Character guide

Doctor Heraclius Gloss

major

Also known as Heraclius Gloss, Doctor Heraclius, the learned Heraclius, Heraclius, Reverse Doctor Heraclius, Doctor

Gloss moves through the world as a respected man of science whose curiosity has quietly outgrown the limits of his profession. The manuscript he pursues promises proof of a doctrine the church and the academy would both reject, and the more he studies it the less he can separate scholarship from obsession. His hunger to know what lies beyond ordinary experience drives the story's central inquiry into identity, memory, and the boundaries of the self.

Monsieur Parent

major

Also known as Parent, Little Georges, Georges, a new Georges, Poor Monsieur Parent

Parent is a respectable bourgeois whose identity rests on his household, his wife, and his small son Georges. When doubt about his marriage enters his mind, it spreads through every ordinary gesture until the home he trusted becomes a stage for quiet betrayal. His mounting anguish and his struggle to preserve appearances make him the story's fragile center, a man discovering how little he actually knows about the people closest to him.

Boule de Suif

major

Boule de Suif shares a coach out of Rouen with merchants, nobles, and nuns who treat her as beneath them yet gladly accept her provisions. Her patriotism and easy kindness stand in sharp contrast to their calculated respectability, and she becomes the group's moral test when a Prussian officer demands a price for their passage. What happens to her among these travelers exposes the hypocrisy of the very society that condemns her trade.

Madame Tellier

major

Also known as Tellier, Madame

Madame Tellier runs her establishment with the efficiency of a household manager, keeping order among her girls and her clients alike. When she decides to attend her niece's first communion in the countryside, she packs up her entire troupe and treats the outing as a family obligation. Her blend of hard commerce and unspoken maternal feeling gives the story its comic warmth and its quiet sting.

Yvette

major

Also known as Mam'zelle Yvette, Mam'zelle, Hip - Hip - Hurrah—Mam'zelle Yvette

Yvette has grown up in a Parisian milieu where charm is currency and love is a transaction, and she has learned to wield her beauty without yet understanding its cost. Her mother, a courtesan, wants her to marry respectably, while the men around her see only the daughter of her mother's trade. Her struggle to choose between the life she was raised for and the love she imagines makes her the story's restless, sympathetic center.

Joseph Renardet

major

Also known as So Renardet, Renardet, Still Renardet

Renardet commands deference in his provincial district as a man of property, influence, and apparent integrity. Beneath that surface lies an old transgression he has spent years outrunning, and the arrival of a stranger threatens to expose what he has carefully hidden. His mounting dread and his instinct to protect his position drive the story's slow-burning tension between reputation and guilt.

Miss Harriet

major

Also known as this Miss Harriet, this strange Miss Harriet

Miss Harriet lodges at the same Normandy inn as a French painter, climbing the same cliff each day to sit motionless in her red plaid shawl and dream. When he sketches her beloved rock and she blurts out, 'Oh! Monsieur, you understand nature in a most thrilling way!' the two begin walking together at sunset, and her starved, ecstatic soul opens like a flower. Her rapturous 'I love—I love—' and wish to be a bird signal a passion she can neither express nor survive.

Paul Pavilly

supporting

Also known as Paul, old Pavilly, Pavilly

Paul recounts the evening he dined beside Henriette, their hands and feet meeting under the tablecloth while her uncle and Rivet argued ahead of them on the moonlit path. When a telegram keeps her aunt away until morning, he tries to press his advantage, is repulsed, then wanders the dark corridor with a candlestick, half-mad and improvising excuses. His comic, self-aware confession of desire and clumsiness drives the story's central seduction scene.

Duc de Servigny

supporting

Also known as Servigny, le Duc de Servigny, Duc, So Servigny

Servigny moves through the fashionable world as a man of importance, the kind whose ceremonious questions can reduce a sea captain to dry impatience. He watches the dramas of his set—elopements, betrayals, family scandals—with the cool eye of someone who has seen every variation and finds them endlessly instructive. His presence frames the social world of the stories, giving the reader a guide to its codes and hypocrisies.

Monsieur Saval

supporting

Also known as Saval, Monsieur le Baron Saval, Baron, Baron Saval

Monsieur Saval, a distinguished notary and baron, is so flattered by an invitation to meet celebrated guests that he pays both cabaret bills and follows the painter Romantin home. Instead of a glittering housewarming, he finds an empty studio with three chairs and a dilapidated broom, and is promptly set to sweeping while Romantin improvises a chandelier. His bewildered willingness to help, still in evening clothes, makes him the perfect foil for the artist's chaotic genius.

