conteur est un mon-
sieur qui, ne sachant pas écrire, débite prétentieusement des balivernes.’ On en vint
à parcourir tous les conteurs célèbres et vanter les raconteurs de vive voix [. . .] On
alla s’asseoir, et, dans le grand repos des champs assoupis, sous la lumière écla-
 4 / French Forum / Spring 2009 / Vol. 34, No. 2

tante de la lune, Zola nous dit cette terrible page de l’histoire sinistre des guerres
qui s’appelle l’Attaque du Moulin.3

Here in this bucolic haven, in this circle of friends assembled to dis-

cuss the art de raconter and to practice it, we may read a kind of
frame for the Médan project not unlike those of the classic frame-nar-
ratives I have discussed. So although Maupassant was still a few years
away from his collaboration in another tale-collection, Le Nouveau
Décaméron, Jennifer K. Wolter is entirely correct to say that his lan-
guage here evokes “a Boccaccian style of storytelling.”4
As Alain Pagès puts it, such a mythical origin added to the col-
lection “une septième histoire, tout aussi importante.”5 And almost as
fictive, for the stories were compiled not in the summer of 1879 as
Maupassant would have it, but late in the fall, in Paris, and without a
great deal of collaboration, oral or otherwise. It is therefore difficult
to believe that this “myth of Médan” was meant to be taken seriously;
in any event, the underlying tone of the Soirées seems to belie the ro-
manticized, oral version of their composition. For Maupassant and the
other five members of the group, the Franco-Prussian War represented
a national crisis provoked not only by foreign aggression, but also by
more insidious forces of moral corruption from within France. Thus
the Médan narratives do not tend to show the coming-together of the
French nation in the face of adversity, but rather its self-betrayal and
undoing.6 In such a context, it is tempting to see the “Boccaccian”
aspect of the collection as an ironic reversal of the traditional associa-
tions that framing holds with social unity. Yet even more striking is
Maupassant’s appropriation and reversal of frame-narrative conven-
tions in his particular contribution to the Soirées. While Boccaccio,
Chaucer and Marguerite de Navarre all stage the collaboration of their
respective societies through storytelling, “Boule de Suif” suggests the
disintegration of French collective identity precisely through its evo-
cation of frame-tale structure.
“Boule de Suif” begins in a Rouen ravaged and humiliated by the
Prussian forces. In the midst of a snowstorm, ten carriage passengers
ride from that city to unoccupied Le Havre primarily to attend to busi-
ness matters there. After the first day of their journey, the travelers
stop for the night at an inn in Tôtes. There, one of the passengers,
the eponymous Boule de Suif (Élisabeth Rousset), is propositioned
 Moreau: Maupassant’s Empty Frame / 5

by a Prussian officer. Although a prostitute by trade, she refuses him

because it offends her sense of personal dignity and patriotic pride
to give her body to the enemy, but the officer detains the entire party
until she agrees to appease his lust. The others, impatient to continue
their journey, tell Élisabeth exemplary stories of supposedly patriotic
women who sacrificed their bodies for the common good, until she
is convinced that she must do likewise and the group is finally al-
lowed to depart. How does this novella borrow from the frame-nar-
ratives I have discussed? For the moment, I will leave aside the char-
acters’ storytelling session at the inn, which will constitute the heart
of my argument, to suggest some other ways in which the structure
of “Boule de Suif” references the frame-narrative tradition. First, the
solidarity—if we may call it that—of this group is imposed from with-
out by the challenges of travel, in this case a voyage undertaken in
wartime and bad weather. As in the Decameron and the Heptaméron,
there are ten travelers and, at six women and four men, they fall just
short of Marguerite de Navarre’s neat gender division. Moreover, in
their conspicuous socio-economic diversity, the passengers represent
a Chaucerian catalog of the estates, updated for nineteenth-century
France and paraded systematically before our eyes as in the General
Prologue of the Canterbury Tales.7 There is the merchant class, “Tout
au fond, aux meilleures places, sommeillaient, en face l’un de l’autre,
M. et Mme Loiseau, des marchands de vins en gros de la rue Grand-
Pont” (56).8 Next comes la haute bourgeoisie:

