Contrast of Old Mother Savage and The Tell-Tale HeartWriters can use different techniques to achieve the same effect on the audience. In the short story "La Vieille Mère Sauvage" by Guy Du Maupassant, we tell the tragic story of a woman who loses everything. The story is scary in that it has an ending you wouldn't expect. Also, this can be considered a sad story because the mother seems sad throughout the story. In the end, the only thing she has to be satisfied with is that the murder of four young men may make other women feel the way she felt when she learned of her son's death. This story can be compared to "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allen Poe, when talking about the strategies both authors use to frighten the audience. They both describe scenes in detail to give an effect of disgust. However, Du Maupassant makes the audience feel sorry for the mother in this story, turning it into a tragedy rather than a horror. The story begins with two men walking in a forest. One of the men recognizes an abandoned house. The house is described as "...a skeleton still standing, but ruined and sinister" (Du Maupassant, 1). The speaker asks the man he is walking with what happened to the people who lived there. The other begins to explain that the father was killed and that during the war the son was sent to fight, leaving the mother alone. It was said that no one bothered her since everyone in the town thought she had money. It was said that she almost never laughed, but this was normal for women of that time: “Women suffer with sad and restricted souls, their lives being solemn and hard” (Du Maupassant, 2). With this thought in mind, it seems that people view the woman as a hero. She is what we consider a "good guy", not because she killed innocent people, but because she took charge of a situation that was out of the ordinary for a woman. This is a far contrast from the end of Poes. In his story, the speaker confesses to killing the old man because the man's heart, which the reader knows at that moment is conscious of, annoys him. At the end of his story, the audience is happy that the speaker is caught off guard. “Old Mother Savage,” by Guy Du Maupassant, and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allen Poe, both offer a look at the other side of tragedies. . In both cases we see the reasoning behind the murders of innocent people. The difference between the two is that in one case the audience feels sad for the killer, while in the other we are happy that justice is being served..