On Tuesday of the following week he went to market at Goderville, prompted solely by the need of telling his story.

Malandain, standing on his doorstep, began to laugh as he saw him pass.  Why?

He accosted a farmer of Criquetot, who did not let hire finish, and giving him a punch in the pit of the stomach cried in his face:  “Oh, you great rogue!” Then he turned his heel upon him.

Maitre Hauchecorne remained speechless and grew more and more uneasy.  Why had they called him “great rogue”?

When seated at table in Jourdain’s tavern he began again to explain the whole affair.

A horse dealer of Montivilliers shouted at him: 

“Get out, get out, you old scamp!  I know all about your old string.”

Hauchecorne stammered: 

“But since they found it again, the pocketbook!”

But the other continued: 

“Hold your tongue, daddy; there’s one who finds it and there’s another who returns it.  And no one the wiser.”

The farmer was speechless.  He understood at last.  They accused him of having had the pocketbook brought back by an accomplice, by a confederate.

He tried to protest.  The whole table began to laugh.

He could not finish his dinner, and went away amid a chorus of jeers.

He went home indignant, choking with rage, with confusion, the more cast down since with his Norman craftiness he was, perhaps, capable of having done what they accused him of and even of boasting of it as a good trick.  He was dimly conscious that it was impossible to prove his innocence, his craftiness being so well known.  He felt himself struck to the heart by the injustice of the suspicion.

He began anew to tell his tale, lengthening his recital every day, each day adding new proofs, more energetic declarations and more sacred oaths, which he thought of, which he prepared in his hours of solitude, for his mind was entirely occupied with the story of the string.  The more he denied it, the more artful his arguments, the less he was believed.

“Those are liars proofs,” they said behind his back.

He felt this.  It preyed upon him and he exhausted himself in useless efforts.

He was visibly wasting away.

Jokers would make him tell the story of “the piece of string” to amuse them, just as you make a soldier who has been on a campaign tell his story of the battle.  His mind kept growing weaker and about the end of December he took to his bed.

He passed away early in January, and, in the ravings of death agony, he protested his innocence, repeating: 

“A little bit of string—­a little bit of string.  See, here it is, M’sieu le Maire.”

Original short stories, Vol. 9.

Guy de maupassant
original short stories
Translated by
Albert M. C. McMASTER, B.A. 
A. E. Henderson, B.A. 
Mme. Quesada and Others