Guy de Maupassant

supporting

Also known as M. Guy de Maupassant, M. de Maupassant, de Maupassant, M. d'Apreval

At seventeen, the narrator—Maupassant's stand-in—lives on the Bertillon estate with his widowed mother and the orphaned little Santèze, a boy who dreams in the elm avenue and begs for love stories at his aunt's knee. The narrator watches this sentimental child court him with flowers and whispered 'I love you,' amused and complicit, never guessing how far the family's passionate legacy will carry. His retrospective guilt—'I was guilty, very guilty'—gives the tale its confessional weight.

Simon Bombard

major

Also known as Simon, little Simon, Prosper Bombard, M. Simon Bombard, Bombard

Simon grows up hearing his father ask, at every returning steamer, 'What a surprise it would be if Jules were on that one!' The family's gospel is Uncle Jules's letter promising to return with a fortune, and every plan—even a little house near Ingouville—rests on that hope. Simon's sisters remain unmarried, the household pinches, and the boy absorbs both the shame of a disreputable uncle and the stubborn faith that he will one day redeem them all.

Walter Schnaffs

supporting

Walter Schnaffs is a reluctant conscript in the invading Prussian army, a man of appetite and comfort who dreads battle far more than he dreads shame. His consuming desire is to be taken prisoner, and his comic desperation drives him to hide, surrender, and improvise in ways that keep backfiring. His cowardice, treated with sly sympathy, anchors the story's early comedy and sets up its ironic reversals.

Madame Loisel

major

Also known as Loisel

Madame Loisel moves through a modest Parisian household while dreaming of salons, silks, and admiration she believes she was born for. When an invitation to a grand ball arrives, her vanity and her husband's small savings collide, and a borrowed necklace becomes the hinge of her fate. Her pride, shame, and stubborn decency in the aftermath make her one of Maupassant's most quietly devastating figures.

M. Lesable

supporting

Also known as the wretched M. Lesable, Lesable, Jacques Léopold Lesable, Léopold

M. Lesable is a minor functionary in a government office, timid, proud, and acutely conscious of his own mediocrity. His marriage to a woman with grander connections exposes him to the condescension of colleagues and the too-attentive friendship of a rival, testing his patience and his self-respect. His slow-burning resentment and awkward dignity give the story its anxious, claustrophobic edge.

Maître Chicot

supporting

Also known as Monsieur Chicot, Chicot, The Little Cask Maître Chicot

Maître Chicot is a prosperous, calculating peasant-innkeeper who understands exactly how much a thirsty old woman will pay for a free drink. He plies his neighbor with brandy, feigns pity for her decline, and waits patiently for the farm to fall into his hands. His genial cruelty and the story's dry, fatalistic tone make him a perfect specimen of Maupassant's Norman avarice.

Madame Lefèvre

supporting

Also known as Madame Julie Lefèvre, Juliette, Julie, Madame

Madame Lefèvre runs a tight, orderly farm where every hen and every coin is accounted for. When she acquires a dog named Cocotte to protect her chickens, the animal becomes both a practical investment and an unexpected source of trouble. Her frugality, her exasperation, and her very human attachment to the beast shape a story about ownership, loss, and the strange loyalty of animals.

Césaire Houlbrèque

supporting

Also known as Césaire, Houlbrèque

Césaire Houlbrèque is a seafaring man whose long absences have left his home in the hands of others. He comes back expecting warmth and familiarity, but finds that time, habit, and other people's needs have reshaped the life he left behind. His bewilderment and slow reckoning with change give the story its melancholy, salt-tinged weight.

M. Cachelin

supporting

Also known as M. César Cachelin, papa Cachelin, Cachelin, César

Old Antoine Boitelle's father is a small-holding Norman farmer who measures the world by soil, custom, and the approval of neighbors. When his son's happiness threatens to cross the color line, he becomes the voice of a community's unspoken rule, torn between affection for the boy and the shame he imagines before his peers. His refusal is the story's quiet engine, turning a love story into an anatomy of inherited bigotry.

