When word of her son's death arrives via mail, the protagonist lives up to her name by committing a savage crime: luring the four Prussians to a warm bed newly stocked with bundles of hay for comfort and warmth, Mere Sauvage lights the cottage on fire and kills her surrogate sons. When the Prussian forces arrive to question the old woman, they cannot believe her story until she reiterates it without omitting any details. Finally, the Prussians execute her, after Mother Savage asks that she be remembered, that her name be uttered to the mothers of the four boys.

             Mother Savage's crime was committed for vengeance. Having lost her biological son to the Prussians, she no longer felt maternal toward the four enemy soldiers no matter how nice to her they were. She killed the soldiers out of disgust for the war, out of hatred for the forces responsible for her son's death. Yet Mother Savage had no loyalty to France; her husband was killed by the gendarmes, the French police. Her anger was therefore directed at large-scale political and military structures over which a peasant woman has no real control. Maupassant brings up issues related to class and social power throughout the short story to emphasize these connections.

             The narrator concludes his story with a quote by Serval, who states, "It was by way of reprisal that the Germans destroyed the chateau of the district, which belonged to me." As the narrator picks up a scarred stone from the wrecked house, the reader is left with plenty to contemplate: the horrors of war; the motives behind the woman's crime; and mostly, about the class struggles that denigrate scores of people like Mother Savage.

             The protagonist, Mere Sauvage, has conflicting motives for wanting to murder the four Prussian soldier boys. First, she is still in shock over the death of her son; she received the letter on the very day that she burned the house down. Therefore, her motives for killing them might have been that she was in a temporary state of shock and insanity.