À côté d’eux se tenait, plus digne, appartenant à une caste supérieure, M. Carré-
Lamadon, homme considérable, posé dans les cotons, propriétaire de trois fila-
tures, officier de la Légion d’honneur, et membre du Conseil général. [. . .] Mme
Carré-Lamadon, beaucoup plus jeune que son mari, demeurait la consolation des
officiers de bonne famille envoyés à Rouen en garnison. (57)

After this we are introduced to the aristocracy: “Ses voisins, le comte et

la comtesse Hubert de Bréville, portaient un des noms les plus anciens
et les plus nobles de la Normandie. Le comte, vieux gentilhomme de
grande tournure, s’efforçait d’accentuer, par les artifices de sa toilette,
sa ressemblance naturelle avec le roy Henri IV [. . .]” (57). There are
also two nuns—one young and one old—to represent the First Estate,
as well as offering a striking parallel with the Prioress and Second Nun
of Chaucer’s Tales (58). To embody Republicanism and penury, there
 6 / French Forum / Spring 2009 / Vol. 34, No. 2

is “Cornudet le démoc, la terreur des gens respectables. Depuis vingt

ans il trempait sa grande barbe rousse dans les bocks de tous les cafés
démocratiques” (58). Finally, we meet Boule de Suif, only later to be
identified by her given name, Élisabeth Rousset. She is defined first
and foremost as a prostitute:

La femme, une de celles appelées galantes, était célèbre par son embonpoint pré-
coce qui lui avait valu le surnom de Boule de suif. [. . .] Aussitôt qu’elle fut recon-
nue, des chuchotements coururent parmi les femmes honnêtes, et les mots de ‘pros-
tituée,’ de ‘honte publique’ furent chuchotés si haut qu’elle leva la tête. (58-9)

Politically, Élisabeth later identifies herself as a bonapartiste (64), but

the only thing that matters to the other travelers is how she makes a
living.
This irrevocable identification with her trade consigns Élisabeth
to an anecdotal existence as a fallen woman, to a negative moral ex-
emplarity pronounced only in whispers. From the moment we meet
her, we know her only through the eyes of others, as Boule de Suif;
her real name is used only four times in the novella, and never by
one of her fellow passengers.9 Along with the name of Cornudet, a
character who is also marginalized to a certain extent, the label Boule
de Suif recalls the highly descriptive appellations of the tale-tellers
in Boccaccio and Marguerite de Navarre, characters with names like
Filostrato, Fiammetta, Parlamente and Saffredent. Yet for Élisabeth,
such a name will not serve to mark her as a narrating voice, but rather
will bar her from speech, moving her into the realm of story itself.
The name Boule de Suif works ultimately to designate Élisabeth as a
kind of fictional character in the eyes of those around her, but also as a
commodity to be traded. She belongs implicitly to the “ex-marchands
de suif” (50) of Rouen to whose humiliating defeat Maupassant refers
in the opening pages of his novella and who now occupy the carriage.
In time, as Élisabeth’s existence becomes progressively less real and
more bound to the narrative role imposed upon her, the economic and
fictional aspects of the name will fuse. She will literally become an
object to be bartered by her fellow passengers through their use of nar-
rative.10 While in traditional frame-narratives, the exchange of stories
tends to produce life against death symbolically (Boccaccio) or liter-
ally (Scheherazade comes to mind), here such an exchange—cynically
economic—turns life into deathly rhetoric.
 Moreau: Maupassant’s Empty Frame / 7

As they encounter adversity and eventually become stuck along

their journey, the travelers do not overcome the hardships of their pas-
sage by finding common ground in conversation. Suddenly thrown
together as they are, the ten initially ride rather uncomfortably, “sans
échanger une parole” (55). It is only the objectionable presence of
Boule de Suif that allows the “honest” women to imagine themselves
as equals and to converse as such:

Mais bientôt la conversation reprit entre les trois dames, que la présence de cette
fille avait rendues subitement amies, presque intimes. Elles devaient faire, leur
semblait-il, comme un faisceau de leurs dignités d’épouses en face de cette vendue
sans vergogne; car l’amour légal le prend toujours de haut avec son libre confrère.
(59)

Similarly, the three other men band together to exclude Cornudet,

speaking of money “d’un certain ton dédaigneux pour les pauvres”
(59). Solidarity, however dubious it may be here, is symbolized, as in
the classic frame-narratives, by conversation. Yet unlike those idyl-
lically dialogic frames, the discursive unity of this national group is
achieved only through acts of exclusion.
Élisabeth also stands out from the others in that she is the only
one to have planned ahead and brought sustenance for the carriage
ride. She first eats in silence before timidly offering to share, fearing
to offend the others’ moral sentiments by presuming to break bread
with them. Indeed, they are ravenous but put up a facade of shocked
decency before diving into and quickly devouring the contents of her
copious picnic basket. The importance of food here points to anoth-
er device of social-leveling in frame-narratives: a shared meal that
binds the travelers together and goes hand-in-hand with conversation.
Food plays such a role in the Decameron, where the locus amœnus of
Boccaccio’s tale-tellers offers an abundance of good things to eat and
drink.11 As for Chaucer, as Elizabeth M. Biebel argues, food in the
Canterbury Tales lends itself to an immediate identification with com-
munion and spiritual sustenance.12 In the same article, Biebel goes on
to suggest that women, equated with sacrificial victims, are frequently
a source of figurative nourishment in the Tales.13 It would seem that this
Chaucerian motif applies to “Boule de Suif” as well. Mary Donaldson-
Evans writes of Élisabeth that, as a symbol for France betrayed by its
own people during the Franco-Prussian War, her very body constitutes
 8 / French Forum / Spring 2009 / Vol. 34, No. 2

a sacrificial meal.14 Élisabeth does in fact appear highly edible: “Petite,

ronde de partout, grasse à lard, avec des doigts bouffis, étranglés aux
phalanges, pareils à des chapelets de courtes saucisses [. . .] Sa figure
était une pomme rouge” (58).15 Moreover, what she pulls from her
basket is nothing less than a small medieval banquet:

Elle en sortit d’abord une petite assiette de faïence, une fine timbale en argent, puis
une vaste terrine dans laquelle deux poulets entiers, tout découpés, avaient confit
sous leur gelée; et l’on apercevait encore dans le panier d’autres bonnes choses
enveloppées, des pâtés, des fruits, des friandises, les provisions préparées pour un
voyage de trois jours, afin de ne point toucher à la cuisine des auberges. Quatre
goulots de bouteilles passaient entre les paquets de nourriture. (61)

If there is any doubt as to the sacramental significance of this meal,

Maupassant makes things more transparent when it becomes a ques-
tion of sharing Élisabeth’s wine: “Un embarass se produisit lorsqu’on
eut débouché la première bouteille de bordeaux: il n’y avait qu’une
timbale. On se la passa après l’avoir essuyée” (62). As an embodiment
of the selfless sacrifice of the Nation, Élisabeth will share all she has
for the journey among her gluttonous concitoyens, but if this repast
indicates the beginning of a social communion, it is a communion
that ultimately excludes Élisabeth, even as it depends on her. Although
Élisabeth’s generosity temporarily obliges the others to demonstrate a
token of civility by including her in the conversation (63), it will not
be long before they definitively sell her out, forcing her to trade her
dignity for their own comfort.
After a long, slow day’s journey, the voyagers reach the inn at
Tôtes. Here, correspondences with the frame-narratives I have dis-
cussed become all the more vivid. Not only does an inn also feature
as the meeting-place for Chaucer’s pilgrims, but like Marguerite de
Navarre’s travelers at the abbey, this group will be held up indefinite-
ly by unfortunate circumstances (war, in this case, in addition to bad
weather) aggravated by individual greed. Whereas the innkeeper of
the Canterbury Tales is the one to initially suggest that the pilgrims
tell stories to amuse themselves, the innkeeper at Tôtes acts as a go-
between for the Prussian officer who wishes to sleep with Élisabeth
and who detains the passengers until she submits. A few days having
gone by with no sign that Élisabeth will consent, the group becomes
more and more impatient to continue their economic pilgrimage from
 Moreau: Maupassant’s Empty Frame / 9