Mademoiselle Henriette

supporting

Also known as Mademoiselle, Mademoiselle Henriette Bonnel, Henriette, Henriette Bonnel

Henriette has spent years as an irreproachable wife and mother, her heart quietly starving beneath the routine of a snoring husband and two children. She engineers a solo trip to Paris and drifts through boulevards, cafés, and the Agony Column of the Figaro, hunting for the orgies and passions she imagines hidden behind every door. Her eager, slightly bewildered pursuit of experience exposes the gap between provincial longing and Parisian reality.

Old Levas

minor

Also known as Monsieur Levas, Levas

An old man whose death becomes a source of morbid curiosity and family conflict.

Pierre Martel

minor

Also known as Martel

A man who recounts a strange and haunting story from his past.

Boitelle

supporting

Also known as Boitelle Old Antoine Boitelle, Antoine Boitelle, Antoine, young Boitelle, Old Boitelle

Antoine Boitelle is a sturdy peasant son who falls hard for a Black woman he meets in town, seeing only her kindness and beauty where his family sees scandal. Caught between filial duty and his own desires, he becomes the story's aching center, a man whose simple decency is no match for the inherited prejudice closing around him. His quiet grief turns a village anecdote into a lasting indictment.

Hector de Gribelin

supporting

Also known as Hector

Hector de Gribelin moves through society with the easy vanity of a man who has never truly been tested, until a quarrel forces him to name seconds and choose weapons. What follows is a long, queasy night of self-interrogation in which his bravado peels away layer by layer. His panic is both comic and painfully recognizable, making the story a sharp study of masculine honor as theater.

Lormerin

supporting

Also known as the handsome Lormerin

Lormerin has spent decades as a self-satisfied man about town, keeping a small altar in his heart for Lise de Vance, the one woman he believes he truly loved. When an invitation arrives, he dresses with a woman's care and arrives eager to be admired, only to meet a white-haired old lady who smiles through tears. His vanity, tenderness, and quiet shock make the story a rueful meditation on time and self-deception.

Cornudet

supporting

Cornudet is the self-appointed conscience of the carriage, forever invoking the Republic and the rights of man while the other passengers eye him with irritation and amusement. His rhetoric is grand, his appetites ordinary, and his willingness to compromise his principles when it suits him exposes the gap between political posturing and private conduct. He sharpens the story's satire of respectable society by showing how easily ideals bend under hunger and convenience.

Marroca

supporting

Marroca is the wife of a busy French civil servant in an Algerian town, and she spends her husband's working hours in the narrator's house, sleeping, laughing, and loving with animal directness. Her body and her will are equally ungovernable: she strips naked under the African moon, cries out loud enough to make distant dogs howl, and asks her lover to sleep in her husband's bed as a keepsake. That request — innocent in her mouth, dangerous in his — is what turns a sunlit idyll into something with teeth.

Mohammed ben Lam'har

minor

Also known as Mohammed

An Arab man whose story of love and betrayal is told in a North African setting.

Baron Mordiane

minor

Also known as Mordiane

A cynical and worldly baron who enjoys manipulating others for his amusement.

Mister Belhomme

minor

Also known as Belhomme, But Belhomme

A man who becomes entangled in a bizarre legal and marital situation.

Hautot

supporting

Also known as César, César Hautot, The elder Hautot, young Hautot, the young Hautot, The young Hautot

Hautot is a wealthy, autocratic farmer — half peasant, half gentleman — who boasts of his game, lifts cartloads of apples, and cut short his son César's schooling for fear of raising a gentleman. He is generous, respected, and entirely at home in the world of dogs, guns, and first-day-of-season rituals. The story opens on that confident morning; everything the son believes about his father is about to be tested by what the father never said.

Denis Marambot

minor

Also known as Denis, Marambot, Monsieur Marambot

A man who discovers a disturbing truth about his wife's past.

Saint Anthony

minor

Also known as Anthony

The saint appears in a story about a man who makes a pact with the devil.

Old Amable

supporting

Also known as Old Amable, father Amable, Only old Amable

Old Amable is a stubborn man of the fields, set in his ways and slow to see what his family sees. One night, candle in hand, he passes the big looking-glass and finds an old man with grey hair staring back — a wreckage he had never noticed. The memory of little Lise and of being young and loved returns with it, and the story turns on that unbearable gap between the man he remembers and the man in the glass.

Jacques Parent

minor

Also known as Jacques

A man whose life is overshadowed by his more famous and successful brother.

Sabot

minor

Also known as Théodule Sabot

A peasant who builds a privy and becomes the subject of a humorous local scandal.

