Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

“BEL-AMI” by Guy de Maupassant (first published in serial form in the newspaper Gil-Blas in 1885; published in book form later in the same year )

            Three times before on this blog I’ve considered works by Guy de Maupassant (see the postings on Pierreet Jean, Une Vie and Fort Comme la Mort). Each time I’ve made the points that de Maupassant (1850-93) is a writer whom I find easy to read in the original French; and that he was as much novelist as short-story writer, even if English-speaking readers know him mainly for his short stories. But there is one of de Maupassant’s novels which has become internationally known. Bel-Ami is the novel which, I believe, cemented in English-speakers’ minds the notion that the French are a sexually-scandalous race, especially as the novel appeared in the late nineteenth century and its frank depiction of a serial seducer could never have been published in contemporaneous Victorian England. When a (slightly bowdlerised) English-language translation of the novel finally appeared in the early 1900s, it added to the title the subtitle “The Story of a Scoundrel”, just in case readers didn’t agree that the protagonist should be viewed as a wicked, wicked man. Bel-Ami was an enormous hit on its first publication in France. In the annotated French “Lire et Voir” edition in which I read it, the editor notes that the novel ran through 51 re-printings in the first two years after its first publication. It made de Maupassant rich and freed him from journalistic hack-work.

To simplify brutally, Bel-Ami concerns a careerist who sleeps his way to the top. 

Georges Duroy is a handsome, down-on-his-luck ex-army sergeant aged about 30. De Maupassant often refers to him as “un jeune homme”. In Paris and without a job, he meets his old army buddy Charles Forestier who is now making a living as a journalist. Forestier and his wife Madeleine find Duroy work on the newspaper La Vie Francaise, but Duroy (whose writing abilities are minimal) finds he can’t rise above being a lowly paid “reporter” (the English word is used in the original French text). Madeleine Forestier – who really writes her husband’s articles for him – advises Duroy that he will get ahead if he seduces the influential Madame Clotilde de Marelle. Duroy does so and, through Clotilde de Marelle’s influence and contacts, he begins to flourish in journalism and gets an increased salary. It is Clotilde’s little daughter Laurine who gives Duroy the nickname “Bel-Ami” (meaning, approximately, “sweetheart”), by which he soon becomes generally known. But when Forestier dies (he has been presented as a sick man since the novel’s beginning), Duroy promptly dumps Clotilde de Marelle and marries the widowed Madeleine Forestier, who has even more wealth and influence than his mistress. Of course Madeleine keeps the aristocratic lover she already has, and Duroy continues his priapic adventures. Even the jilted Clotilde is happy to become his mistress once again.

But Duroy, now well-paid and the newspaper’s chief political correspondent, still wants to climb higher. He is nettled that his colleagues all know it is really his wife Madeleine who writes his articles. Within his hearing they even call him “Forestier”. So how can he get ahead? Simple – seduce the fluttery and silly middle-aged Virginie Walter, the wife of the newspaper’s millionaire owner. Of course he is soon bored with Virginie’s sentimentality and clinginess and wants to dump her; but through what we would now call “insider trading” both Duroy and Virginie’s husband gain much wealth. And Duroy is able to bully his wife Madeleine into giving him half the handsome legacy her aristocratic lover leaves her when he dies. He then unceremoniously divorces Madeleine by getting the vice-squad to burst in and catch her sleeping with one of her other lovers, the Foreign Minister forsooth.

Duroy is now rich and well-connected, but he has one more step to take before he reaches the top. Virginie Walter’s naïve adolescent daughter Suzanne, unaware of her mother’s boudoir behaviour,  thinks Duroy is wonderful. M. and Mme. Walter want Suzanne to marry an aristocrat, but Duroy elopes with her. To prevent a scandal,

M. and Mme. Walter agree that Duroy can marry Suzanne. As the Church sees his first (civil) marriage as no marriage at all, and can therefore ignore both his marriage and his divorce, Duroy is able to get a big society church wedding at La Madeleine. He is now editor-in-chief of La Vie Francaise. He is rich. He has managed to be awarded the Legion of Honour by corrupt officials and he has even expunged from common knowledge his humble peasant origins by having the aristocratic title of Baron conferred upon him. Georges Duroy, “Bel-Ami”, is now officially Le Baron Du Roy de Cantal. What more could a conniving arriviste want?.... And of course, he will still be keeping his knowledgeable mistress Clotilde de Marelle.

            You will agree that this account of a man winning, without any retribution, wealth and position by progressing cynically through at least four women’s beds (not to mention short-term affairs en route) is something that could not have been published in Victoria’s England.

            Yet the element of sex is worth considering in more detail. For all the protagonist’s obvious amorality, for all the depiction of a society where marital infidelity is the rule rather than the exception, and sex is routinely exchanged for money, there are no explicit sex scenes in this novel. De Maupassant, whenever he establishes that Duroy has made another conquest, always breaks off before the bedroom is reached.

