The Piece of String

It was market day in Goderville, and from every road the farmers of the countryside were coming into town.

The men walked slowly, leaning forward with every step, their bodies bent by years of ploughing and harvest. Their wives followed with baskets of chickens and ducks. The square was full of noise: the bellowing of cattle, the shouting of bargains, the smell of manure and sweat and hay.

The piece of string

Among the crowd was Maître Hauchecorne, a farmer from the village of Bréauté. He was a careful man, a true Norman who believed that anything useful should be picked up.

As he came into the square, he noticed a small piece of string lying on the ground. He bent down, with some difficulty, because of his rheumatism, and picked it up. He began to roll it up neatly.

Then he saw, standing in his doorway, Maître Malandain, the harness-maker. The two men had once quarrelled over a halter, and they had disliked each other ever since.

Hauchecorne felt a little ashamed to be seen by his enemy picking up rubbish from the mud. He quickly pushed the string into his pocket, then pretended to search the ground for something else he had lost. And he went off into the market with his head forward.

The announcement

At noon, the farmers crowded into the inn for lunch. The great hearth blazed, and a row of chickens and legs of mutton turned on the spit.

Suddenly, a drum sounded outside. It was the town crier. In a jerky voice, he announced that a black leather pocketbook had been lost that morning on the road to Goderville. Inside were five hundred francs and some business papers. Whoever found it was asked to return it to the mayor's office, or to its owner, Maître Fortuné Houlbrèque of Manneville. There would be a reward of twenty francs.

The farmers went back to their meal, talking about the chances of the pocketbook being found.

They had just finished their coffee when a police officer appeared at the door.

Before the mayor

He asked for Maître Hauchecorne, and told him that the mayor wished to see him.

The mayor, a stout and solemn man, sat behind his desk. He told Hauchecorne that he had been seen that morning picking up the lost pocketbook.

The old farmer was stunned. Who had said such a thing?

It was Maître Malandain, the harness-maker. He had seen him pick it up.

Hauchecorne understood at once. Red with anger, he pulled the piece of string out of his pocket and held it up. This was what he had picked up, he said. Only this.

The mayor shook his head. Malandain was a trustworthy man, he said. Surely he could not have mistaken a piece of string for a pocketbook.

Malandain was called in and repeated his story. The two old men argued for an hour. Hauchecorne asked to be searched, and he was. Nothing was found.

At last the mayor let him go, but warned him that the matter would be reported.

The talk of the town

The news had already spread. When Hauchecorne came out, people crowded round him, curious and half laughing. He told them all about the string. Nobody believed him. They only laughed harder.

All afternoon, and all the way home, he told his story to everyone he met, turning out his pockets to show that he had nothing. People said he was an old rascal.

That night, he could not sleep for anger and shame.

The pocketbook returns

The next day, at about one o'clock, a farmhand named Marius Paumelle came to the mayor's office with the pocketbook. He had found it on the road, and since he could not read, he had taken it home to his master.

Hauchecorne was overjoyed. At last, he was cleared. He went from village to village, telling everyone the end of the story, triumphant.

But something strange happened. People listened, and they nodded, and they smiled in a knowing way.

One man winked at him and said he was a clever one, all right. Another said that those who find things don't usually make such a fuss. Slowly, Hauchecorne understood what they were thinking. They believed he had found the pocketbook after all, and had got a friend to return it once he was caught.

The old man's end

He tried harder and harder to convince them. He told the story every day, adding new details, new arguments, new proofs. But the longer and more cleverly he told it, the less people believed him. The jokers in the market would ask him to tell it again, just to laugh.

He grew thin. He stopped working properly. The thing that hurt most was that he was a Norman, and shrewd, and he knew in his heart that he would have been quite capable of such a trick, and that people knew it too.

At the end of December he took to his bed. He died early in January. Even in his last fever, he kept murmuring that it was only a little piece of string, and holding out his empty hand, as if to show it to the mayor.

About this story

Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) grew up in Normandy and wrote many stories about its sharp-witted, suspicious farmers. "La Ficelle" was first published in 1883. This version is a shortened, simplified retelling.