The Chair Mender

"The Chair Mender" is a short story by Guy de Maupassant, originally titled "La rempailleuse", and sometimes published in English with the non-literally translated title "Lasting Love" (incidentally, for as important as Maupassant was to the development of the short story, documentation of original and translated titles takes some digging). It was first published in French in 1882. In English, it is only eight pages long, which is pretty short considering how much goes on in it.

The story starts with the framing device of some aristocrats discussing whether men or women feel love more strongly. One of them recounts a story, about the daughter of a chair mender, who develops a schoolgirl crush on a neighborhood boy, the son of a pharmacist. One day, she finds him crying, and gives him some pocket change. She continues to give him money as a young lady, in exchange for kisses. Although she is much poorer, she continues to give him whatever money she has. When he grows up and gets married, she pines for him, and when she dies an early death, she gives all the money she has saved to him, which he accepts callously. We return to the framing device, where the ladies of the party comment that it is "only women who know how to love".

I get the point of this story, and the irony in it, but it basically boils down to "women are crazy and men are pigs". I get the point about unrequitted love, but it is told in such an unrealistic way, that whatever social or psychological commentary was intended doesn't work for me. The idea of a woman so besotted with a childhood crush that she saves all of her money for a married man is just hard to believe, and is presented in a heavy-handed manner. Part of that might be that I am not familiar with the 10th century French class system, (a chair mender is apparently far down from a pharmacist), and part of it might be that gender politics has changed (the idea of women being desperate for male attention is outside my experience).

That is my opinion, but feel free to read it and judge for yourself: