To most readers, Maupassant offers two faces. On the one hand, he is widely read as a lucid and ironic observer of the petty vices, crude passions and stupidities of otherwise unremarkable individuals populating the peasant and urban classes of nineteenth-century French society. More intriguing to current criticism is a face that appeared later in Maupassant's work, that of the sick, tormented schizophrenic, haunted literally to death by the frightening and inescapable “other” of “Le Horla” and “Lui.” Maupassant the realist or Maupassant the psychotic. Relatively scant attention, though, has been given to his work as representing broader historical, social, and cultural problems. While it is true that his vision, particularly in his short stories, tends to focus on the anecdotal and the particular rather than the general—as many of his titles indicate: “La Parure,” “Le Lit,” “Le papa de Simon,” and so forth—and seems more interested in “human nature” than social changes and conditions, it can reasonably be argued that many of his stories directly invoke broader and more fundamental concerns of late nineteenth-century French society, for example, the war, prostitution, state bureaucracy, etc. A case in point is “La Maison Tellier,” published in 1881 as the title story of a collection containing some of his most popular and often reprinted texts.

The “Maison” of the title is a house of prostitution in Fécamp, and Maupassant's story describes the closing of the establishment one Saturday to allow its owner, Madame Tellier, and the women who work there to attend the first communion of her niece in a small village some few hours distance away by train. The women, gaudily outfitted in their Sunday-best, are received ceremoniously by Madame's brother while the simple villagers are awe-struck by the exaggerated decorum and finery of such important ladies from the big city. During the church service the next morning, the sentimental and uncontrollable sobbing of these distinguished female visitors so inspires the religious enthusiasm of the congregation that the priest declares a miracle has taken place. The women return that evening to Fécamp to the relief of their mystified and frustrated clientele whose only knowledge of the closing had been a notice discovered the previous evening, mysteriously announcing “Closed for a first communion.” Overjoyed at the re-opening of their traditional gathering-place, the townsmen offer a lively celebration including champagne, songs, and dancing that lasts until the early morning hours, and that ends with an apparent marriage proposal to Madame Tellier from Monsieur Vasse, magistrate of the local commercial court.

Typically this story has been read as an example of one of Maupassant's favorite themes, the satirical association of (female) sexuality and religion (Lecarme-Talbone 112), cited as an instance of the “blasphemous identification” between church and brothel (Donaldson-Evans 84). Maupassant's delight in the farcical potential and ambiguities to be found in verbal associations of religious and sexual ardor has been noted frequently, for instance, in the passage Donaldson-Evans (84) quotes from the priest's words at the close of the ceremony:

Pendant que Jésus-Christ pénétrait pour la première fois dans le corps de ces petits, le Saint-Esprit, l'oiseau céleste, le souffle de Dieu, s'est abattu sur vous, s'est emparé de vous, vous a saisis, courbés comme des roseaux sous la brise.

(275)¹

The device is so dominant, in fact, that a recent critic considers the associations between “la maison de Dieu” and “la maison Tellier” an indication that the goal of this story is a certain “rédemption de la prostituée” (Crouzet 254).² Maupassant's deliberate juxtaposition of church and brothel is revealed in seemingly gratuitous details of description: an entrance to Madame Tellier's house is lighted by “une petite lanterne comme celles qu'on allume encore en certaines villes aux pieds des madonnes encastrées dans les murs” (258), while from its windows can be seen, beyond the port, “la côte de la Vierge avec sa vieille chapelle toute grise” (256).

But the comic effects of double entendre, mistaken identity, and incongruous religious sentimentality are more than ingredients of a farce mocking hypocrisy and ignorance or revealing the author's particular notions of feminine psychology. A strong clue to Maupassant's broader social vision in this story can be found in its opening sentences:

On allait là, chaque soir, vers onze heures, comme au café, simplement.