His depiction of sexual relations is brutal. It is clear that at least two of Duroy’s women have a taste for “rough”. Clotilde de Marelle insists on being taken by Duroy to the haunts of prostitutes, especially the promenade of the Folies-Bergere, and it is clear that she is both used to, and admires, the aggressive men to be picked up there. (One of the novel’s cruellest scenes has Duroy running into one of his casual women – the prostitute Rachel – at the Folies-Bergere and a fight ensuing when she realizes that she has been dumped for the woman with more social influence.) Madeleine Forestier eagerly wants to meet Duroy’s lowly peasant family once she has married the cad. Again, she wants something tougher, rougher and hornier-handed than the boyish journalists who have previously filled her bed.

And there is that little matter of how we, as readers, are supposed to take Duroy’s sex-life. How much, as he ostensibly condemns a corrupt society, is de Maupassant in fact celebrating penis-power? (This is similar to Zola’s ostensibly negative view of captalism in LaCuree – you can’t help noticing how much Zola in fact admires money-power and what it can do.) Some of the episodes in Bel-Ami are like a roue’s fantasy:- Duroy seducing Madeleine Forestier when the corpse of her first husband in still warm; Duroy getting to seduce and sleep with both mother Virginie Walter and daughter Suzanne Walter. Other episodes seem very close to the life of de Maupassant himself, a big, virile man who was also the serial seducer of women from a higher social class than the one he was born to. (He once described his hobby as “seducing duchesses”.) De Maupassant, after this novel won him riches, named his yacht “Bel-Ami” and mimicked Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” by saying “Bel-Ami c’est moi!”. Francis Steegmuller’s 1950 biography says very quaintly “It can scarcely be denied that someone possessing de Maupassant’s savagely utilitarian approach to most of womankind, with all the brutal details of relationship which it implies, must necessarily have certain traits included in any definition of the word blackguard.” As a major criticism of this novel, I found it hard to believe that so many women would so easily fall for the handsome Georges Duroy. To me, this seemed like something of a wishful male’s fantasy. Yet, as de Maupassant himself clearly knew his way around the country of Seduction, he presumably knew what he was talking about.

De Maupassant disingenuously said this novel was based on nobody in particular, but it has been easy for literary historians to trace the real-life originals of journalists, mistresses and society people whom de Maupassant used as his models.

For balance, it has to be said that in Bel-Ami de Maupassant is as much concerned with the shabby state of journalism, and the state of politics in the France of his day, as he is with sex. He is savagely critical of France’s expansionist imperialism. Episodes in the novel concerning fictitious events in Morocco really reflect shady French dealings in Algeria. He sees public honours as a sham – the Legion of Honour is awarded to people who have either powerful friends in government or the money to buy influence. Politicians are mainly concerned to amass fortunes for themselves, as in the novel’s treatment of “insider trading” by government ministers. Venality rules society with a savagery that would have startled even Balzac. As for the newspapers, it is clear throughout the novel that they are all controlled by political interests and are in effect propaganda sheets.  In the novel, Georges Duroy learns from other journalists how to use ghost-writers when he is incapable of writing something himself; how to fake interviews with visiting celebrities; and how to gather malicious and slanted information to produce “echos” [a gossip column]. The irony is that the fictitious newspaper La Vie Francaise was closely based on Gil-Blas, the newspaper where de Maupassant worked for years, and in which some of his novels (including this one) were first serialised. Another reason for seeing some identification of Duroy with his creator.

Some people have detected a teeny bit of antisemitism in the novel. The newspaper magnate Walter is a Jew who has opportunistically converted to Catholicism and is depicted unsympathetically as a grasping vulgarian. More pervasive, though, is the novel’s strain of anticlericalism where de Maupassant, like his contemporary Zola, satirises or attacks the Church. Mme. Walter is a pious church-going woman. Duroy’s first rendezvous with her is in a church, with its odour of sanctity. This scene has been compared with Emma Bovary’s first tryst, in a church, with her lover in Madame Bovary. Even more, it is reminiscent of Valmont wilfully seducing a pious church-going woman in Les Liaisons Dangereueses. Later, jilted, Mme. Walter confuses the image of Christ with the image of her seducer. Religious piety, in this outing, is just repressed sex. Then, of course, there is the whole sham of the elaborate church-wedding that caps Duroy’s worldly success.

Bel-Ami is a swift-moving and in it own way engaging novel, even if most of its characters are loathsome. Yet there is a point at which its gallop becomes wearisome. I think Odile Bombarde, the woman who wrote the introduction to the “Lire et Voir” edition, put her finger on it when she said of Georges Duroy  “il n’evolue nullement, il se contente de perfectionner ses moyens” (“he doesn’t evolve, he’s happy just to perfect his skills”). Later she describes the protagonist as “l’antithese d’un etre du roman au psychisme subtil” (“the opposite of a character found in a novel with subtle psychology.”). Once established as cad, bounder, seducer and arriviste, George Duroy stays that way, and even if specific episodes can’t be foreseen by the reader, the way Duroy reacts to anything becomes entirely predictable. In other words, it’s a little one-dimensional.

