The Luncheon by W. Somerset Maugham
Quick answer: The Luncheon by W. Somerset Maugham: full summary with the twenty-one stone ending, characters, themes of vanity and hypocrisy, and the comic craft.
A struggling young writer in Paris receives a letter from an admirer of his work: she is passing through, and could they have a little luncheon at Foyot's? Foyot's is where French senators eat, and he has eighty francs to last the month. But she is forty, flattering and insistent, and she assures him she never eats anything for luncheon. What follows is one of the funniest slow-motion muggings in English prose.
W. Somerset Maugham wrote the story in the 1920s and collected it in Cosmopolitans, his book of very short stories built to fit a magazine page. Narrated by the writer twenty years later, after spotting the woman at a play, it is a masterclass in comic escalation, and it ends with a single sentence of revenge that students remember long after the exam.
The story in brief
The narrator, then living in a tiny flat in the Latin Quarter and earning barely enough to keep body and soul together, is flattered by the woman's praise of his book and cannot bring himself to refuse. At Foyot's the menu prices stop his heart, but his guest repeats her creed: she never eats more than one thing for luncheon. Then she wonders whether they have any salmon. It is early for salmon, but a beautiful one is found, and while it is being cooked she accepts a little caviare, since she never minds caviare. He orders the cheapest dish on the card, a mutton chop, and she gently scolds him for eating meat. She drinks nothing but champagne, her doctor's orders, so a bottle arrives while he drinks water. Course by course the catastrophe builds: giant asparagus, wheeled past on a trolley and sighed over until he surrenders, then ice cream and coffee, and at the last moment fresh peaches, out of season and priced accordingly, taken almost absent-mindedly as she talks.
Between courses she keeps up a stream of advice about his liver and his habits, each sermon delivered while she eats his month's budget. The bill arrives and it takes everything: he pays, finds himself with three francs left for the waiter's tip, and walks out with a whole month ahead of him and not a penny in his pocket. Her parting shot is that he should follow her example and never eat more than one thing for luncheon. He answers that he will do better and eat nothing for dinner that night, and she calls him a humorist without hearing the truth in it. The frame then snaps shut. Twenty years later, watching her at the play, the narrator observes that he is not a vindictive man, but that the immortal gods have taken the matter in hand: today she weighs twenty-one stone. That verdict is the ending, and the revenge.
The characters
Two people, one table, and a silent third party in the narrator's wallet.
Themes and meaning
The obvious theme is hypocrisy, and it is worth stating precisely: the woman is not lying about eating one thing for luncheon so much as narrating a flattering fiction about herself in real time, revising it dish by dish. Beside it sits vanity, the narrator's, since one honest sentence about his finances would have ended the ordeal, and social politeness as a trap, because every rule of good manners works against the person with the thinnest wallet. Money worry itself is a theme: few stories render the arithmetic of poverty, the silent recalculation after each order, with such comic accuracy.
The sharper observation is that the story's revenge is doing something slyer than fat-shaming, which is how a careless modern reading takes it. The ending is an irony of self-image: the woman's whole power over the narrator rested on her performance of dainty restraint, and time has published her appetite where no performance can hide it. The twenty-one stone are simply her luncheon philosophy made visible. Maugham's target is never her body; it is the gap between what she claimed and what she did, closed at last by the gods of consequence.
The craft: escalation on a fixed refrain
Structurally the story is a comic engine with one moving part. The refrain, that she never eats anything for luncheon, is planted early and then contradicted by ascending courses: salmon, caviare, champagne, asparagus, ice cream, peaches. Each repetition of the claim raises the value of the contradiction, and because the narrator's funds are finite and known, every course carries a visible price in dread. That is the technique worth stealing: fix a stated rule, break it in increments of rising cost, and anchor the stakes to a number the reader can count down. Comic escalation with genuine stakes underneath is also what separates a funny anecdote from a scoring story, the kind of control the Language and Creativity marks in Writory's Short Story Contest tend to notice.
The frame does quiet work too. Because the older narrator tells it from the safety of twenty years, the story can be merciless without being bitter; his younger self's panic has fermented into amusement. And the last line demonstrates the power of the withheld payoff: the entire tale exists to justify one short sentence, held back until the final breath.
Lines that carry it
Two moments deserve close reading. The refrain itself, "I never eat anything for luncheon," is the story's spine, funnier at every repetition because the table in front of her keeps testifying against it. And the closing revelation, that today she weighs twenty-one stone, lands hard for a craft reason worth naming in an exam: it is comedy's version of a sniper shot, one sentence, perfectly delayed, that converts twenty years of resentment into a joke the reader completes. Maugham does not explain the revenge or moralise over it; he trusts the reader to weigh, so to speak, the evidence.
What poets can take from this
- For exams, define the irony precisely: the contrast between the woman's repeated claim and her actual orders, sharpened by the narrator's shrinking eighty francs.
- Track the menu as a structural device; listing the courses in order shows you understand escalation, not just event.
- Mention the frame narrative: the play, twenty years later, turns an anecdote into a story about time delivering justice.
- Writers, plant a refrain your character keeps repeating, and let events contradict it at rising cost.
- Keep your narrator complicit; the story is richer because his vanity, not just her greed, causes the disaster.
- Hold your best line for last, and make it short enough to sting.
Try it yourself
Write a story built on one repeated claim a character makes about themselves, generosity, punctuality, honesty, that events contradict in escalating increments. Give your narrator a hard number (money, hours, chances) that shrinks with each contradiction, and end with a single sentence set years later.
Questions
What is the irony in The Luncheon?
The woman insists she never eats anything for luncheon while consuming salmon, caviare, champagne, asparagus, ice cream and peaches, leaving the poor narrator to eat a mutton chop and go broke. The final irony arrives twenty years later, when the self-declared light eater weighs twenty-one stone.
Why does the narrator agree to the luncheon at Foyot's?
Flattery and vanity. He is a young, unknown writer, and a letter praising his book from an older admirer is hard to resist, so he cannot bring himself to say he is too poor for Foyot's. Maugham makes clear that the narrator's pride, as much as the woman's appetite, empties his pocket.
What happens at the end of The Luncheon?
The bill consumes the narrator's entire month's budget, leaving him three francs for the tip and nothing for the weeks ahead. In the frame story, twenty years on, he sees the woman at a play and takes his revenge in one sentence: today she weighs twenty-one stone.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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