Ils s'y retrouvaient à six ou huit, toujours les mêmes, non pas des noceurs, mais des hommes honorables, des commerçants, des jeunes gens de la ville. …

(256)

It is not simply that this house of prostitution is tolerated by the inhabitants of the city, frequented by its most “respectable” population—a magistrate, important merchants, the tax collector, a banker's son—and incorporated into their regular habits. It is, literally, an integral element of (male) social life in the city, serving both the sailors who dock at its port and the notable citizens of its society. In its traits and characteristics it is as much a bourgeois institution as the family, professions, and the “café.” Madame Tellier, honest widow “d'une bonne famille” (256), is a former innkeeper who inherited the business from an uncle. When she and her husband took over the establishment in Fécamp, “ils se firent aimer tout de suite par leur personnel et des voisins” (257). Even the house enjoys, through the “realist” details given by Maupassant, a certificate of middle-class legitimacy: “La maison était familiale, toute petite, peinte en jaune, à l'encoignure d'une rue derrière l'église Saint-Etienne …” (256). It seems a natural part of the urban landscape, and is even included in the medical program of one of its clients, the fish merchant, who goes there for “reasons of health” (260). Madame's business-like decorum, the banality of the house, descriptions of innocent excursions and picnics by the river offered by Madame to her “girls,” all these details highlight the picture of a stable and serious middle-class enterprise, functioning successfully and comfortably within the norms of bourgeois order.

What is missing from this picture, of course, is sexual desire, its forces and threat of irruption and scandal. Sexuality, after all—woman, her sexuality, and the male desire and economic capacity to possess her—is the motor behind this enterprise, its raison d'être, just as it is the necessary reference of Maupassant's irony and humor. Such sexuality is present nevertheless, along with the whole exchange apparatus of prostitution, but displaced and controlled, or even repressed, by the social and commercial banality that grounds Maupassant's rhetoric and charges his comic descriptions. At several points in the story the socially disruptive dimension of sexuality does erupt, but, significantly, this occurs in the absence of its containing authority, Madame Tellier's firm, business-like eye. Prevented by Madame's departure—“Fermé pour cause de première communion” (262)—from satisfying their desire, or rather from participating in the institutionalized circulation of this desire, the group of British and French sailors explodes in shouting and fist-fights, becomes a “horde hurlant” (261) marching through the streets, while the bourgeois clientele of the house, equally frustrated, wanders aimlessly, complaining, arguing, and in the end nearly coming to blows. The image of male sexual desire Maupassant proposes here in the absence of social control reveals a latent violence that threatens to destroy the peace and harmony upon which depends the orderly functioning of the city. The same argument demonstrating the necessary control or containment of sexual energy and desire can be found in two other scenes. The first occurs on the train where a traveling salesman who offers free garters to the prostitutes threatens to unleash a sexual orgy until Madame Tellier steps in, re-establishing order and restraining the women by her authoritative control. Later in the story, when the group has returned from church, a more violent picture of desire is seen when Madame's brother drunkenly attacks one of the women:

L'homme furieux, la face rouge, tout débraillé, secouant en des efforts violents les deux femmes cramponnées à lui, tirait de toutes ses forces sur la jupe de Rosa en bredouillant: “Salope, tu ne veux pas?”

(277)

Again it is Madame who restores order, seizing her brother and throwing him forcefully from the intended victim. It should be noted that these scenes representing libidinal energy and disruption—the near-riot in Fécamp, the salesman's vulgar provocations, and the attack of Madame's brother on Rosa—all occur outside the legitimately designated ground of regulated sexual activity, the established house in Fécamp. The significance of the closing scene in the story is revealed by its contrast to these earlier incidents: insulated by its definition as an acceptable practice of middle-class commerce and pleasure under the responsible direction of Madame, sexuality is no longer a violent threat but becomes an expression of harmony and joyous order. Maupassant's descriptions of the party, however ironic or comic they may be, persistently avoid foregrounding the sexuality of the festivities while they insist on the decorum of its participants:

Les quatre danseurs le [un quadrille] marchèrent à la façon mondaine, convenablement, dignement, avec des manières, des inclinations et des saluts.

(281)

Dancing, music, singing, and even sexual encounters are carried out in a spirit of social cooperation and generosity. The magistrate's proposal to Madame Tellier, in this sense, is a fitting certificate of social legitimacy for the entire evening, and, further, for Madame's position in the Fécamp society.