Cinematic Footnote: Gentle reader, let me tell you that a little superficial research (i.e. a quick squizz at Wikipedia) tells me that Bel-Ami has been filmed many times, including three times in English-language versions. In 1939, only a few months before war broke out, there was a German film version which was once interpreted as anti-French propaganda (“those decadent, immoral, conniving French” etc. etc.), but which has more recently been hailed as sprightly comedy. Oddly enough, this version (without subtitles) is readily available on Youtube.  In France itself there was a film version in 1955, a telemovie in 1982 and another telemovie in 2005. As for English-language versions, there was a BBC TV serial in the 1970s and a 2012 European version with an Anglophone cast.

But probably the most notorious, and notoriously silly, version was Hollywood’s 1946 attempt called The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, directed by Albert Lewin and with an opening credit warning us “This is the story of a scoundrel”. Georges Duroy was played by Hollywood’s resident suave English swine George Sanders, the cadaverous John Carradine played his friend Charles Forestier, and the main women in Duroy’s life were played by Ann Dvorak and a very young Angela Lansbury. One genuine Frenchman was involved in the production – Darius Milhaud, who wrote the soundtrack score. But I cannot help wondering how much he might have laughed at the finished product. For The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami is so bowdlerised and altered from de Maupassant’s novel that is is usually hard to discern any real connection with its literary source. The occasional episode derives from de Maupassant, but the film quickly smothers it with moralising dialogue reminding us what a wicked man Duroy is. And of course Duroy has to be punished for his sins. In the film’s ending, he dies in a duel (there is a duel mid-novel, but it is an incidental thing), but not before repenting and regretting that he has never truly loved anyone. In short, this is a textbook example of how frank novels simply couldn’t be filmed in the days of the old Hollywood production code.

I regret to inform you, this is the only film version of the novel that I have seen in its entirety.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

“UNE VIE” (“A LIFE” – sometimes translated as “A Woman’s Life”) by Guy de Maupassant (first published as a serial in the newspaper Gil-Blas in 1883; then in book form as L’Humble Verite )

            I’ve visited Paris in each of the last three years, and each time I have done so, one of my delights has been trawling through second-hand bookshops – not just those book booths on the left and right banks of the Seine, but also the excellent purveyors of livres d’occasion around the Place Saint Michel. I also like the habit some booksellers have in France of placing well-preserved second-hand books among new books, marking them for customers’ convenience with a special yellow sticker.

            Now for some reason on each of my visits, one of the many books I have snapped up has always been a novel by Guy de Maupassant (1850-93). Why should this be so? I’m really not sure. Perhaps it is the general simplicity of his style (I’m one of those people who has to look up a French-English dictionary for a few words on each page when I am reading a novel in French). Perhaps it is the straightforwardness of his aims. Or perhaps it has been sheer chance. Anyway, on my second visit I bought de Maupassant’s Pierre et Jean (about which I’ve already commented on this blog, as I have on his Fort Comme La Mort) and on my most recent visit I bought his Bel-Ami, about which I will doubtless one day inflict a commentary upon you.

But on my first visit it was Une Vie which I bought and to which I will now turn my attention. This was the first full-length novel de Maupassant wrote (excluding such accomplished novellas as Boule de Suif) after already having launched his better-known career as a prolific writer of short stories.

It was his first novel and – I think – it shows.

Une Vie is, as its title says, the story of a life: the whole life of a woman – or at least most of her life, from buoyant youth to sad late middle age. As such it is “plotless” in the sense of allowing one event to follow another, sometimes in the haphazard fashion of real life. And it has its jolts of sensation. As has been noted, de Maupassant inserted into it episodes which he had previously used as the basis for short stories.

The daughter of Norman gentry, young Jeanne is delighted to at last be free of her convent education: “libre enfin pour toujours,” it says on the opening page, “prete a saisir tous les bonheurs de la vie dont elle revait depuis si longtemps”. “At last free forever, ready to grab all the joys of life about which she had dreamed for so long.” She joins her parents the baron and baroness on their estate in Normandy and her head is filled with vague romantic notions. But the tale shows her repeatedly thwarted by reality – and by nasty men. Thinking she is in love, she is persuaded to marry Julien, the young Vicomte de Lamare, even though alert readers can readily see that Julien is mainly interested in advancing his own wealth and prestige by marrying into her family. Before the wedding, Jeanne’s father advises her “N’oublie point ceci, que tu appartiens tout entiere a ton mari” (Chapter 4): “Never forget this – that you belong completely to your husband.” A wife is a husband’s property.

The Corsican honeymoon of Jeanne and Julien is idyllic enough. But Jeanne has her first shock when she has sexual intercourse and finds it disgusting and at odds with the vague romantic ideas of love she had had as a virgin. Physical sex is to her “quelque chose de bestial, de degrandant, une salete enfin” (“something bestial, degrading and finally dirty”) (Chapter 5). She comes to believe that men have nothing in common with the desires of women and that her husband’s sexual demands are at best something to be endured. She prefers to sleep separately from Julien.

