The Tellier house

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Title of a French edition from 1891

The Tellier House is a novella by the French writer Guy de Maupassant . It first appeared in 1881 as La Maison Tellier by Paul Ollendorff in Paris, then in the magazines La Lanterne (1889) and Gil Blas (1892). The novel was published in German in 1893 in the Tellier family and other stories . With Das Haus Tellier , which is set in a brothel in a small Norman town, he questions the common categories of morality and immorality of the time.

background

After Guy de Maupassant made his breakthrough in 1880 with the novella Boule de suif (English: fat dumplings ), his patron Gustave Flaubert died unexpectedly that same year . As a result, Maupassant resigned in the Ministry of Education and initially worked for two magazines. The Tellier House , his first collection of short stories , came into being in 1881 . Due to the success of the band, he was finally able to secure himself financially.

action

Madame Tellier is the owner and operator of a popular brothel in Fécamp . The sailors and ordinary workers are served on the lower floor, the dignitaries of the city on the upper floor. One day a riot breaks out in front of the Tellier house : the door does not open. At the invitation of her brother, a carpenter, she went to the country with her girls for her niece's first communion . Since she does not want to entrust the business to her employees, she decides to take the entire workforce of five prostitutes with her.

On this day of the company outing, the doors of the inn remain closed. A group of decent, respectable gentlemen from the city have to come to terms with the unfamiliar situation. For the exuberant staff of the establishment, however, the train ride and the subsequent stay are worthwhile. The village gives the dressed-up ladies a splendid reception, because the villagers have no idea of ​​the professional orientation of the fine guests from the city. During the service the prostitutes, who have not been to church for a long time, burst into tears with emotion and infect all visitors. Thereupon the unsuspecting old pastor praised the heartfelt piety of the "ladies":

“Above all, I thank you, my dear sisters, who have hurried from so far and whose presence among us, whose moral faith, whose lively piety has been a salutary example to all! You are the support of my church, your piety has carried the others away. Perhaps without you this great day would not have had such a truly divine character. "

- Maupassant : La Maison Tellier

Then the group celebrates in the cleared workshop of the carpenter. Soon the drunken master of the house takes on the ladies, but Mme. Tellier plays the indignant and urges them to leave. Finally, the townspeople leave and return to Fécamp in good time in the evening, where they are eagerly awaited by the respectable citizens and extensively celebrate with champagne.

reception

With his portrayal of the good-natured and warm-hearted behavior of women from the brothel milieu, Katrin Burtschell sees the author in the vicinity of other prominent brothel visitors and actors of the time such as Edgar Degas and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec .

filming

Text output

  • La maison Tellier. Ma femme. Les conseils d'une grand'mere. Paris, Louis Conard, 1908
  • Tellier family and other stories. Berlin, Jakobsthal, 1893.
  • Novellas. The Tellier house / Among relatives / The widow . From the French by Ingeborg Lahne. Stuttgart, Riedeler 1947
  • La Maison Tellier. Narrative. With 16 lithographs by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec . Hamburg, Europa Edition Günter Koch, 1948
  • La Maison Tellier. With illustrations by Helmut Soltsien. Translated by Ernst Sander. Hoppe 1953.

Web links

Wikisource: La Maison Tellier  - Sources and full texts (French)

Remarks

  1. ^ Maupassant, contes et nouvelles , Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, Gallimard, p. 1357.
  2. ↑ Guy de Maupassant: The Tellier House and other short stories . From the series 'The Literary Legacy'. Translated from the French by Ernst Sander. With an introduction by Andri Peer. Illustrations by Christian Broutin. Leisure library, (around 1990)
  3. ^ Translation: Georg von Ompteda ; tangible z. B. About Ompteda, Tellier, p. 26, Berlin 2015 (European Literature Publishing House , BoD ).
  4. ↑ Katrin Burtschell: Nobuyoshi Araki and Henry Miller - a Japanese-American analogy , p. 50.