Essay Questions

What turns out to be the horrifically disturbing answer to the question posed in the title “What was Really the Matter with Andrew”?

By any stretch of rational reasoning, “What was Really the Matter with Andrew” is fairly disturbing. This is the story of a young mother having an affair with a man that keeps getting interrupted by her baby, Andrew, crying. The lovely Captain Sommerive—the object of her adulterous lust—decides to use what was apparently a rather well-known and dependable means of solving this particular situation: He sadistically pinches the young child until the baby would prefer to be anywhere but in the bed of the mother, including back alone in the crib.

What really elevates this rather bizarre little tale to into the sphere of the grotesque, however, is the deeper answer to what is really the matter with Andrew. The answer to that question is that he has a kind and loving father who genuinely recoils at the evidence of abuse, but is stuck with a mother whose own equally humane reaction is completely undone by her subsequent inhumanity: blaming the pinch marks on the child’s nurse and standing by silent as her oblivious husband nearly beats the woman and when he dismisses her with the certainty of never being hired again.

“Boule de Suif” is ultimately a dramatic enactment of the theories of what infamous Renaissance political philosopher?

In the end, it all comes down to a single line of dialogue issuing forth from the mouth of the Countess: “The end justifies the means.” Although Niccolò Machiavelli never actually wrote those words, his groundbreaking tome The Prince basically offers this advice on nearly every page. The Prince has long been the handbook du jour for wannabe usurpers and tyrants, but its influence extends far more deeply into the mainstream than those seeking ultimate power. The entire narrative threat of Maupassant’s story is a playing out of the collective advice given by Machiavelli to all who would seek overcoming an obstruction to successfully indulging whatever is in their own self-interest. The self-interest of all characters is aligned in the story because they all benefit from getting the title character to sleep with the Prussian officer. As the story unfolds, it plays out in savagely dramatic fashion how the lessons of Machiavelli have filtered down to every level of society whether they have any actual awareness of his philosophical works or not.

Is Satan really the title character of “The Devil,” or might the title actually be referring to someone else?

Although quite obviously taking place in a society substantially different and far removed from the 21st century, “The Devil” is one of the author’s stories which may resonate more deeply with modern audiences than even some of his more famous efforts. The heart of the issue of this narrative is not religion, but rather how to care for the elderly as they near their final days in a way that offers dignity to them without exerting undo pressures upon surviving family members. The element bringing the story closer into the purview of examining the nature of evil is that the two major characters who are not facing imminent death are more devoted to their engagement in a battle of wills over the economics of senior care.

Honore, the son of the dying woman, wants to avoid paying more for a caretaker than is necessary while the caretaker, Rapet, want to avoid losing money on the deal by the old woman taking longer to die than necessary. The length that the nurse goes to in order to bring about a satisfactory economic solution to her circumstances would seem to implicate her as being more deserving of being called the Devil, but only if one ignores the fact that the son was trying to cheat her in the first place.