Worse follows when she returns to cold, windy, rainy, depressing Normandy (Guy de Maupassant’s homeland). One day while dressing Jeanne’s hair, her faithful young maid Rosalie falls down and gives birth to a baby. It turns out that the baby was fathered by Julien, who warmed Rosalie’s bed whenever Jeanne cold-shouldered him. Jeanne momentarily considers throwing herself off a cliff but (dutiful daughter that she is) is restrained by the thought of how her mother would grieve. Rosalie is taken care of by being married off to a trusting peasant and everyone (including the complaisant local priest) persuades Jeanne that Julien’s behaviour should be forgiven on the basis that “boys will be boys”. So Jeanne forgives him.

By this stage, Jeanne herself is pregnant. When she gives birth to her son, Paul, he becomes the complete focus of her life, giving it such meaning as it has. It takes Jeanne an awfully long time to understand that her husband has embarked on another affair with the wife of a local squire. Even when she does know this, she inveigles Julien into sleeping with her again a few more time so that she can have another child. And then Julien dies. A new and fanatically puritanical priest (as a fervent anti-clerical, de Maupassant always produced negative portraits of priests) tips off the husband of Julien’s new mistress about the couple’s adulterous affair. The husband dispatches his wife and her lover in the most melodramatic way de Maupassant could devise – he pushes over a cliff the shepherd’s hut in which the guilty pair are swiving.

Hearing the news of Julien’s death, Jeanne miscarries her second child.

And Jeanne’s fortunes go down and down. When her mother dies, she discovers letters showing that this apparently righteous woman had lovers just as her father had mistresses. The family inheritance is lost. Rather than living in the chateau in which she was brought up, Jeanne is reduced to living in a drab house in town. Ironically, as she grows older she is looked after by the now-widowed Rosalie and her bastard son. But Jeanne’s consolation is her boy Paul upon whom she dotes, whom she spoils, and whom she visits obsessively when he is sent off to college.

The trouble it, Paul turns out to be a real shit, who runs off, gets involved in shady business affairs, shows no consideration for his mother and indeed exploits her for money. The character of Paul, according the Francis Steegmuller’s literary biography of de Maupassant (published in 1950), was based on de Maupassant’s scapegrace younger brother Herve, who, like Guy de Maupassant himself, ended up insane.

Where does it all end? It ends with Jeanne in late middle age, pathetically clinging to the idea that her son will one day come home and return the love she has lavished on him, when we know full well that this will never happen.

So Une Vie has shown a trusting, innocent and rather sentimental woman being exploited and deceived by a series of men – the father who arranged for her to marry a philandering husband and helped persuade her to forgive his behaviour; the husband who saw her as a source of wealth and prestige only and frequently betrayed her; the two priests who each gave the worst possible advice; and the thankless son.

Now here is part of my problem with this novel, and part of the reason I think it does not work.  By calling the novel Une Vie, de Maupassant is suggesting that the sad life of Jeanne is somehow typical of something. But typical of what? Jeanne is throughout blazingly naïve, sometimes even downright stupid. She knows her husband cheats on her once and yet she is still surprised when he cheats on her again. She is shocked to find that her parents share the loose sexual morals of their social peers. She continues to trust her son when it has been made clear again and again that he is untrustworthy and will never keep a promise. At a certain point I found myself asking – when is she going to wake up? I can think of only one episode in the novel in which she asserts herself, this being when (in Chapter 7) she overrules her father and gets poor Rosalie to confess, in front of the priest, who was the father of her baby. Perhaps a proto-feminist theme could be squeezed out of the novel. It is possible that de Maupassant was commenting on how little power women had in marriage; and how young gentlewomen who had closeted educations were rendered incapable of handling their lives realistically. It is possible that he was deliberately showing minor aristocrats as a dying breed, without the practical savvy of the bourgeoisie or even the peasants. Even so, we have a huge problem in reading this novel of a shallow, one-dimensional protagonist who is bereft of much will or intellectual power. She becomes a bore.

Further to this, there is de Maupassant’s habit of spelling everything out. In most chapters, and every time Jeanne feels joy or woe, there will be a paragraph or two telling us that she bubbled with naïve romantic dreams or that her heart was desolate and broken as she wailed tears of grief. There is a recurring motif, too, of Jeanne going to the window and reacting emotionally to the dawn.

As a sidelight I note that while the novel does move from adolescence to late middle age, it is interesting that most of it takes place well before the 1880s in which the author was writing. In an early chapter, a man refers nostalgically to Napoleon and regrets that he is now locked up on St Helena (which means the time must be before 1821). In the second-to-last chapter, Jeanne finds the railway a novelty (and rather scary) when she travels from Le Havre to Paris on a vain quest to find her son. I would therefore guess that even the later scenes are set quite some time before the novel was written. Perhaps this retrospective view is part of de Maupassant’s view that domineering landed gentry were getting to be things of the past.

            Francis Steegmuller says Une Vie caused some controversy when it was first published. Its indelicacies – especially in its airing of the loose morality of the French squirearchy – caused one powerful bookselling chain not to stock it. The matter reached (very brief) debate in the French parliament, although the book was not banned or subjected to censorship. It is easy to see why some things in the novel (especially its sexual references) would once have been thought objectionable, although they are discreet and mild from our perspective.