Rouen to Le Havre. Yet the arts of conférer and raconter are not im-
mediately proposed as a remedy; on the contrary, boredom and hos-
tile silence reign: “Une fois rentrés, on ne sut plus que faire. Des pa-
roles aigres furent même échangées à propos de choses insignifiantes.
Le dîner silencieux dura peu, et chacun monta se coucher, espérant
dormir pour tuer le temps” (78). Most especially, Élisabeth reverts to
her earlier status as a pariah shut out from dialog: “Les femmes par-
laient à peine à Boule de suif” (78). In what may be read as a parody
of the ten days passed by Boccaccio’s tale-tellers and intended for the
stranded travelers of the incomplete Heptaméron, Maupassant’s char-
acters cannot bear to spend more than a few days together, and this in
relatively comfortable circumstances not far from home. As time drags
on, there is an increasingly vocal consensus that Élisabeth should give
in; she is a prostitute after all, as Mme Loiseau says: “‘Puisque c’est
son métier, à cette gueuse, de faire ça avec tous les hommes, je trouve
qu’elle n’a pas le droit de refuser l’un plutôt que l’autre’” (78). This
insistence that Élisabeth conform to her “métier” runs counter to the
Chaucerian conventions of frame-narrative; although the tellers of the
Tales are likewise identified by trade or profession (e.g. The Reeve,
The Plowman), their function as narrators—their belonging to a dis-
cursive community—largely outweighs everyday station and allows
for a temporary transcendence of it.
But Maupassant’s travelers want only to get on with their business,
and so they condemn Élisabeth to hers, attempting to fix her forever in a
single determining role. This is where, at last embarking upon the narra-
tive project Maupassant’s allusions to frame-narrative lead us to expect,
the others decide to sap Élisabeth’s resistance by telling her stories. At
this point, Élisabeth has left the inn to attend a baptism (78), making her
the only character to enter a church while in Tôtes. This is significant
in terms of frame-narrative convention since, in all three collections I
have discussed, the conteurs break their storytelling sessions regularly
for collective acts of religious devotion, further heightening the aspect
of communion implied by cooperative narrative. Here, however, it is
quite the opposite, for the other travelers decide to gang up on Élisabeth
through their use of narrative precisely while she, and she alone, is at
mass. When she returns and the group is seated for lunch, they begin to
mount their unholy rhetorical assault on her, taking turns at providing
examples of women who used their bodies for the common good:
 10 / French Forum / Spring 2009 / Vol. 34, No. 2

Aussitôt à table, on commença les approches. Ce fut d’abord une conversation

vague sur le dévouement. On cita des exemples anciens: Judith et Holopherne,
puis, sans aucune raison, Lucrèce avec Sextus, Cléopâtre faisant passer par sa
couche tous les généraux ennemis, et les y réduisant à des servilités d’esclave.
Alors se déroula une histoire fantaisiste, éclose dans l’imagination de ces million-
naires ignorants, où les citoyennes de Rome allaient endormir, à Capoue, Annibal
entre leurs bras, et, avec lui, ses lieutenants, et les phalanges des mercenaires. On
cita toutes les femmes qui ont arrêté des conquérants, fait de leur corps un champ
de bataille, un moyen de dominer, une arme, qui ont vaincu par leurs caresses
héroïques des êtres hideux ou détestés, ou sacrifié leur chasteté à la vengeance et
au dévouement. (80)

