Short Fiction · Chapter
Love explained
The narrator reflects on a news story about a passionate crime, which triggers a memory of a duck hunt with his cousin Karl de Rauville in a frozen marsh.
What happens
The narrator reflects on a news story about a passionate crime, which triggers a memory of a duck hunt with his cousin Karl de Rauville in a frozen marsh. After a night of bitter cold, they shoot a pair of teal; the male returns to his dead mate and is also killed. The narrator, moved by the bird's devotion, buries them together and leaves for Paris that day.
Themes in this chapter
Love and Desire
The male teal's desperate loyalty to its dead mate exemplifies a pure, instinctual love that transcends danger.
Cruelty and Suffering
The hunters' deliberate killing of the devoted male bird highlights the cruelty inherent in the hunt and the suffering of the animals.
Isolation and Loneliness
The frozen, desolate marsh and the solitary cries of the male teal evoke a profound sense of isolation and loss.
Characters to notice
- Guy de Maupassant
The narrator and protagonist, reflecting on a past hunting experience that revealed the nature of love.
- Monsieur Parent
The cousin Karl de Rauville, a country gentleman who hosts the narrator and participates in the hunt.
Key passages
“I have just read, in a news item, a Drama of Passion. He killed her, then he killed himself—therefore he loved her.”
The narrator reads a news story about a man who killed his lover and then himself, concluding that such violence is proof of love.
Opens the chapter by framing love as a destructive, passionate force.
“Nothing is more disturbing, more agitating, more terrifying even than marsh lands.”
The narrator finds marshes deeply unsettling and mysterious.
Establishes the eerie, primal atmosphere of the setting.
“Never has bitterness of grief so torn my heart as this desolate call, the mournful reproach of this poor bird lost in space.”
The male teal's cries of grief affect the narrator more deeply than any human sorrow.
Highlights the emotional impact of the bird's love and loss on the narrator.
“I put them, already cold, into the same grave—and I departed that same day for Paris.”
The narrator buries the two teal together and immediately leaves the countryside.
Concludes the story with a symbolic act of union and a return to civilization.