Original Short Stories — Volume 01Maupassant, Guy de
General
Original Short Stories — Volume 01
Maupassant, Guy de
Short stories, French -- Translations into English
The captain, who no doubt wished to impart an appearance of gallantry
to the orgy, raised his glass again and said: “To our victories over
hearts.” and, thereupon Lieutenant Otto, who was a species of bear from
the Black Forest, jumped up, inflamed and saturated with drink, and
suddenly seized by an access of alcoholic patriotism, he cried: “To our
victories over France!”
Drunk as they were, the women were silent, but Rachel turned round,
trembling, and said: “See here, I know some Frenchmen in whose presence
you would not dare say that.” But the little count, still holding her
on his knee, began to laugh, for the wine had made him very merry, and
said: “Ha! ha! ha! I have never met any of them myself. As soon as we
show ourselves, they run away!” The girl, who was in a terrible rage,
shouted into his face: “You are lying, you dirty scoundrel!”
For a moment he looked at her steadily with his bright eyes upon her, as
he had looked at the portrait before he destroyed it with bullets from
his revolver, and then he began to laugh: “Ah! yes, talk about them, my
dear! Should we be here now if they were brave?” And, getting excited,
he exclaimed: “We are the masters! France belongs to us!” She made one
spring from his knee and threw herself into her chair, while he arose,
held out his glass over the table and repeated: “France and the French,
the woods, the fields and the houses of France belong to us!”
The others, who were quite drunk, and who were suddenly seized by
military enthusiasm, the enthusiasm of brutes, seized their glasses, and
shouting, “Long live Prussia!” they emptied them at a draught.
The girls did not protest, for they were reduced to silence and were
afraid. Even Rachel did not say a word, as she had no reply to make.
Then the little marquis put his champagne glass, which had just been
refilled, on the head of the Jewess and exclaimed: “All the women in
France belong to us also!”
At that she got up so quickly that the glass upset, spilling the
amber-colored wine on her black hair as if to baptize her, and broke
into a hundred fragments, as it fell to the floor. Her lips trembling,
she defied the looks of the officer, who was still laughing, and
stammered out in a voice choked with rage:
“That--that--that--is not true--for you shall not have the women of
France!”
He sat down again so as to laugh at his ease; and, trying to speak with
the Parisian accent, he said: “She is good, very good! Then why did
you come here, my dear?” She was thunderstruck and made no reply for a
moment, for in her agitation she did not understand him at first, but
as soon as she grasped his meaning she said to him indignantly and
vehemently: “I! I! I am not a woman, I am only a strumpet, and that is
all that Prussians want.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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