“Their chiefs—formerly drapers or corn-dealers, retired soap-boilers or suet-refiners, warriors of circumstance created officers for their money or the length of their moustaches, heaped with arms, flannels, and gold lace—talked loudly, discussed plans of campaign, and gave you to understand that they were the sole support of France in her death-agony; but they were generally in terror of their own soldiers, men ‘of the sack and cord,’ most of them brave to foolhardiness, all of them given to pillage and debauchery.”

The opening description of the retreating French forces immediately establishes The Dangers and Hypocrisies of Patriotism with its inglorious depiction of the army. The upper-class officers have attained their rank not through skill but through either their wealth or their affectation of social status (as symbolized by their moustaches). These leaders are contrasted with the men they command, who are of lower social status and often come from criminal backgrounds. The juxtaposition also introduces the class inequality that existed in French society at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and that drives the story’s conflict.

“Many a rotund bourgeois, emasculated by a purely commercial life, awaited the arrival of the victors with anxiety, trembling lest their meat-skewers and kitchen carving-knives should come under the category of arms.”

Guy de Maupassant offers a critical description of the bourgeoisie, satirizing their self-centeredness. That the merchant residents of Rouen are concerned mostly with money and their own comfort foreshadows how Boule de Suif’s traveling companions will betray her.

“For some days already the ground had been hard with frost, and on the Monday, about three o’clock in the afternoon, thick dark clouds coming up from the north brought the snow, which fell without intermission all the evening and during the whole night.”

Maupassant uses detailed imagery to establish the story’s setting. The characters can escape neither the war nor the harsh reality of the cold winter and the incessant snow; both will affect the travelers’ journey. The passage also sets a bleak atmosphere, laying the groundwork for the harshness to come.