After first reading the story, in my mind there were only two thoughts about it.
Selling Jean was wrong, and Charlot is a very ungrateful child. After reading "Country Living" a further two times my opinion of the events are not quite as black and white as they once were. Charlot in my opinion is still a very rude and ungrateful child to his hardworking but perhaps snobbish parents, however it is much harder to say what the Vallin did was as wrong as I may have once thought it was.Written in 1883, Country Living surrounds two very close families of the French peasantry. The Tuvache and Vallin are great friends. Their children play together and it is sometimes hard for both sets of parents to remember which set of children are theirs and which are their neighbours' offspring.
During this time a rich couple start to get to know both families and after a period of several months they make a bold bid to buy the youngest child of the Tuvache, Charlot. His mother becomes furious with this ridiculous suggestion and tells Madam D'Hubieres to attempt to buy Jean Vallin, for she will not sell her little Charlot.After negotiating with the Vallin the D'Hubieres manage to purchase Jean and take him away with them. After years of jeering from the Tuvache and other members of the town, Jean comes back to his family. He has grown up to be a gentleman and has learned many trades.
Charlot feels jealous of Jean, insults his parents for not allowing him to have been sold to the D'Hubieres and leaves the town never to return.The supposed moral from the story would be that selling children is right. That is the moral I first got after reading "Country Living" by Guy de Maupassant. However after reading it a second and a third time I believe that the moral is that you should put your child before your own happiness i.e. if you can not offer a good life to your child you should allow someone else to offer him that chance.
Of course back then the sale of children to rich couples was a thing of common practise. Once a Mayor had been summoned the transaction would take only minutes, seeming to suggest that it was not something that society generally frowned upon.An added reason for uncertainty over whether to sell Jean would be the fact that the Tuvache had already declined the offer and that they would be likely to destroy their relationship with the perhaps regretful and jealous Tuvache.Of course their own reluctance to sell Jean would have been a major factor hence why the D'Hubieres paid a larger sum of money to the Vallin than was first expected.A general consensus throughout history has always been that the rich exploit the poor. However this story highlights the other side of the coin.
The Vallin use every trick in the book to be able to raise the price for Jean. These included saying how hard it would be to release Jean to the D'Hubieres because they would miss him and also asking for a goodwill payment for Jean to leave on the same day.Looking at this it is easy to say that Madam D'Hubieres was a passionate young lady who was foolish with her husband's money. This brings me on to my next point, the role that women play in Country Living.
It is women that initiate most of the transactions that occur with in this short story. While this went against the grain for real life, not so much for short stories. Monsieur Tuvache disagrees with his wife, when Charlot is wanted for sale. However instead of saying so he backs up his wife with nods and shakes of the head.
Again it is Madam D'Hubieres that does all the talking about the adoption of Charlot and Jean until the question of money takes place whence her husband speaks.Also during this time it is Madam Vallin who talks about the price of losing her son Jean.Therefore this short story appears to promote the role of women in society. It is possible that Guy de Maupassant's close relationship with his mother may have led to this being the case.We can therefore see from this story that the values of olden times are far different from those now, or are they? Adoption? Fostering? Surrogate Mothers? Perhaps our modern day values are not as far away from those of yesteryear as we may like to think.
