Miss Harriet

Seven strangers share a coach winding through the cliffs of Normandy, and among them is Miss Harriet, a peculiar elderly Englishwoman whose eccentricities mask something far more tragic. Léon Chenal, the narrator, watches this odd woman with a mixture of amusement and discomfort, until he learns her story, and his amusement curdles into something more complex: a tender, almost unbearable pity. Miss Harriet has loved him in silence for years, her devotion as undiscriminating as it is absolute. Maupassant, with his painter's eye for landscape and his surgeon's precision for the human heart, renders this odd woman with extraordinary compassion. What could be ridiculous becomes heartbreaking. What could be pathetic becomes sacred. This is a story about loneliness, about the way love persists long after hope has any right to, and about the strange responsibility we bear for hearts we never asked to break.