La Rempailleuse by Guy de Maupassant On Love

 

La Rempailleuse by Guy de Maupassant

On Love

 

The moral of this short story seems to be that Love is the most noble of all feelings and even if you are a Rempailleuse, it will transform you like it did to Cinderella, from a mere commoner to a lady of emotions.

In the view of the expert Barbara Fredrickson, Positivity is obtained from gratitude, joy, awe, interest, amusement, inspiration, pride, hope, serenity and most of all love!

In other words, science has come to confirm what writers like Maupassant had underlined- love is the key to happiness and ultimately heaven.

The gloomier perspective is that you only find it in…books. I was astonished to read a short story by Thomas Mann, some thirty years ago in which this view was expressed by a character:

-          Real people are incapable of love, for that is ever lasting

-          It is appalling to hear so often- words can’t express my love for you

-          It’s nonsense: the word love means so much that it does not exist in the real world.

That story had the effect of a thunder bolt and it makes a point.

Maupassant may have suggested with his story that we should look for diamonds and extraordinary feelings in the darkest places.

La Rempailleuse is looked down upon, because this is a “base ‘occupation, at least at the time Maupassant was writing about it. It does not exist as such anymore, but the equivalent would be a person who is rummaging through the debris of houses from which people have moved…or plain and simple homeless, or street bum? I am not sure, for these people do not have an occupation, La Rempailleuse did.

Anyhow, she was the daughter of a poor couple, who had had the same occupation. She had a distressed, unhappy childhood and if we were to have a Freudian approach, we would find the cause of her need for affection in the early stages of her life. But I have read psychologists who reject Freud and I agree with them and consider Freud important, but passé.

La Rempailleuse meets a young boy, who is terribly distressed. She helps him, gives him all her pocket money and kisses him.

Money is the only reason why he accepts her advances, for the people have towards her profession the attitude we have today towards beggars. Not all of us, I mean you, not me…

In a way, I have a bunch of rempailleurs on the next street. Although I live in a gated, pretentious community, outside the walls and gates, there are poorer people and a number of them go on the field nearby to search through the trash. The useless town hall officials have allowed an unauthorized garbage dump develop on an empty plot of land. Through this growing waste, sometimes iron and some other recyclable materials can be found and monetized.

La Rempailleuse is faithful to her “lover”. They never get close in reality, but in her mind, that boy and later the man is the most important soul on this earth.

At one point it is both comical and sad to read how that man and his family deal with possessions coming from such a “base person”.

But money have no smell, Vespasian is reputed to have said.

It is a beautiful story of love, inspirational and thought provoking: you can find happiness, pride, joy, hope and more living in poverty and having a job and a social status that is despised.

It makes you wonder who has the worthwhile life, the homeless who loves, or the rich guy who looks on disgusted and loved nothing, for the obsession with money is not love and was found in tests to be extremely detrimental:

Having money per se is not a reason to be unhappy, but those who are obsessed with money and material things have a high tendency to be unhappy.

“All you need is love,

Love is all you need”