Marquise Obardi

supporting

Also known as Obardi, The Marquise Obardi, Madame Obardi, The Marquise, Marquise, the Marquise, The astonished Marquise

The Marquise Obardi presides over an elegant Parisian table where guests trade stories, and it is in her company that the legend of the Marquis d'Arville and his hatred of hunting is unfolded. She is a woman of fashion and appetite, quick to admire strong feeling — 'it is beautiful to have passions like that,' she says of a tale of vengeance. Her salon is the frame that holds the story's central anecdote, and her reactions measure how the tale lands.

Mademoiselle Pearl

supporting

Also known as Pearl, Mademoiselle

Mademoiselle Pearl — called Mademoiselle Source in the household — raises a frail, bookish boy with patient, jealous love, watching him drift from her knee to his chair by the fire. As he grows silent and unreachable, she is left weeping in the long tête-à-tête, frightened by a danger she cannot name. Her secret, whatever it is, sits under the surface of every ordinary evening, and the story's festive gathering is where it finally surfaces.

Rosa la Rosse

minor

Also known as Rosa, fat Rosa

A prostitute who works in Madame Tellier's establishment.

Paul Limousin

minor

Also known as Limousin, Paul

A young man who becomes involved in a tragic love triangle.

Madeleine

minor

Also known as Madame Madeleine, Madame

A woman whose past catches up with her in a surprising way.

Isidore Paturon

minor

Also known as Isidore, Paturon, this Isidore

A young man who is tricked into a marriage by a clever matchmaker.

Pierre de Marchas

minor

Also known as Marchas

A journalist and friend who accompanies the narrator on various adventures.

Joseph Rivet

minor

Also known as Joseph, Monsieur Joseph Rivet, Monsieur Rivet, Rivet

A Norman farmer who becomes involved in a local scandal.

Father Matthew

minor

Also known as Matthew

A priest who offers counsel and performs a memorable exorcism.

Philip Remy

minor

Also known as Philip

A friend of the narrator who shares a strange and unsettling experience.

Labouise

minor

A soldier who tells a grim story about a comrade's fate during the war.

Monsieur Boivin

minor

Also known as Boivin, old Boivin

A man whose wife's obsession with a dog leads to a tragic accident.

Madame Berthe Vilers

minor

Also known as Madame Vilers, Berthe

A woman who writes a letter revealing her innermost feelings.

Henri Fontal

minor

Also known as Henri

A man who recounts a bizarre and haunting tale of a haunted house.

Maître Hauchecorne

supporting

Also known as Hauchecorne

Maître Hauchecorne is a small, careful man of the Norman countryside, the sort whose good name is his only capital. When a pocketbook is found and he is accused of having taken it, his protests, his gestures, and his very way of telling the truth become evidence against him. The story follows the slow, grinding machinery of gossip and suspicion as it closes around a man who has done nothing — and cannot make anyone believe it.

Mother Magloire

minor

Also known as Mother, Old Mother Magloire

An old woman who outwits a greedy notary with a clever trick.

Irma

minor

Also known as the beautiful Irma, Irma Pavolin, the lovely Irma

A beautiful young woman who becomes the object of a soldier's affection.

Luc Le Ganidec

minor

Also known as Luc

A Breton sailor who tells a story of a supernatural encounter at sea.

Comte de Mascaret

supporting

Also known as the Comte de Mascaret, the Comte

The Comte de Mascaret belongs to a lineage where thwarted desire and dramatic revenge are hereditary legends, told and retold at the family table. He carries the weight of ancestors who hanged themselves over faithless lovers, a heritage that shapes how those around him interpret every romantic gesture. His presence in the story establishes the world of inherited passion and its costs, a backdrop against which the younger generation's own desires will be measured.

Madame Savage

supporting

Also known as Madame

Madame Savage lives a life of monotonous respectability, her days spent managing a household and raising two children while her imagination devours scandalous newspaper columns about Parisian vice. She is consumed by the fear that she will die without having tasted the intoxicating pleasures she reads about, a frustration that smolders beneath her irreproachable exterior. When Prussian soldiers are billeted in her home, this pent-up hunger and resentment will find a terrible outlet.

Jeanne Cordier

minor

Also known as Cordier, Jeanne

A young woman who defies her father to marry the man she loves.

Honoré Bontemps

minor

Also known as Honoré

A man whose wife's infidelity is revealed in a public and humiliating way.

