Short Fiction · Chapter
A Traveller's Notes explained
The narrator describes a train journey along the French Riviera, observing fellow passengers and their behaviors, including a sleeping hunchback, a hostile stout lady, and a young couple.
What happens
The narrator describes a train journey along the French Riviera, observing fellow passengers and their behaviors, including a sleeping hunchback, a hostile stout lady, and a young couple. He reflects on the vulgarity of eating in public and the grotesque nature of sleep. The journey passes through Cannes, Nice, and Monaco, where he visits an unfinished exhibition and witnesses a balloon accident. A fellow traveler recounts a gruesome story of a decapitated Corsican youth, causing a lady to faint.
Themes in this chapter
Social Class and Money
The narrator critiques the vulgarity of passengers eating in public, highlighting class distinctions and manners in shared spaces.
Cruelty and Suffering
The story of the Corsican youth decapitated in a tunnel and the fainting lady illustrate the intrusion of violence and horror into everyday travel.
Characters to notice
- Guy de Maupassant
The narrator and observer of the journey, providing commentary on fellow passengers and the scenery.
Key passages
“The young woman is pretty and seems modest, but she smells too strongly of perfume. What kind of perfume is it? I know it without being able to name it. Ah! now I've got it. Peau d'Espagne? That tells nothing.”
The narrator notes the young woman's strong perfume, recognizing it as Peau d'Espagne but finding the label uninformative.
Reveals the narrator's keen observation and skepticism of superficial markers.
“I know nothing more common, more vulgar, more out of place, and more ill-bred than to eat in a carriage where there are other passengers.”
The narrator considers eating in a train compartment with strangers to be extremely rude and uncouth.
Highlights the narrator's disdain for breaches of social etiquette.
“And then the body fell back on our knees. He was minus his head, madame, for it had been cut off by a tunnel. And the neck was not even bleeding any longer; all the blood had flowed along the line.”
The man from Marseilles recounts how the Corsican youth's head was severed by a tunnel, and the body collapsed onto them, bloodless.
A gruesome anecdote that shocks the listeners and causes a lady to faint.