If the maison Tellier provides a model for the taming and control of sexuality and prostitution through social authority, Maupassant's ironic juxtaposition of religion and the house of God shows an even more complete effacement of sexuality. Here in the country, in contrast to the ethnically-inspired costumes they wear at work, the disguise of the prostitutes is not aimed at stimulating erotic fantasies. It serves, rather, to inspire admiration and envy in the local population and to stimulate the spiritual fervor of the congregation. The mechanism for Maupassant's irony remains the same, the incongruous juxtaposition and intermixing of respectability and venal sexuality. But the sexual dimension is all but absent in the récit, represented, rather, in the language and double entendre of the narration where it is easily recognized by the reader. Moreover, it functions at an increased level of ironic intensity since here in the rural village all the participants in the ceremony, including the prostitutes themselves, seem thoroughly convinced by the counterfeit. The reader, of course, must remain aware of the deception in order to respond to the additional irony that it is not only these simple country folk who are duped by the pretense but the city women as well.³ The confirmation ceremony, along with the admiration their exaggerated demeanor and dress inspire in others, stimulates the prostitutes to fantasize an impossible “return” to innocence, childhood (and motherhood), and devout respectability. The reality of their sexuality, the male desire it provokes, and the commercial exchange these allow, disappear in this fantasy, except, of course, in the mind of the knowing writer and complicit reader who recognize it in the parallels, double entendres, “ambiguities,” etc., of the fictional representation. And, as if to ensure the underlying force of this reality, it is presented directly as it violently ruptures the illusion of virginal innocence during the libidinal outburst of Madame Tellier's brother or begins to appear in some of the popular songs the women want to sing on their return to the train station.

The idyllic return to the innocence of rural life, where sexuality is apparently absent or totally sublimated into the ceremonies and ecstasies authorized by religion and the institution of the church, is impossible in Maupassant's representation; it proves to be a pitiful fantasy or ridiculous farce. Far from offering a redeeming picture of the basically “innocent” and “childlike” prostitute as Crouzet's remarks suggest, the episode of the trip to the country is intended to reveal, as so many of Maupassant's other stories do, the naiveté and blindness of a simple rural mentality with its beliefs and institutions when confronted by the habits and behavior of urban society. The fact that the prostitutes themselves momentarily become victims, so to speak, of their own deception is not a sign of their redemption or innocence, but rather, in Maupassant's ironic eye, of their foolish self-indulgence and exaggerated sentimentality.

What is more significant to our purpose here, however, is that the prostitutes' visit to the country raises again the question of sexuality and its institutional control. The ironic association of female sexuality and religion and the irreverent identification of church and brothel are indeed, as critics have noted, the essential trait of Maupassant's language and descriptions in this story. But these are only the surface indications of the author's underlying notion of a need for an authoritative structure to control the potential violence associated with and potentially provoked by female sexuality and prostitution. The juxtaposition of the “maison Tellier” and the “maison de Dieu,” in other words, does more than provide apparent illustrations of Maupassant's ironic attitudes towards women and religion; it demonstrates the inability of the church or religion as an institution to effectively “regulate” this sexuality. It does so by exposing the illusory and farcical nature of an outmoded attitude that simply denies or fails to recognize it. While staging an impossible return to an “age of innocence,” Maupassant's story at the same time promotes the “maison” as an efficient and modern structure functioning comfortably and harmoniously (and profitably) within the social and institutional framework of an urban bourgeois society. If there is an element of irony in this demonstration, it does not threaten the legitimacy and effectiveness of the well-regulated house of prostitution. If there is any threat to urban peace, it lies in the risk of closing the house and trying nostalgically to substitute religious sentiment for commercial morality. The night of violence, frustration and near-chaos in Fécamp offers convincing proof of this wisdom articulated by “La Maison Tellier.”

Furthermore, Maupassant's tale suggests that this confrontation of church and brothel is not merely a question of competing patriarchal institutions, but of a traditional and outdated order of rural society being confronted and replaced by contemporary, urban structures. Again and again the reader is offered comparisons that recall and thematisize the conflict and that highlight its temporal significance. Whereas Madame Tellier's structure solidly contains the noisy revelry of it patrons, the inspired singing in the church reveals its decrepitude:

Des grains de poussière et des fragments de bois vermoulu tombèrent même de la voûte ancienne secouée par cette explosion de cris.

