# The Umbrella explained — Short Fiction

> Chapter companion for Short Fiction by Guy de Maupassant.

## What happens

Madame Oreille, a frugal and domineering wife, is forced to buy her husband a new silk umbrella after his cheap one is ruined by office jokes. When the new umbrella quickly becomes riddled with burn holes, she accuses him of carelessness and refuses to replace it. At a friend's suggestion, she decides to file a fraudulent claim with their fire insurance company, and after a tense interview, she succeeds in getting the company to agree to pay for a new cover.

## Themes in this chapter

### Marriage and Domesticity

The Oreilles' marriage is defined by financial control and petty conflict, with Madame Oreille's miserly rule turning the home into a battleground over a single umbrella.

### Social Class and Money

The story highlights how money and status anxieties dominate the couple's life, from the husband's need to keep up appearances at work to the wife's desperate attempt to recover eighteen francs.

### Illusion vs. Reality

Madame Oreille constructs a false narrative of accidental fire damage to deceive the insurance company, masking the reality of her own parsimony and her husband's probable innocence.

## Character check-ins

### Madame Oreille

The extremely economical and short-tempered wife who begrudges every expense and eventually schemes to defraud the insurance company.

### Monsieur Oreille

The husband, a clerk at the War Office, who suffers his wife's penny-pinching and is falsely accused of burning the umbrella.

## Key lines

> Madame Oreille was a very economical woman; she thoroughly knew the value of a halfpenny, and possessed a whole storehouse of strict principles with regard to the multiplication of money.

Madame Oreille was extremely frugal, obsessively mindful of every penny, and had rigid rules about saving money.

_Establishes the central trait of Madame Oreille's character: miserliness._

> She mended it with a piece of silk cut out of the old umbrella, which was of a different color, and the next day Oreille went off very humbly with the mended article in his hand.

She patched the hole with a mismatched scrap from the old umbrella, and the next day Oreille went to work looking embarrassed.

_Shows Madame Oreille's cheapness and Oreille's humiliation._

> Make your fire insurance pay for it. The companies pay for all articles that are burned, as long as the damage has been done in your own house.

Have your fire insurance cover the cost. They reimburse for items damaged by fire if it happened at home.

_The friend's suggestion sets up the fraudulent insurance claim plot._

## Links

- HTML: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/short_fiction_23_se/chapters/the-umbrella
- Book: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/short_fiction_23_se
- All chapters: https://www.betterreads.online/discover/short_fiction_23_se/chapters