Short Fiction · Chapter
An Artifice explained
A doctor tells a young married patient a story about a woman whose lover dies in her bedroom and the frantic cover-up she orchestrates with the doctor's help before her husband returns home.
What happens
A doctor tells a young married patient a story about a woman whose lover dies in her bedroom and the frantic cover-up she orchestrates with the doctor's help before her husband returns home.
Themes in this chapter
Love and Desire
Madame Lelièvre's passionate love for her lover is depicted through her frantic grief and intimate farewell kisses.
Gender and Power
The story highlights the power dynamics of marriage and the lengths a woman must go to conceal an affair to maintain her social standing.
Illusion vs. Reality
The elaborate deception staged by the doctor and Madame Lelièvre to make the husband believe the lover merely fainted contrasts sharply with the grim reality of death.
Characters to notice
- Bertha
Madame Bertha Lelièvre, the young married woman whose lover dies in her bedroom; she seeks the doctor's help to conceal the affair from her husband.
- Doctor Heraclius Gloss
The old doctor who narrates the story of assisting Madame Lelièvre in hiding her lover's death.
Key passages
“No woman can love passionately until after she has married.”
True passionate love is only possible after the experience of marriage.
The doctor expresses a cynical view that marriage is a prerequisite for genuine love.
“Her kisses fell like blows on to his closed mouth and eyes, on to his forehead and temples, and then, putting her lips to his ear, as if he could still hear her, and as if she were about to whisper something to him, to make their embraces still more ardent, she said several times, in a heartrending voice: ‘Adieu, my darling!’”
She kissed his dead face passionately, whispering farewell as if he could still hear her.
Madame Lelièvre's grief is shown through intense, desperate kisses and a final whispered goodbye.
“I gave him a slap on the shoulder, which sent him forward and made him fall into the carriage; then I got in after him.”
I shoved the dead man into the carriage and climbed in beside him.
The doctor's matter-of-fact handling of the corpse underscores the absurdity and urgency of the cover-up.