title: Regret
author: Guy de Maupassant
genre: short story/classics
first lines:
Monsieur Saval, who was called in Mantes "Father Saval," had just risen from bed. He was weeping. It was a dull autumn day; the leaves were falling. They fell slowly in the rain, like a heavier and slower rain.
source: http://www.americanliterature.com/
In this story Paul Saval looks back upon his life with regrets. His parents have both passed on, he is not married and he is sixty-two years old.
He thinks about death and wonders how people can enjoy life knowing they will die one day.
Is it not strange that people can laugh, amuse themselves, be joyful under that eternal certainty of death? If this death were only probable, one could then have hope; but no, it is inevitable, as inevitable as that night follows the day.
Paul also reflects on never having someone love him, which I found to be the most depressing part of this story. He admits to being secretly in love with his best friends wife at one point, a woman named Madame Sandres.
He had not even been loved. No woman had reposed on his bosom, in a complete abandon of love. He knew nothing of the delicious anguish of expectation, the divine vibration of a hand in yours, of the ecstasy of triumphant passion.
What superhuman happiness must overflow your heart, when lips encounter lips for the first time, when the grasp of four arms makes one being of you, a being unutterably happy, two beings infatuated with one another.
As Paul reminisces on his secret love, and remembers one day when he was about to confess his love to her, he is full of remorse. He decides to go to Madame Sandres now and tell her how he has felt all this time.
I found this to be a beautifully written and sad short story. The way de Maupassant wrote it is with a sad heart. It's impressive that he was able to pack so much meaning and feeling in so little words.
I could not help but think that Regret was a direct reflection of the author's own feelings.
Moral of the story? Don't let life pass you by?
Life has its sombre days. It would no longer have any but sombre days for him, for he had reached the age of sixty-two. He is alone, an old bachelor, with nobody about him. How sad it is to die alone, all alone, without any one who is devoted to you!
You can read Regret
for free online
here.
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant (5 August 1850 – 6 July 1893) was a popular 19th-century French writer, considered one of the fathers of the modern short story and one of the form's finest exponents.
Maupassant suffered from mental illness in his later years and attempted suicide on January 2nd, 1892. He was committed to a private asylum in Paris and died the following year.