Mademoiselle Francesca Rondoli

supporting

Also known as Francesca, Mademoiselle Rondoli, Mademoiselle Francesca, Suddenly Francesca, Rondoli, Francesca Rondoli

Francesca Rondoli enters the story as a fleeting presence on a train, a young Italian woman whose beauty and manner immediately captivate a fellow passenger. She represents the allure of the unknown, the possibility of romance that travel briefly permits, and the tension between desire and the obligations waiting at home. Her role in the early arc is to unsettle the traveler's assumptions about love and chance, drawing him into a connection that will test his judgment.

Monsieur Loiseau

supporting

Also known as Loiseau, Madame Loiseau, Unfortunately Loiseau, Madame

Monsieur Loiseau is a wine merchant traveling with his wife in the coach alongside Boule de Suif and other passengers, a man whose eye is always on the main chance. He embodies the hypocritical respectability of the provincial middle class, quick to exploit others while performing outrage at impropriety. His presence sharpens the social dynamics of the journey, exposing how quickly principles bend when comfort or profit is at stake.

Bertha

minor

Also known as Madame Lelièvre, Madame Bertha Lelièvre

A woman whose secret correspondence leads to a dramatic confrontation.

De Garelle

minor

Also known as M. de Garelle

A young man who is the lover of the Marquise Obardi.

Madame Husson

supporting

Madame Husson is a solitary, eccentric woman who manages her own affairs with masculine practicality, keeping relatives at arm's length and tolerating no interference. Her scheme to institute a 'May King' festival honoring chastity reveals both her rigid moralism and her naive faith in human virtue. The story's early arc follows her determination to impose her values on the town, setting up a collision between her ideals and the messier realities of desire.

Monsieur Morissot

supporting

Also known as Morissot

Monsieur Morissot is a quiet, unassuming man whose passion for angling predates the siege of Paris, a hobby that once connected him to simpler days and a friend named Sauvage. With the city under Prussian occupation, he grows restless and nostalgic, willing to risk danger for the familiar pleasure of a riverbank. His decision to go fishing despite the war sets in motion a story about ordinary men caught between private joys and public catastrophe.

Madame Dufour

minor

Also known as Madame

A mother who takes her family on a country excursion where her daughter is seduced.

Sorieul

minor

A Norman farmer who tells a story about a clever trick played on a neighbor.

Maillochon

minor

A soldier who participates in a grim and humorous prank.

Coco

minor

Also known as Zidore, Coco - Zidore

A neglected old horse that becomes the focus of a poignant story about cruelty.

Muscade

supporting

Muscade belongs to Doctor Heraclius Gloss, and the monkey's sly tricks and counterfeit devotion make him a small engine of disruption in an otherwise ordered world. Where the doctor's household runs on routine, Muscade runs on mimicry and mischief, exposing how thin the line is between civility and farce. His antics matter early because they set the comic machinery in motion and reveal the humans around him through their reactions.

Clochette

minor

Also known as Mother Clochette, this Mother Clochette

An old nun who tells a story of a tragic love from her youth.

Old Boniface

minor

Also known as Boniface, postman Boniface, old Boniface

A postman who becomes the victim of a cruel practical joke.

Polyte

minor

Also known as Monsieur Polyte

A farmhand who has a secret affair with a farmer's wife.

Bel-Ami

minor

Also known as Anna, Isabella

A pet dog whose fate is tied to a story of love and loss.

Mouche

supporting

Also known as Man, Mouche A Boating Man, little Mouche

Mouche shares a cramped, waterborne life with three men, a household whose intimacy breeds both dependence and unspoken rivalry. Her secret gives her a private gravity that the men around her can sense but not name, and it colors every ordinary exchange on deck. She matters because the story's early tension grows from what she withholds, turning a boating idyll into a study of trust, desire, and what people choose not to see.

Gaspard Hari

minor

Also known as Gaspard, old Gaspard Hari, old Hari, old Gaspard, Old Hari, Old Gaspard, Hari, Old Gaspard Hari

An old Norman peasant whose life is marked by a terrible secret.

Madame Lecacheur

minor

Also known as Lecacheur

A shrewd innkeeper who hosts a memorable dinner party.

Morin

minor

Also known as Madame Morin

A man who is arrested for assaulting a woman on a train and must face the consequences.

Rachel

minor

A prostitute who works in Madame Tellier's house and has a tender moment with a young man.

Queen Hortense

minor

An eccentric old woman who believes she is a queen and lives in a fantasy world.