More surprisingly, Steegmuller notes that de Maupassant’s first novel was greatly admired by Leo Tolstoy, and was once placed on a list of  “France’s ten greatest novels” by a committee including such illustrious names as Francois Mauriac, Andre Gide and Jean Giraudoux.

It makes me uncomfortable to disagree with such worthies, but disagree I do. It is not merely the plod of events and the repetitions, but the doggedly one-dimensional nature of the protagonist (and her unconquerable naivete) that defeat me. Of course this is one of those books one should read to fill out the card of well-known nineteenth century male writers who chose to produce studies of women protagonists (de Maupassant’s mentor Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina; George Moore’s EstherWaters etc.). But I do not believe La Vie is the equal of others in this line, even if it has sometimes been compared with Madame Bovary as a study of provincial manners.

            Naughty and puerile footnote: De Maupassant in this novel often uses the verb “penetrer” when he refers to the relations of the sexes and how men do not “penetrate” the inner thoughts and feelings of women (and vice versa). But the use of the word is so insistent that it is hard to believe he did not want us to interpret it in a more literal sense.

Something Old

 Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.

 “FORT COMME LA MORT” (“Strong as Death”) by Guy de Maupassant (first published in serial form, then in book form, in 1889) 

“For love is as strong as death, its jealousy as lasting as the grave. It burns like a blazing fire, like a mighty flame”, it says in Chapter 8 of the Song of Songs (or Canticle of Canticles or Song of Solomon if you prefer). This seems an unequivocal statement of the power of (sexual) love, doesn’t it? But the realist in me immediately points out that if love is really as strong as death then, logically, death must be as strong as love. And in death love dies.

I’m not sure if Guy de Maupassant (1850-93) consciously worked it out this way, but in his novel Fort Comme La Mort (Strong as Death – I have yet to see an English translation of the novel) he is at least as fixated on ageing, decay and the inevitability of death as he is on love, even if an unconsummated and rather pointless love is ostensibly the focus of the novel.

As I have remarked before on this blog (look up the posting on Pierre et Jean), de Maupassant tends to be known to Anglophone readers solely as the writer of short stories, in which genre he was indeed prodigious. This ignores the fact that he also published six novels, and left two more incomplete when he died. Fort Comme La Mort is regarded by the French as one of his best, even if it is scarcely known to the outside world. (Only once has it ever been filmed – as a French TV drama.) What interests me is that the novel was written by a man who was about to turn 40, and it clearly reflects the sense many get at that age that youth is irretrievably gone. Indeed the middle age of the main character (who is nearly 50) is as crucial to the novel’s meaning as Josef K’s reaching the age of 30 is to the meaning of Kafka’s TheTrial. Only hindsight lets us know that de Maupassant, who died at the age of 43, never lived into the old age that he apparently feared.

Olivier Bertin is a successful society portrait painter. His long-term mistress is the Comtesse Anne de Guilleroy, whose husband is a conservative member of parliament.  (“Anne” is apparently an abbreviation of Antoinette, and Bertin frequently addresses her as “Any” i.e. “Annie”.) The time is the early Third Republic of the 1880s, but many tone-ier members of the possessing classes still hanker for royalty and its titles. Like husbands in so many of de Maupassant’s work, the Comte de Guilleroy is a harmless, complaisant, unsuspecting chap who thinks that his wife and the artist are “just good friends”, especially as Olivier Bertin once painted an admired portrait of Anne.

Bertin paints, goes to his club, visits Anne and her family, and joins in the social chitter-chatter with his pals, although when they boast of their sexual conquests he tactfully says “Moi, je me contente de mes modeles.” (Part One, Chapter 3). But Bertin is increasingly unhappy. He’s losing his touch as a painter. Like a “blocked” writer, he’s run out of ideas. Worse, while he can remember the happy days of his first seduction of Anne (it is recalled in the opening chapter), and while she is still his good pal and confidante, the fire has gone out of their liaison.

And then he begins to notice Anne’s adolescent daughter Annette. To Anne, Bertin’s interest in Annette is at first unexceptionable. He is avuncular towards Annette and a part of a social group in which the girl is always chaperoned. But Bertin’s feelings for the girl become an obsession. In her, he sees a purer and more beautiful and more vibrant and (most crucially) younger version of his mistress. It doesn’t help that people often remark on how like the portrait of Anne (painted years previously) the young Annette looks. At first we think that this is heading towards the seduction of the girl by the middle-aged man – a “dirty old man” story verging on paedophilia, or a nineteenth century Lolita.

But that is not the way Fort Comme La Mort develops.

Step by step, and in painful psychological detail, de Maupassant shows how much the artist deceives himself in imagining that there is nothing sexual in his feelings and then how much he deceives himself in thinking that he can somehow recapture his youth through the girl. And it is clear that he hardly knows how the girl thinks or what the core of her being is anyway.

