A Vendetta by Guy de Maupassant
Quick answer: A Vendetta by Guy de Maupassant: full summary with the ending, the widow Saverini and her dog Semillante, themes of revenge, and the story's cold, patient craft.
An old widow stands over her murdered son's body in a Corsican town and promises him revenge, though she is frail, alone, and the killer has already escaped across the water. Her only companion is a dog. Out of those meagre materials, Guy de Maupassant builds A Vendetta, published in 1883, one of the most chilling revenge stories in any language, and one of the shortest. It can be read in minutes, and its final sentence is famous for what it refuses to feel.
The story is set in Bonifacio, on cliffs at the southern tip of Corsica, an island whose code of blood vengeance was notorious in the nineteenth century. Maupassant treats that code without romance and without judgement. Students meet the story as an essay-friendly study of revenge and determination; writers should read it for its machinery, because it shows how a plot can be nothing more than a single idea, patiently loaded, and then released in one spring.
The story in brief, ending included
The widow Saverini lives in a poor house in Bonifacio with her son Antoine and his dog Semillante. One evening Antoine is killed in a quarrel, treacherously knifed by Nicolas Ravolati, who flees that same night across the strait to Longosardo in Sardinia, beyond the reach of Corsican justice. The old woman weeps over her son's body and promises him a vendetta. But she is old and weak, with no other son, no brothers, no male kin to carry out the obligation. She broods on it alone while the dog howls at the door. Then, watching Semillante, she has her idea. She fences the yard, chains the dog, and starves it.
When the animal is frantic with hunger, she builds a straw dummy of a man and ties a length of cooked sausage around its throat. Released, the starving dog tears the food from the dummy's neck. She repeats the training for months, always the same target, always the reward at the throat, until the attack is automatic. Then, one morning, having starved Semillante for two days, she dresses as a ragged old beggar man, crosses with the dog to Longosardo, and finds Ravolati at work in his joiner's shop. She calls his name; he turns; she looses the dog with her command to devour, and Semillante destroys his throat. Two neighbours later remember only an old beggar with a lean black dog. The widow returns home, and the story ends with the flattest sentence Maupassant ever aimed like a weapon: that night she slept well.
The characters
Three living figures and one dead one, and the dead one drives everything.
Themes and meaning
The standard readings: revenge as sacred duty in Corsican culture, where a vendetta is not a crime but an obligation owed to the dead; the resourcefulness of the powerless, since an old woman uses patience and intelligence where a young man would have used a knife; and the corruption of innocence, with the dog as an emblem of natural affection converted into a killing tool. Cite the setting too, the white cliffs and the strait between Corsica and Sardinia, a wild border landscape where the law is thin and the old code fills the space.
The sharper point is the story's total absence of moral commentary. Maupassant grants the widow no hesitation, no nightmare, no punishment, and no remorse; the final line closes the account like a ledger. Readers looking for the story's judgement will not find one, and that vacancy is deliberate. The tale asks whether justice and vengeance can be told apart when the law has failed, and it answers by sleeping soundly. Whatever the reader feels at that line, horror, satisfaction or both at once, is the reader's own contribution, and Maupassant knew it.
The craft: a plot wound like a spring
Structurally the story is one straight line: vow, problem, idea, preparation, execution. There is no subplot, no second location beyond the crossing, no character who is not necessary. The middle section, the training of the dog, is where a lesser writer would have hurried, and it is exactly where Maupassant slows down, because repetition is the plot. Each training session is a payment into the ending, and by the time the widow crosses the strait, the reader can see the whole mechanism and still cannot look away. Suspense here is not uncertainty about what will happen; it is certainty, approaching.
The technique worth stealing is the disciplined point of view and the withheld verdict. We stay close enough to the widow to follow every practical step, yet Maupassant never opens her conscience for inspection, so the ending lands as fact rather than feeling. That last line does the work of a page of psychology. When a story is scored on Storytelling and Structure, as entries are in Writory's monthly Short Story Contest, this is the shape that earns the marks: a promise made in the first scene, kept in the last, with nothing wasted between.
What poets can take from this
- In essays, define vendetta as cultural obligation, not personal rage; the widow acts because no one else is left to act.
- Use the dog's training as your key evidence for the theme of patience and the corruption of natural affection.
- Quote or cite the final sentence; the absence of remorse is the story's real subject and your strongest discussion point.
- Writers: give your protagonist an impossible task and let the plot be nothing but the solving of it, step by verifiable step.
- Slow down where the preparation happens; repetition can be suspense when every pass tightens the mechanism.
- End on a flat factual sentence after a violent climax and let the reader supply the emotion.
Try it yourself
Write a revenge story in which your avenger is physically incapable of direct violence and must build an instrument of it over months. Spend most of your words on the preparation, keep the actual act brief, and end within two sentences of its completion, without telling the reader how to feel.
Questions
What happens at the end of A Vendetta?
The widow Saverini crosses to Sardinia disguised as an old beggar, finds Nicolas Ravolati in his workshop, and sets her starved dog Semillante on him. The dog tears out his throat, the widow returns home unrecognised, and the story ends by noting that she slept well that night.
What is the theme of A Vendetta?
Revenge as duty, and the patience of the powerless. The story shows an old woman fulfilling Corsica's code of blood vengeance through intelligence and preparation, and it pointedly refuses to condemn or excuse her.
How does the widow train the dog in A Vendetta?
She starves Semillante, then ties cooked sausage around the throat of a straw dummy so the ravenous dog learns to attack a man-shaped figure at the neck. Months of repetition make the attack automatic, turning grief and hunger into a weapon.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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