The stories are vague, assembled haphazardly, and not presented to

us at any length. They also appear to lack historical veracity,16 which
contrasts with the stated ambition of the Héptameron “de n’escripre
nulle nouvelle qui ne soit veritable histoire.”17 On the other hand, it is
significant that the subject of these exempla is sexual ethics, a central
theme in the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and especially the
Heptaméron. The preservation of sexual virtue—whether in terms of
virginity, fidelity, chastity or defense against sexual assault—is a ma-
jor focus of these frame-narratives and provides a moralizing voice to
balance the ribald humor of other tales.18
Yet in the eyes of those around her, who have already consigned her
to the narrative of a vendue, Boule de Suif has no virtue to preserve.
In that sense, the traditional paradigm of sexual ethics is reversed.
The “moralizing” aim of these conteurs is rather to make Élisabeth
sacrifice a dignity—one that seems to them only vestigial—for the
good of the majority. While the female framers of the Heptaméron
band together against the pervasiveness of seductive male rhetoric,
affirming chastity as a universal virtue for women of every stature,19
everybody here participates in the assault on Élisabeth regardless of
their sex. Only the buffoonish Cornudet, who ineffectually claims to
be offended by the group’s actions, and the younger nun, who is nev-
ertheless silently complicit, do not contribute a narrative. Some stories
are marked by the politics of the narrators—“On parla même en terms
voilés de cette Anglaise de grande famille qui s’était laissé inoculer
une horrible et contagieuse maladie pour la transmettre à Bonaparte,
sauvé miraculeusement, par une faiblesse subite, à l’heure du rendez-
vous fatal”(80)20—as well as by their religious sentiments:
 Moreau: Maupassant’s Empty Frame / 11

Chacun se battait les flancs pour découvrir des exemples nouveaux et ne trouvait
rien, quand la comtesse, sans préméditation peut-être, éprouvant un vague besoin
de rendre hommage à la Religion, interrogea la plus âgée des bonnes sœurs sur les
grands faits de la vie des saints. Or beaucoup avaient commis des actes qui seraient
des crimes à nos yeux; mais l’Église absout sans peine ces forfaits quand ils sont
accomplis pour la gloire de Dieu, ou pour le bien du prochain. C’était un argument
puissant; la comtesse en profita. (81)

As in the classic frame-narratives I have discussed, each participant

brings his or her own point of view to the table, assembling a group
of tales that is heterogeneous in genre and register; there is classical
and recent history, “une histoire fantaisiste” (80) and selections from
hagiography. M. Loiseau for his part adds an element of blue humor,
essential to any tale-collection: “À son tour Loiseau lâcha quelques
grivoiseries plus raides dont on ne se blessa point” (79).
Yet for all their ostensible diversity, the various discourses blur
into a univocal aim, namely the sacrifice of the tenth member of the
group. Another trait shared by the frame-narratives I have discussed
is that individual tales are always firmly ascribed to specific speak-
ers, each character taking his or her turn in a methodical order. In the
Heptaméron, for example, the voix is passed ritualistically from one
tale-teller to the next in an express desire for narrative diversity:

Et, voyant Madame Oysille que le temps se perdoit parmy les louenges de ceste
trespassée, dist à Saffredent: ‘Sy vous ne dictes quelque chose pour faire rire la
compagnye, je ne sçay nul d’entre vous qui sceust rabiller la faulte que j’ay faicte
de la faire pleurer. Parquoy je vous donne ma voix pour dire la tierce nouvelle.’21