Stages of his obsession are chronicled. At one point, his mistress Anne’s mother dies. Anne goes into deep mourning. We as readers have the distinct impression that there is something as forced in her grief as there is in the attention that Bertin now pays to her, when his mind is preoccupied with her daughter. The trusting Comte de Guilleroy invites Bertin down to his country estate to comfort his wife and bring her out of her grief by taking her to Paris. But in the country setting, Bertin’s fixation increases. When Anne plays the piano for him, Bertin gazes instead at the listening Annette to the point where Anne asks him to look at her for a change. When the three of them walk in the country estate in the balmy summer season, far from the urban stinks of Paris to which Bertin is accustomed, the scene is like Eden to him. He watches the girl and

“… de plus en plus, d’heure en heure, elle activait en lui l‘evocation d’autrefois! Elle avait des rires, des gentillesses, des mouvements qui lui mettaient sur la bouche le gout des baisers donnes et rendus jadis: sensation precise, quelque chose de pareil a un present reve; elle brouillait les epoques, les dates, les ages de son coeur, les rallumant des emotions refroidies, melait, sans qu’il s’en doutat, hier avec demain, le souvenir avec esperance.” (Part Two, Chapter 2)

[“….more and more, from hour to hour, she aroused in him the sense of old times! Her laughter, her sweet manners, her movements all filled his mouth with the taste of kisses given and received long ago: it was an exact feeling, like a dream version of the present; she stirred up the eras, the dates, the different ages of his heart, lighting once again emotions that had long since died, mixing, without his fully suspecting it, yesterday with tomorrow, memory with hope.” – Pardon my clumsy translations in this notice.]

By this stage we realize that young Annette is as much pretext as object of desire. She is the past, which the roué cannot recapture. But also by this stage Anne is becoming aware of Bertin’s obsession. She begins to find stratagems to remove Annette from Bertin, especially when Bertin takes mother and daughter to his studio to paint a portrait of Annette as “Reverie”. The Comte and Comtesse de Guilleroy are in the process of arranging the marriage of Annette to the young, handsome, athletic and eligible Marquis de Farandal. The mere thought of this marriage overwhelms Olivier Bertin with irrational feelings of jealousy directed at the young marquis, directed at younger males, directed at the world in general. To make it more humiliating, Olivier Bertin is fully aware that his feelings are irrational and very nearly puerile.

But there they are.

The time comes when Anne at last sits down with her old lover and, as he frankly admits his obsession, she tries to persuade him that he will recover only if he never sees Annette again. Somewhere in their feverish exchanges, Bertin says: “Elle, je l’aime comme vous, puisque c’est vous; mais cet amour est devenu quelque chose d’irresistible, de destructeur, de plus fort que la mort. Je suis a lui comme une maison qui brule est au feu!” (Part Two, Chapter 6)

[“I love her like you because it is you; but this love has become something irresistible and destructive, stronger than death. I’m drawn to her as a burning house is drawn to fire.”]

            Like Pierre et Jean, Fort Comme La Mort is an intense study of the corrosive effects of an unhealthy obsession upon a single individual. For nearly the whole of the novel we are locked inside the head of this individual, although the narrative is in the third person. In Fort Comme La Mort however, there are some passages where we break free of Olivier Bertin’s thoughts to see what Anne is thinking – and here we discover her fear of being abandoned by her lover and her silent soliloquies before the mirror as she looks at her crow’s feet and compares herself with her daughter. Though not as irrational as her lover, she is just as consumed with time and ageing.

            I cannot say that this novel is all of a piece. To round it off, de Maupassant dips (in the last fifteen pages) into pure melodrama, sparked by Bertin’s seeing a review in a newspaper condemning his art as old-fashioned. This denouement involves a lurid death scene and the burning of love letters. There are touches of heavy-handed symbolism. The humid streets of Paris in summer – oppressing the worn-out Bertin – contrast with the Edenic country estate where Annette walks. There is a scene where Bertin goes to a Turkish bath, which Annette’s young fiancé the Marquis de Farandal is also attending, and the younger man’s naked body contrasts with Bertin’s, like spring and autumn personified. Most obviously, there is a scene where the leading characters go to the opera. On stage is a performance of Gounod’s Faust. With Annette is his sight lines, Bertin identifies with the saturnine necromancer’s wish to be young again and to make love to a young woman. His ears prick up at Faust’s lines “Je veux un tresor qui les contient tous. Je veux la jeunesse.” (Part Two, Chapter 6) [“I want a treasure containing all the others. I want youth.”] De Maupassant obviously knew his Zola, as the scene is a dead ringer for the one in LaCuree (published 18 years earlier than Fort Comme La Mort) in which stepmother and stepson, involved in a quasi-incestuous relationship, go to the theatre and see a performance of Racine’s Phedre, which echoes their situation.

            So this sombre reflexion on getting old is not as tightly structured as Pierre et Jean and is unlikely ever to have been deemed “perfect” by Henry James. Indeed the biographer Francis Steegmuller, who is generally very sympathetic to de Maupassant, accuses Fort Comme La Mort of suffering from “a most pernicious form of anaemia” and says “it is especially Maupassant’s failure to leave anything unsaid, any action unexplained, any thought unrecorded.” He is, in effect, accusing de Maupassant of being too obvious, spelling things out, and leaving no room for subtext.

