Like Death

by Guy de Maupassant

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850–1893) was born in Normandy to a middle-class family that had adopted the noble “de” prefix only a generation earlier. An indifferent student, Maupassant enlisted in the army during the Franco-Prussian War—staying only long enough to acquire an intense dislike for all things military—and then went on to a career as a civil servant. His entrée into the literary world was eased by Gustave Flaubert, who had been a childhood playmate of his mother’s and who took the young man under his wing, introducing him into salon society. The bulk of Maupassant’s published works, including more than three hundred short stories and six novels, were written between 1880 and 1890, a period in which he also contributed to several Parisian daily newspapers. Among his best-known works are the novels Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean and the fantastic tale Le Horla; above all, he is celebrated for his stories, which transformed and defined the genre for years. In 1892, after attempting suicide to escape the hallucinations and headaches brought on by syphilis, Maupassant was committed to an asylum. He died eighteen months later.

  RICHARD HOWARD received a National Book Award for his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s Fleurs du mal and a Pulitzer Prize for Untitled Subjects, his third volume of poems. For New York Review Books he has translated Maupassant’s Alien Hearts, Honoré de Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece, and Marc Fumaroli’s When the World Spoke French.

  OTHER BOOKS BY GUY DE MAUPASSANT PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  Afloat

  Translated and with an introduction by Douglas Parmée

  Alien Hearts

  Translated and with a preface by Richard Howard

  LIKE DEATH

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT

  Translated from the French by

  RICHARD HOWARD

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Richard Howard

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Forgery in the manner of Auguste Rodin, Etude de femme nue (Study of a female nude), c. 1896;

  The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Maupassant, Guy de, 1850–1893, author. | Howard, Richard, 1929– translator.

  Title: Like death / by Guy De Maupassant ; translated by Richard Howard.

  Other titles: Fort comme la mort. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2017] | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016026783 (print) | LCCN 2016026798 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370323 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681370330 (epub)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Psychological. | FICTION / Family Life. | FICTION / Literary.

  Classification: LCC PQ2349 .F713 2017 (print) | LCC PQ2349 (ebook) | DDC 843/.8—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026783

  ISBN 978-1-68137-033-0

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Translator’s Preface

  LIKE DEATH

  Part One

  1

  2

  3

  4

  Part Two

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

  The often approved but jinxed recognition of Guy de Maupassant’s career was initially characterized by the young author’s readiness to groom his talent in accord with a seven-year apprenticeship to Gustave Flaubert (the dear companion of Guy’s divorced mother). Today, varying choices among Maupassant’s more than three hundred short stories are frequently read and admired in English translation, although his six novels and his five tales—that are long enough to be mistaken for novels—are not readily translated and, outside of France, nowhere near so familiar as his stories.

  Recently Sandra Smith made a fine new translation of thirty Maupassant stories, The Necklace and Other Stories, and it is my hope that her varied and sensitive selection from a literary form offering more than a merely tyronic expedient of shorter to longer pieces will spur readers to rise to Maupassant’s novels, with the novel’s proper attributes of development, range, and, well, consummation.

  In 2009 I translated Maupassant’s Alien Hearts, his last novel (published in 1890, shortly before the author died of syphilis at forty-two). I feel there is an obvious logic in adding Like Death (Fort comme la mort), the novel immediately preceding the author’s sixth: both are ravishingly (as well as critically) Parisian, and I believe that in France Like Death, along with Bel-Ami, is the most popular of Maupassant’s major works. It concerns Olivier Bertin, the hero, or perhaps victim—certainly the most intimately prevailing figure—a middle-aged artist confronting what he recognizes as the immense dilemma of having been attractive down to the last possible minute of middle age and now seeking to recover in his mistress’s daughter the irregularly encouraged possibility of his own lost youth. But though I’m happy to have exposed the bare bones of the plot, what strikes me as the translator’s obligation is to reveal what this thirty-nine-year-old writer invented in his late novels, something which until now I had supposed was the invention the aging Marcel Proust alone created some thirty years after young Maupassant devised it and died.

  Here then are examples from Fort comme la mort (the title translated with a sense of joyous responsibility as Like Death), which typify the ecstatic discovery any reader will make:

  The painter, listening to her, felt as gay as a bird, as gay as he had never been. Everything she told him, all the futile and commonplace details of that young girl’s simple existence, amused and interested him.

  “Let’s sit down here,” he said.

  They sat down near the water. And two swans came floating down ahead of them, expecting to be fed.