Yet in this reworking of frame-narrative structure, many of the exem-

pla served up to Élisabeth are not even attributed to specific characters
but only to an anonymous “on.” More importantly, not one of the tales
is actually presented to the reader except through indirect discourse.
This has the effect, among other things, of drowning out the stories’
particularity as they are completely subsumed by their frame. The
brilliant polyphony of Boccaccio, Chaucer and Marguerite de Navarre
fades into a monstrous collective imperative. The kind of impassioned
discussion that the tales of the Heptaméron never fail to provoke for
conteur and audience alike is absent. Here, all are of one mind though
their means of expression differ. Even the older nun does her part, con-
tributing a Bible story meant to convince Élisabeth to surrender:
 12 / French Forum / Spring 2009 / Vol. 34, No. 2

Elle trouvait tout simple le sacrifice d’Abraham, car elle aurait immédiatement tué
père et mère sur un ordre venu d’en haut; et rien, à son avis, ne pouvait déplaire
au Seigneur quand l’intention était louable. La comtesse, mettant à profit l’autorité
sacrée de sa complice inattendue, lui fit faire comme une paraphrase édifiante de
cet axiome de morale: ‘La fin justifie les moyens.’ (81)22

Interestingly, Élisabeth’s situation suggests a parallel to the story told

by another bonne sœur, Chaucer’s Second Nun, who recounts how
Saint Cecilia both maintained her chastity and resisted a Roman of-
ficial’s demands that she sacrifice to Jupiter.23 In Élisabeth’s case, sex
(with a figure of imperial power) and sacrifice are one and the same,
but the narrative involvement of the Church is turned on its head.
Rather than exhorting her to Christian chastity, even this “sainte fille”
(82) appropriates Christian discourse to undermine Élisabeth’s virtue.
Not so much won over by her fellow travelers’ rhetorical skill as she
is backed into a corner, Élisabeth eventually has little choice but to give
in. Thus, as a kind of typecast character whom the others use for their
own ends, Élisabeth is not only framed in the sense of narrative, but in
the criminal sense as well: she has been set up. When Élisabeth finally
submits, the others, led on by Loiseau, amuse themselves by making
innuendoes about what she is doing upstairs with the officer: “Au bout
d’un quart d’heure il recommença la même farce, la renouvela souvent
dans la soirée; et il faisait semblant d’interpeller quelqu’un à l’étage
au-dessus, en lui donnant des conseils à double sens puisés dans son
esprit de commis voyageur” (84). For the other nine, it is now as if
Élisabeth, expelled from their company, has passed over into the world
of fiction, into Loiseau’s dirty jokes, the annals of garbled history and
the unorthodox saints’ lives of the countess and the nun. The others are
free to make what they want of Élisabeth in her absence, and her sacri-
fice finally does create an atmosphere of mutual good cheer—perverse
as it is—similar to the way those in classic frame-narratives put aside
their differences to cherish the pure enjoyment of tale-telling. At this
point, it is striking that the absent Élisabeth is not included as a person
who might be hurt by the jokes told at her expense:

Bien que ces plaisanteries fussent d’un goût déplorable, elles amusaient et ne
blessaient personne, car l’indignation dépend des milieux comme le reste, et
l’atmosphère qui s’était peu à peu créée autour d’eux était chargée de pensées
grivoises. Au dessert, les femmes elles-mêmes firent des allusions spirituelles et
discrètes. Les regards luisaient; on avait bu beaucoup. Le comte, qui conservait,
 Moreau: Maupassant’s Empty Frame / 13

même en ses écarts, sa grande apparence de gravité, trouva une comparaison fort
goûtée sur la fin des hivernages au pôle et la joie des naufragés qui voient s’ouvrir
une route vers le sud. (84, emphasis mine)