(273)

The voyage by rail, a contemporary symbol of modern, industrialized France, is contrasted comically to the slap-stick trip in the horse-drawn wagon taking the women, bouncing and falling from their chairs, from the station to the village. On the train, traditional and modern commerce clash when an old peasant couple traveling to market with a basket of ducks is maliciously harassed and ridiculed by a young commis voyageur. It might even be claimed that the inept seduction efforts of Madame's brother, a traditional menuisier, provide a comic contrast to the satisfied desires of his modern urban equivalents, all successful professionals or entrepreneurs. In any case, these scenes that contrast the traditional to the contemporary reinforce Maupassant's idea of the superiority of urban to rural order at the same time as they call for a modern, well-managed, bourgeois institution to regulate sexuality and prostitution in late nineteenth-century France.

But “La Maison Tellier” does not limit its arguments favoring the institutional control of sexuality and prostitution to questions of middle-class efficiency and the need for modern management of social order. Alain Corbin's exhaustive study on prostitution in nineteenth-century France suggests a further, less evident argument at work in Maupassant's story. Corbin explains in detail how, near the end of the nineteenth century, houses such as Madame Tellier's were being seriously challenged by a less regulated and therefore more dangerous form of prostitution, la prostitution clandestine. Ranging from the ouvrière supplementing her meager wages to the music-hall singer and haute courtisane available to the highest or most powerful bidder, women designated as belonging to this “class” of prostitutes shared a common feature in that they did not operate under the control and policing of a house but rather in a relatively unregulated, less institutionalized arena of society. Maupassant's story touches on this question only virtually, as part of his critical farce, but beneath the irony of his representation is found the expression of a major threat such socially diffused prostitution presents to middle-class society. The danger is that such women will no longer be recognized as prostitutes, that they escape the institutionalized control of their sexuality, and that they threaten to encroach upon other (more “respectable’) social roles assigned to women.

The presence of that threat can be discerned in scenes where Maupassant presents an image of apparent innocence only to undercut it by a revealing irony. For instance, Maupassant describes the occasional outings to the country Madame Tellier offers her “girls” as “des parties de pensionnaires échappés, des courses folles, des jeux enfantins, etc.” (257) Or, again, he paints a picture of maternal tenderness in which one of the women comforts the exhausted, frightened young girl on the eve of her first communion:

[Rosa] l'amena dans son lit bien chaud, la pressa contre sa poitrine en l'embrassant, la dorlota, l'enveloppa de sa tendresse aux manifestations exagérées, puis, calmée elle-même, s'endormit. Et jusqu'au jour la communiante reposa son front sur le sein nu de la prostituée.

(270)

However, the knowing reader is not taken in by innocent appearances. We know full well that these “school-girls on a picnic” are in fact prostitutes from Fécamp, and are told that Rosa's motherly gesture is triggered by a far different sentiment: “seule en son cabinet noir, et peu habituée à dormir seule, [elle] se sentit saisie par une émotion vague et pénible” (269). Behind these insights lurks the realization that an unwary observer might easily be deceived, duped into believing these women are in fact innocent school-girls or tender mothers. Maupassant's lucidity and irony assure his complicit reader that such deceptions are transparent, only illusions.

A similar effort to counter the threat of being duped is found in the farcical device that grounds the ironic focus on the entire trip to the country. It is neither the reader nor Maupassant who sees this band of prostitutes as “les belles dames de la ville” (268), who is moved to tears by the uncontrolled sobbing of one of these honored visitors, who, with the priest, thanks them as: “mes chères soeurs, qui êtes venues de si loin, et dont la présence parmi nous, dont la foi visible, dont la piété si vive ont été pour tous un salutaire exemple” (275). It is not the cynically initiated author or reader who is a victim of these deceptions, but only the characters in the story, the peasants, the priest, and the prostitutes themselves. This is the comic irony of mistaken identity and not, as Crouzet would have it, signs of “la rédemption de la prostituée.” On the contrary, such phrases and descriptions are, quite typically in Maupassant, designed to reveal the pretentiousness, sentimentality, and false consciousness of the prostitutes and to ridicule the simplicity, credulity, and naïve faith of the villagers.