  Bertin felt memories awakening within him, recollections that had faded, had drowned in inadvertence and suddenly recurred for no reason at all. Of varying nature, they rose so rapidly and so simultaneously that he experienced the sensation of a hand stirring the vase of his memory.

  He tried to find what caused this upsurge of his old life that he had felt and noticed several times already, though less often than today. There was always a reason for these sudden evocations, a simple and material cause, an odor perhaps, often a fragrance. How many times had a woman’s dress flung upon him in passing, with the evaporated breath of some essence, the full recollection of forgotten incidents. At the bottom of old scent flasks he had also recovered fragments of his existence; and all the vagrant odors of the streets, of the fields, of the houses, of the furniture, sweet and unwelcome, the warm odors of summer evenings, the sudden chills of winter nights, always revived remote memories, as if such scents, like the aromatics that preserve mummies, retained and embalmed all these extinct events.

  Was it damp grass or chestnut blossom that recalled the past? No. What then? Was he indebted to his eyes for this awakening? What had he seen? Nothing. Among people he had met, someone might have resembled a figure from the past, and without his recognizing the resemblance, the bells of the past had rung in his heart.

  Wasn’t it more likely to have been sounds? How often had he happened to have heard a piano, or an unknown voice, even a hand organ in the square playing something he had heard twenty years ago, filling his heart with for
gotten sensations. . . . But that continuous, incessant, intangible appeal! What was it around him, close to him, always reviving his extinguished emotions?

  “It’s a little chilly,” he said. “Let’s go home.”

  This is what we have learned to call “involuntary memory.” Proust named and used it, and other writers along with Proust and even before him have made use of the powerful figure. What astonishes me is that Maupassant’s voice is so distinct, so developed, that I cannot tell whether Proust, a known reader of Maupassant, was a recognizable user and developer of the figure or merely (merely!) another inventor of involuntary memory.

  And here is another example of possible influence or parallel invention, something I will call “involuntary attraction.”

  From Proust:

  He thought of his dream again, and saw once again, as he had felt them close beside him, Odette’s pallid complexion, her too thin cheeks, her drawn features, her tired eyes, all the things which—in the course of those successive bursts of affection which had made of his enduring love for Odette a long oblivion of the first impression he had formed of her—he had ceased to notice since the early days of their intimacy, days to which doubtless, while he slept, his memory had returned to seek their exact sensation. And with the old intermittent caddishness which reappeared in him when he was no longer unhappy and his moral standards dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: “To think that I’ve wasted years of my life, that I’ve longed to die, that I’ve experienced my greatest love, for a woman who didn’t appeal to me, who wasn’t even my type.”

  (Translated by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin)

  And here is Maupassant’s original, we might say:

  Desire for this woman had scarcely touched him, for it seemed hidden behind some other more powerful feeling, still obscure and scarcely awakened. Olivier had imagined love began with reveries, with poetic exaltations. What he felt now seemed to derive from an indefinable emotion, much more physical than spiritual. He was nervous, palpitating, disturbed, as when a disease germinates in our body. Yet nothing painful mixed with this fever of the blood, which also agitated his thoughts by a sort of contagion. He was not unaware that this disturbance came from Madame de Guilleroy, from the memories she left behind and from the expectations of her return. He wasn’t drawn to her by an impulse of his entire being, yet he felt her constantly present in himself, as if she had never left him; she surrendered a part of herself each time she left him, something subtle and inexpressible. What was it? Was it love? He probed the depths of his own heart to discern and to understand: he found her charming, yet she didn’t correspond to the type of ideal woman his blind hopes had created. A man who invokes love has foreseen the spiritual qualities and the physical gifts of a creature who will seduce him, and Madame de Guilleroy, infinitely pleasing though she might be, didn’t seem to be such a woman.

  Then why did she engross him so much more than the others, in so different, so incessant a fashion?

  After which examples of “the involuntary,” your translator, like the hero himself, is silenced.

  —RICHARD HOWARD

  LIKE DEATH

  PART ONE

  1

  DAYLIGHT poured into the enormous studio through an open bay in the ceiling: an oblong of brilliant light—an immense perforation in the remote azure infinity—ceaselessly crisscrossed by sudden flights of birds.

