Guy de Maupassant complete short stories volume 2 - Penn State ...

ound, moreover, he was called nothing but ‘that pig of a Morin,’
and that epithet went through him like a sword-thrust every time
he heard it. When a street boy called after him ‘Pig!’ he turned
his head instinctively. His friends also overwhelmed him with
horrible jokes and used to ask him, whenever they were eating
ham, ‘Is it a bit of yourself?’ He died two years later.
“As for myself, when I was a candidate for the Chamber of
Deputies in 1875, I called on the new notary at Fousserre,
Monsieur Belloncle, to solicit his vote, and a tall, handsome
and evidently wealthy lady received me. ‘You do not know me
again?’ she said. And I stammered out: ‘Why—no—madame.’
‘Henriette Bonnel.’ ‘Ah!’ And I felt myself turning pale, while
she seemed perfectly at her ease and looked at me with a smile.
“As soon as she had left me alone with her husband he took
both my hands, and, squeezing them as if he meant to crush
them, he said: ‘I have been intending to go and see you for a
long time, my dear sir, for my wife has very often talked to me
about you. I know—yes, I know under what painful circumstances
you made her acquaintance, and I know also how perfectly
you behaved, how full of delicacy, tact and devotion you
showed yourself in the affair—’ He hesitated and then said in a
lower tone, as if he had been saying something low and coarse,
‘in the affair of that pig of a Morin.’”
Saint Anthony
276
SAINT SAINT ANTHONY
ANTHONY
They called him Saint Anthony, because his name was Anthony,
and also, perhaps, because he was a good fellow, jovial, a
lover of practical jokes, a tremendous eater and a heavy drinker
and a gay fellow, although he was sixty years old.
He was a big peasant of the district of Caux, with a red face,
large chest and stomach, and perched on two legs that seemed
too slight for the bulk of his body.
He was a widower and lived alone with his two men servants
and a maid on his farm, which he conducted with shrewd
economy. He was careful of his own interests, understood business
and the raising of cattle, and farming. His two sons and his
three daughters, who had married well, were living in the neighborhood
and came to dine with their father once a month. His
vigor of body was famous in all the countryside. “He is as strong
as Saint Anthony,” had become a kind of proverb.
At the time of the Prussian invasion Saint Anthony, at the
wine shop, promised to eat an army, for he was a braggart, like
a true Norman, a bit of a, coward and a blusterer. He banged
his fist on the wooden table, making the cups and the brandy