Short Fiction · Chapter
Clochette explained
The narrator recalls his childhood memory of Mother Clochette, an old, bearded, limping dressmaker who visited his family's home every Tuesday.
What happens
The narrator recalls his childhood memory of Mother Clochette, an old, bearded, limping dressmaker who visited his family's home every Tuesday. He adored her and listened to her simple, dramatic stories. One day, he finds her dead on the floor of the linen room. Later, he overhears the doctor reveal that Clochette, as a beautiful young woman named Hortense, had a secret love affair with a school assistant, was discovered, and jumped from a loft to hide him, breaking her leg in three places. She lived the rest of her life as a crippled, unmarried dressmaker, never revealing the truth.
Themes in this chapter
Love and Desire
Clochette's youthful love for the school assistant drives her to sacrifice her body and future.
Cruelty and Suffering
The assistant's cowardice and Clochette's lifelong physical and emotional suffering from the fall and its cover-up.
Illusion vs. Reality
The contrast between the narrator's childhood perception of Clochette as a simple, bearded old woman and the tragic, heroic reality of her past.
Characters to notice
- Clochette
The old, bearded, limping dressmaker who visits weekly; revealed to have been a beautiful young woman who sacrificed her leg and future for a lover.
- Guy de Maupassant
The narrator as a child, who adored Clochette and was deeply affected by her death and the doctor's story.
- Doctor Heraclius Gloss
The doctor who treated Clochette's broken leg and later reveals the secret story of her accident and love affair.
Key passages
“She was a tall thin woman, bearded—covered with hair, rather, her beard growing everywhere on her face. It was an amazing beard, an unexpected beard, bursting out into incredible bunches and curling tufts of hair that looked as if a madman had scattered them across a vast face like the face of a petticoated policeman.”
Clochette was a tall, thin woman with a thick, wild beard covering much of her face, giving her an unusual and striking appearance.
The narrator vividly describes Clochette's remarkable, almost comical facial hair.
“She limped, not just an ordinary cripple's limp, but like a ship riding at the anchor. When she rested the weight of her bony lopsided body on her one good leg, she seemed to be gathering herself to rise on a monstrous wave; then she plunged all at once on the verge of disappearing into an abyss: she buried herself in the earth.”
Her limp was dramatic and unsteady, as if she were a ship pitching on a wave, lurching and sinking with each step.
The narrator uses a nautical metaphor to emphasize the severity and peculiarity of her limp.
“She made no complaint, only saying with heroic patience: 'I'm being punished, well punished.'”
Despite her terrible injury, she accepted her suffering without protest, viewing it as deserved punishment.
Clochette's quiet acceptance of her fate reveals her sense of guilt and resignation.