Even so, we could also remember that this was the novel which Ford Madox Ford was consciously attempting to emulate when he wrote The Good Soldier. Until Fort Comme La Mort falls apart in melodrama, it gives a bracingly dyspeptic view of Paris and its wealthier society and its artistic circles as seen by an author who, even in his late 30s, was blasé about it all. De Maupassant shows a weary familiarity with the art scene of which Bertin is part when he gives us a set piece (Part One, Chapter 4) describing an art show, with artists jockeying for attention and attempting to devalue one another’s work in subtle and unsubtle ways. (The character of the art critic Musadieu becomes sour comic relief in such scenes). Even when Bertin and Anne are first being introduced to us, we are given a sense of world-weariness in the way fashionable conversation is described:

“Connaissant tout le monde, dans tous les mondes, lui comme artiste devant qui toutes les portes s’etaient ouvertes, elle comme femme elegante d’un depute conservateur, ils etaient exerces a ce sport de la causerie francaise fine, banale, aimablement malveillante, inutilement spirituelle, vulgairement distinguee, qui donne une reputation particuliere et tres enviee a ceux dont la langue s’est assouplie a ce bavardage medisant.” (Part One, Chapter 1)

[“Knowing everybody in all sorts of high society, he as an artist to whom all doors were open, she as the elegant wife of a conservative member of parliament, they were drawn into the sport of French chatter – neat, banal, cheerfully malicious, pointlessly witty, vulgarly distinguished; the sort of chatter that can give you a special reputation, and is much treasured by those whose tongues are attuned to destructive gossip.”]

Then there is the advice, which Bertin gives to young Annette early in the novel, on how she can hold her own at dinner-table conversation:

“Ecoute bien, Nanette. Tout ce que nous disons la, tu l’entenderas repeter au moins une fois par semaine, jusqu-a ce que tu sois vieille. En huit jours tu sauras par coeur tout ce qu’on pense dans le monde, sur la politique, les femmes, les pieces de theatre et le reste. Il n’yaura qu’a changer les noms des gens ou les titres des oeuvres de temps en temps. Quand tu nous aura tous entendus exposer et defendre notre opinion, tu choisiras paisiblement la tienne parmi celles qu’on doit avoir, et puis tu n’auras plus besoin de penser a rien, jamais; tu n’auras qu’a te reposer.” (Part One, Chapter 2)

[“Now listen carefully, Nanette. Right up until you are an old woman, you’ll hear everything we say here repeated at least once a week. In a week, you will know by heart everything that everyone in society thinks about politics, women, stage plays and all the rest. You just have to change people’s names or the titles of shows from time to time. When you’ve heard us all expound and defend our opinions, all you have to do is choose your own opinion from among those people are supposed to have, and then you won’t have to think about anything ever again. All you’ll have to do is relax.”]

I do not think Fort Comme La Mort is de Maupassant’s best work, but it has its strong moments, both as a reflexion on ageing and the male ego, and as a disenchanted portrait of a society.

Silly Anglophone footnote: I am always interested in Anglicisms that are taken up as fashionable words in other languages. In Fort Comme La Mort, I find de Maupassant speaking of fashionable circles as containing “la fine fleur du high-life” (Part One, Chapter 2), describing Annette’s young fiancé as having “des allures anglaises de sportsman” (Part One, Chapter 2) and also speaking of people who make miniscule fripperies as “des bijoutiers de Lilliput” (Part One, Chapter 3). This is just a selection, although of course the novel was written long before franglais took hold of the French language.

Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago. 

 “PIERRE ET JEAN” by Guy de Maupassant (first published 1888; various English translations)  

What is the general reputation of Guy de Maupassant (1850-93) among English-speakers?

To most Anglophones I think he is best, and perhaps exclusively, known as a short-story writer. Sometimes you find ill-informed textbooks telling students that de Maupassant wrote only sting-in-the-tail short stories, and evidence of this misconception is found in his famous story La Parure (The Necklace) with its surprise ending. In retaliation, de Maupassant translators and scholars are at pains to point out that such stories were only a small part of de Maupassant’s output. The Penguin Selected Short Stories of de Maupassant, which sits on my shelf, has the translator Roger Colet pointedly excluding The Necklace from the selection because, he explains, it is so unrepresentative of de Maupassant’s 300-odd short stories. For the more informed Anglophone reader, de Maupassant is known as the purveyor of ironical, and sometimes cynical, realist narratives, just a whisker away from Zola’s naturalism. His masterpiece (I remember it from Stage 2 French) is often said to be one of his very first works, the long short story Boule de Suif, with its Franco-Prussian War setting and its ironical account of a prostitute’s exploitation by self-interested people. Flaubert, de Maupassant’s literary mentor, proclaimed it a masterwork as soon as it was first published.

Focus on the short-story writer, however, ignores the fact that de Maupassant was also a novelist. He wrote six novels. The only one to gain much traction with English-speakers seems to be Bel-Ami (1885), the chronicle of a cynical journalist sleeping his way to the top. It was once made into a (bowdlerised) Hollywood film. In France, de Maupassant is as well known for the novels Une Vie (1883) and Fort Comme la Mort (1889).

