This paper focuses on the presentation of women at war in Boule de suif (sometimes translated as Butterball or as Roly-poly), Mademoiselle Fifi and Le Lit 29 ( Bed 29). In spite of certain similarities between protagonists, these women communicate different meanings and interpretations according to the way their stories are plotted. By highlighting the functionality of the narrative elements in the story’s economy, this paper aims at putting forward an alternative reading to the traditional thematic interpretations of the novellas, which tend to essentialize the stock characters. Our reading focuses on Maupassant as story-teller, among other things his way of constructing original stories in which he plays on the transgression of established values while respecting the spatio-temporal framework in the name of verisimilitude, thus leaving the reader, through a « rhetoric of dissimulation », with the responsibility of identifying for himself the targets of his social critique.