In the meantime, behind these efforts and the surface comedy can be found a warning of the danger society runs when prostitution (and, by the logic of this story, female sexuality) is no longer identified and contained by its socially sanctioned space, that is by the maison de tolérance, but is free to invade other areas of the social fabric. The danger here is not so much that male desire (represented by Madame's inflamed brother) will become violent and disruptive, or that commerce (represented by the traveling salesman who offers garters to the women in exchange for a bit of sexual fondling) will lose sight of its goals, although both these risks are suggested in Maupassant's tale. The real danger is that society will be duped, that it will lose its power to label and thus to control and regulate female sexuality. That danger, of course, in “La Maison Tellier,” is not explicitly presented but rather disguised by the mask of farce—the prostitutes are caricatures of pious, refined, well-to-do women. It is only the simple-minded villagers and not the lucid author and knowing reader he creates who are taken in by the deception. Any anxiety associated with this danger is well-cloaked, or better, repressed by Maupassant's entertaining and reassuring irony.

Disguised in this tale by farce and Maupassant's typically domineering irony, the fear and anxiety provoked by the potential uncertainty regarding the social identity of female sexuality is immediately evident in “Les Tombales,” a text added to the 1891 edition of La Maison Tellier and which, perhaps unconsciously, serves as a revealing companion piece to the story just examined. This is not the place to undertake a lengthy discussion of another text, but a few remarks will reinforce our reading of “La Maison Tellier.” Intrigued by the grief of a young widow he notices one afternoon in the Montmartre cemetery, a worldly Parisian befriends her and almost immediately an intimate relationship springs up between them. The man's interest lasts only a few weeks, however, and he abandons the woman, only to see her again some weeks later in the cemetery, again in mourning, leaning on the arm of a distinguished middle-aged gentleman. The questions Maupassant poses at the end of this story are a direct expression of the latent anxiety of uncertainty found in “La Maison Tellier”:

Etait-ce une simple fille, une prostitutée inspirée qui allait cueiller sur les tombes les hommes tristes […]? Etait-elle unique? Sont-elles plusieurs? Est-ce une profession? Fait-on le cimetière comme on fait le trottoir?

(2: 1245)

What these two stories reveal in their different ways is the threat masculine society feels when it encounters female sexuality, or, more accurately, an image of female sexuality it has instituted, which transgresses or blurs the boundaries of socially defined sexual identity. Such transgressions threaten not only the institutions of social order but the very core of masculine security.⁴ That threat is defused in “La Maison Tellier” by caricature and farce, and in “Les Tombales” by the bemused, superior tone of the “victim.” But these devices, at the same time, reveal a deep anxiety on the part of Maupassant, one that can be linked directly to a moment in the broad social definition of sexuality in late nineteenth-century France.⁵

Maupassant's sophisticated irony may provide an anecdotal survey of late nineteenth-century “human behavior,” but at the same time it documents broader cultural conditions and problems that were challenging if not changing French society and mentality at the end of the century. These stories suggest that it may be time to take a fresh look at Maupassant the moralist, to reconsider his importance in the broader debate of society and culture in nineteenth-century France, and to measure his contribution along side that of Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola.

Notes

1. All references to “La Maison Tellier” indicate vol. 1 of Contes et nouvelles in the Pléiade edition.

2. Louis Forestier's notes in the Pléiade edition of Maupassant's stories express a similar opinion: “La ‘fête’ ce n'est pas la première communion: c'est par le souvenir d'enfance, une liberté et une pureté récupérées chez les filles. …” (1: 1370).

3. For a discussion of the narrative relationship between reader and narrator in Maupassant, see Angela S. Moger, “Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire.”

4. For a short but very useful survey of the prostitute in Maupassant's fiction and a discussion of her role from a Freudian point of view relating her to the mother image, see Lecarme-Tabone.

5. References to the dangers and inconvénients associated with uncontrolled prostitution occur frequently in Maupassant. See, for example, “Les Soeurs Rondoli,” “L'Armoire,” “Nuit de Noêl,” and “Divorce.”

Works Cited

Corbin, Alain. Les Filles de noce. Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978.

Crouzet, Michel. “Une rhétorique de Maupassant?” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France. 80.2 (1980): 233-61.

Donaldson-Evans, Mary. A Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986.

Lecarme-Tabone, Eliane. “Enigme et prostitution.” Maupassant: Miroir de la nouvelle. Ed. Jacques Lecarme et Bruno Vercier. Saint-Denis: PU de Vincennes, 1988. 111-23.

Maupassant, Guy de. Contes et nouvelles. Ed. Louis Forestier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1974.

Moger, Angela S. “Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire,” PMLA 100 (1985): 315-27.