And then there is Pierre et Jean (1888) which French connoisseurs regard as his best, even if English readers hardly know it. (Apparently there is an Oxford World’s Classics translation.)

Now what brings me to write about this particular novel?

Sheer serendipity. In Paris recently, and looking for something manageable to read, I found a good copy of Pierre et Jean in a second-hand bookshop, going for the princely sum of one euro. I snapped it up and enjoyed it in brief moments from travel. It’s a short novel (de Maupassant’s shortest by a nose) and easily read, and as I interpret it, it has a central situation rather than a plot as such.

Thus it goes.

Monsieur Roland is a retired Parisian jeweller, living with his wife Louise in Le Havre. He loves playing at boats, going out frequently on fishing expeditions with a Captain Beausire. He is the epitome of a city businessman in retirement, imagining he is some sort of adventurer.

M. and Mme. Roland have two very different sons. The elder – aged about 30 – is the dark-haired and rather saturnine Pierre, a doctor, who is pensive, laconic, brooding and more than a little cynical. The younger – in his early 20s – is the fair-haired Jean, genial, loquacious, sociable and a lawyer with a fairly uncomplicated view of life. Attached to this small family there is a wealthy and still-young widow, Mme. Rosemilly. Her late husband was a sea-captain, which is one reason why the sea-loving M. and Mme. Roland chose to socialise with her. In a vague sort of way, Pierre and Jean are rivals for her hand and her wealth.

All this is established in this short novel’s opening chapter. Whereupon the Rolands are jolted by the news that an old family friend, M.Marechal, has died and has most unexpectedly left his whole legacy to the Rolands’ younger son, Jean.

At first Pierre congratulates Jean on his good fortune, but then jealousy begin to gnaw at him. As his black moods increase, he suspects that Jean can only have been bequeathed the legacy because he is really M.Marechal’s illegitimate son by an adulterous affair with Mme. Roland.

De Maupassant writes in the third person, but for most of the novel we see things exclusively from Pierre’s viewpoint as he rationalises his jealousy. His suspicions of his mother’s adultery grow to a certainty. It is clear that Pierre is not a very sociable person – his only friend is the Polish pharmacist Marowsko, who is dependent upon the doctor Pierre for his customers. It is also clear that Pierre is far more aware of social and financial realities than Jean is.

How does it all end? I will provide no spoilers, but there are intense scenes between the mother and each of her sons; and a downbeat ending. One could compare the tale with other classic stories of contrasting and rival brothers (Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse, for example, or Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae), except that de Maupassant’s realism makes him concentrate on credible observation rather than melodramatic turns of a plot. This is at its best as a study in jealousy, its most striking scenes being those where Pierre keeps imagining what he could do with an inherited fortune, such as setting himself up in a more opulent surgery than the one where he works.

As far as verisimilitude is concerned, the chief flaw in the story is the thinness of M. Roland’s character. Being such a gormless caricature, he contrasts with his intense and emotional wife and her intense and emotional sons. One has to suspend an awful lot of disbelief to accept that he has never suspected what his two sons so easily find out. Yet M. Roland is very much in the mould of so many married men in de Maupassant’s stories. They tend to be harmless or foolish dupes who are unaware that they are being cuckolded or otherwise deceived behind their backs.

Reading this trim and accessible novel, I kept considering the time in which it was

written. 1888. The late nineteenth century. The age when middle-class people in Europe were just getting used to seeing the seaside as a holiday resort and to boating and sea-bathing as delightful pastimes. Inevitably, memories of all those impressionist and pointilliste paintings of bathers (Seurat, Renoir etc.) swept before my eyes as I read, especially as de Maupassant makes so much atmospheric use of the sea, the weather and the moods of the harbour to echo Pierre’s moods as he wanders about brooding.

And yet one still has the impression of a naturalist situation spun out until the fierce conclusion between mother and sons.

So was de Maupassant really better as a short-story writer than as a novelist?

Just as we are about to ask this, however, we are trumped by the excellent polemical introduction which de Maupassant wrote for Pierre et Jean. He argues that critics too often expect novels to do the same thing, no matter who is writing them. The introduction is one of the best pre-emptive biffs I have ever seen a writer throw at potential critics, and leads me to reconsider and ask – what, after all, is wrong with a novel that is as much reflection upon a situation as a march of events? Hawthorne wrote such a novel in The Scarlet Letter and really all Kafka’s novels have a similar conception. So why can’t we enjoy de Maupassant’s use of the form?

Sensible footnote: Having read this novel, I owe to Francis Steegmuller’s ancient study of de Maupassant (Maupassant, published in 1950) the knowledge that Pierre et Jean was regarded as “faultless” by Henry James and was much admired by Vincent van Gogh. Steegmuller also points out that this (largely) sober, rational and realistic novel was written after de Maupassant’s story of madness Le Horla, which has sometimes been falsely assumed to signal de Mupassant’s own final descent into mental breakdown. 

Silly footnote: Reading the French text, I was foxed by the word “salicoques”, which the male Rolands were said to be hunting on night expeditions. I guessed it referred to flatfish or flounder. But it turns out “salicoques” are prawns.