Élisabeth Rousset’s existence as a person has been replaced with that

of Boule de Suif, a disposable character in a tawdry anecdote. Her
sacrifice is a fall into exemplarity, and it allows the others to con-
tinue their own narrative and leave the inn, moving on to Le Havre.
In the surrender of her will and personhood, Élisabeth even comes to
resemble Griselda, the troubling paragon of self-effacing female vir-
tue who figures in both the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales.24 Yet
after her selflessness is put to the test, Griselda is finally rehabilitated
and rewarded. Not so for Maupassant’s doomed heroine, who exists
in a world where the rhetoric of patriotic sacrifice comes cheap. As if,
once over with, Élisabeth’s capitulation only confirms her depravity,
she will be shunned even more harshly on the next leg of the journey
than she was on the first. She will also be left hungry this time as the
others fill their bellies.
It is worthy of note here that both the Canterbury Tales and the
Heptaméron fall short of the narrative projects initially outlined in
their prologues. Although by serendipity rather than by design, their
incompletion suggests that the adversity confronting the tale-tellers
finally fades, through cooperative effort, into the idyllic conversatio of
the narrative world itself.25 For Marguerite de Navarre, for example, it
seems almost a happy accident that the cycle of tales trails off in mid-
stream; it no longer matters that the travelers cannot leave the abbey,
for the power of the conte has become supreme. Narrative can over-
come obstacles encountered along the way so as to establish another
existence entirely, one in which dreams and ideals become realities,
one in which Boccaccio’s world away from the plague is actualized.
In short, the frame of collective crisis fades from view, absorbed into
the community of narrative it has created at the center.
The cruel victory of the majority in “Boule de Suif” works through
an inversion of this use of framing. For these characters, narrative ex-
empla can be nothing more than rhetoric—to paraphrase the casuistic
older nun, a mere means to an end on the road to Le Havre. The pur-
pose of the stories told to Élisabeth and of the narrative into which
she ultimately disappears is not to create an atmosphere of mutual
 14 / French Forum / Spring 2009 / Vol. 34, No. 2

comfort and moral fortitude under harsh circumstances; the travelers

do not strive to make the most of their circumstances through coopera-
tive discourse, but rather work to actively abolish those circumstances
through the sacrifice of one in their number. This reversal of frame and
content makes “Boule de Suif” an ironic title: it represents the thing
framed that is absent, the woman who is not there. If Élisabeth/Boule
de Suif is to be read as a symbol of the French nation betrayed, what
she has been betrayed by is precisely the empty speech that claims to
construct her in the first place. Such use of narrative has only itself
as object and assimilates all into itself—like the gluttons devouring
Élisabeth’s food, or like the scarlet taxonomy that imprints itself for-
ever upon her, silencing her. If the Heptaméron represents the begin-
nings of a French national imaginary through storytelling, this is a dark
vision of its end, in which Maupassant’s references to frame-narrative
underscore the distance between the cooperative rhetoric of national
communities and the real acts of exclusion that found and maintain
them. In “Boule de Suif,” the project of “collective” narrative has pro-
duced only the most ironic kind of solidarity—that of a nation lum-
bering along war-torn roads to an uncertain future, this as Cornudet
whistles La Marseillaise and Élisabeth silently weeps. No longer pres-
ent to anyone but the reader, Élisabeth ends as if trapped between the
lines of a nationalist discourse no longer divided by partisanship only
because it has been brought together by the commonality of greed: “Et
Boule de suif pleurait toujours; et parfois un sanglot qu’elle n’avait pu
retenir passait, entre deux couplets, dans les ténèbres” (89).

Princeton University

Notes
1. Angela S. Moger, “Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire,” PMLA 100, no.
3 (May 1985): 315–327.
2. Timothy Hampton, Literature and Nation in the Sixteenth Century: Inventing Renaissance
France (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2001), 130–134.
3. Cited by Alain Pagès, “Le Mythe de Médan,” Les Cahieres Naturalistes 55 (1981): 31–40.
32.
4. Wolter, “Les Soirées de Médan: The Beginning and/or End of the Médan Group,”
Excavatio: Emile Zola and Naturalism 17, no. 1–2 (2002): 141. Emphasis mine.
5. Pagès, 32.
 Moreau: Maupassant’s Empty Frame / 15

6. See Mary Donaldson-Evans, “The Decline and Fall of Élisabeth Rousset: Text and Context
in Maupassant’s ‘Boule de Suif,’” Australian Journal of French Studies 18, no. 1 (1981): 17. See
also David Baguely, “L’Envers de la Guerre: Les Soirées de Médan et le Mode Ironique,” French
Forum 7, no. 3 (Sept. 1982): 235–244.
7. Baguely has identified “Boule de Suif” in terms of the literary convention of a social
microcosm traveling together (242). While Baguely does attribute this to an element of me-
dieval/renaissance literature, it is the “nef des fous” (242) and not the frame-narrative. On the
significance of the travelers’ various socio-political identities in terms of political allegory, see
Donaldson-Evans, 20–34.
8. “Boule de Suif,” in Boule de suif et autres contes de la guerre, ed. W.M. Landers (London:
Harrap, 1983), 50-89. All references to “Boule de Suif” will be from this edition.
9. See Donaldson-Evans, 20.
10. See Donaldson-Evans 20, 22.
11. See Frank Capozzi, “Food and Food Images in the Decameron,” Canadian Journal of
Italian Studies 10, no. 34 (1987): 1–13.
12. Elizabeth M. Biebel, “Pilgrims to Table: Food Consumption in Chaucer’s Canterbury
Tales,” in Food and Eating in Medieval Europe, ed. Martha Carlin, Joel T. Rosenthal (London:
The Hambledon Press, 1998), 15–26.
13. Biebel, 22-26.
14. See Donaldson-Evans, 24–27. On Élisabeth as a symbol for the French nation, see also
Hannah Thompson, “A Battle in the Feminine? The Gendered Body and the Franco-Prussian
War,” in Visions/Revisions: Essays on Nineteenth-Century French Culture, ed. Nigel Harkness,
et. al. (Oxford: Peter Lang: 2003), 157–73.
15. Élisabeth may be partly inspired by Chaucer’s Wife of Bath. Not only have the two
women enjoyed the company of many men, but both are endowed with a more than ample figure
and a ruddy complexion. Compare the passage cited with Canterbury Tales I, v.458–476.
16. See Donaldson-Evans, 32.
17. Heptaméron, ed. Renja Salminen. (Geneva: Droz, 1999), 11.
18. See Hampton, 121.
19. See Gary Ferguson, “Gendered Oppositions in Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron:
The Rhetoric of Seduction and Resistance in Narrative and Society,” in Renaissance Women
Writers: French Texts/American Contexts, ed. Anne R. Larsen, Colette H. Winn (Detroit: Wayne
State University Press, 1994), 154.
20. Donaldson-Evans (32–33) points out that this is a particularly poorly chosen example for
Élisabeth, who has already expressed her loyalty to Napoleon.
21. Heptaméron, 25.
22. Pursuing Chaucerian correspondences still further, the nun’s flagrant abuse of a
Biblical exemplum may serve to identify her with some of the less-than-honest clergymen of
the Canterbury Tales. While the nuns and Parson of the Tales use exempla “responsibly,” the
Pardoner, Friar and Summoner are all guilty of twisting the stories they choose to suit their own
ends. See J. Allan Mitchell, Ethics and Exemplary Narrative in Chaucer and Gower, Chaucer
Studies, vol. 33 (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2004), 95–111.
23. Canterbury Tales VIII, v.120–553. Michel Berta argues that Élisabeth resembles a saint
as portrayed in medieval hagiography. Berta emphasizes the “exemplary” and “archetypal” as-
pects of her character; this seems to me yet another way of saying that she has been cast in a nar-
 16 / French Forum / Spring 2009 / Vol. 34, No. 2

row role from the beginning, one reflected by other characters’ use of hagiographical and biblical
exempla: “Sainte Élisabeth Rousset dite Boule de Suif,” Excavatio: Émile Zola and Naturalism
12 (1999): 121–130.
24. See Decameron X, 10; Canterbury Tales IV, 1.
25. This is in spite of Chaucer’s famous “retraction.”