  Yet once inside this severely curtained chamber, the sky’s joyous brilliance dimmed, drowsing in heavy folds of fabric, dying out under shadowy porticos, barely revealing the somber corners where one or two gold frames glowed like living coals. Peace and rest seemed incarcerated here, the peace of artists’ quarters where human souls have labored. Within these walls where minds have lived and struggled, thought is exhausted by its own violent efforts, overwhelmed once it has subsided. Everything seemed dead after such paroxysms of life; each object was torpid now—furniture, drapery, heroic figures unfinished on the canvases—as if the whole place had suffered its owner’s fatigue, had labored along with him, participating daily in his endless struggle. A sluggish odor of paint, turpentine, and tobacco impregnated the whole studio, saturating rugs and furniture, and no sound provoked the heavy silence except the screams of swallows flying across the open skylight and the unremitting murmur of Paris itself, barely audible over the rooftops. Nothing stirred except a tiny cloud of blue smoke rising toward the ceiling with each puff of the cigarette that Olivier Bertin, sprawled on his sofa, slowly exhaled between his lips.

  His gaze lost in the inaccessible sky, he was seeking a subject for a new work. What to do next? As yet he hasn’t the faintest idea. Anything but a determined, self-assured worker, he is a vacillating dreamer whose uncertain inspiration wavers among the myriad manifestations of art. Rich, famous, recipient of many honors, he remains, toward the end of his life, a man unaware of the ideal he is pursuing. Awarded the Prix de Rome, a defender of noble traditions, he has evoked, after so many others, the great historical scenes, and then, modernizing his inclinations, he has painted living men along classical lines. Intelligent, enthusiastic, an indefatigable worker with ever-changing dreams, passionate about the techniques he knows so well, he has acquired, thanks to a fastidious nature, remarkable qualities of execution and great versatilities of talent, partly as a result of his vacillations and his ventures into every genre of art. Perhaps, too, the world’s sudden infatuation with his work—always so elegant, so correct, so distingué—has had a certain influence on his nature and kept him from being what he would in the course of things have become. Since the triumphs of his early work, a constant desire to please has unconsciously haunted him, secretly impeding his development and attenuating his convictions. This craving to please, moreover, had shown itself in a great variety of forms and contributed a good deal to his renown.

  The amenity of his manners, the routines of his life, the fastidious care he took of his person, his early reputation for strength and skill as a fencer and an equestrian had added a parade of minor notorieties to his growing eminence. After Cleopatra, the first of his canvases people talked about, Paris had been utterly smitten, had adopted him, toasted him, and he straightaway became one of those brilliant figures, frequently artists, so likely to be encountered in the Bois, whom the salons squabble over and whom the institute welcomed virtually in his teens. He had entered the city as a conqueror, to universal approval.

  This was how Fortune led him to the threshold of old age, petting and caressing him all the way.

  And so, under the influence of the weather (the day had turned out to be splendid), he began casting about for a likely poetical subject. Slightly benumbed by his lunch and his cigarettes, he daydreamed a while, staring into space, sketching figures in the air, graceful women on a path in the Bois or crossing some sidewalk in town, lovers on the beach, all the wanton fancies his tastes delighted in. Interchangeable images coiled around him, vague and various in the brilliant hallucination of their familiarity, and the swallows streaking across the space overhead like an incessant flight of arrows seemed to be seeking to erase his own visions with a constant buffet of feathers.

  Nothing was left! Every figure he glimpsed looked like something he had already done, each woman who appeared before him was the daughter or the sister of those his artist’s whim had so lovingly produced, and the vague fear he had been suffering from for at least a year now, the fear of being depleted, of having reached the end of his inspiration, grew ever more insistent as he reviewed his past accomplishments and recognized his impotence to imagine something new, to discover the unknown.

  He got up rather feebly to search the canvas for what his imagination had failed to find, hoping that his hand, scribbling aimlessly, might waken some fresh vision in his eyes, might evoke the elusive discovery by some unrecognizable outline.

  Even as he inhaled the cigarette smoke, he began pulling lines together, making swift marks on a piece of gray cardboard, lightly stroking his pointed stick
of charcoal, then almost immediately disgusted by these foolish efforts, he threw away his cigarette, whistled a tune he had heard on the street somewhere, and reaching down, gathered a heavy set of dumbbells lying under a chair.

  Using his other hand, he pulled aside the curtain covering the mirror by which he would check the correctness of his model’s poses, verify the accuracy of perspectives, and propping it directly in front of him, began juggling the dumbbells, while keeping his eyes on his own face.

  He used to be famous in the studios for his strength, as later in society for his looks. Now it was age that weighed him down. Tall, broad-shouldered, full-chested, he had developed the belly of an old wrestler, though he continued to exercise daily and to ride cavalry horses at least once a week. His head remained remarkable, handsome as ever, though different of course. A thick growth of white hair, cut short, brightened his brown eyes under heavy gray brows. His strong mustache, an old soldier’s mustache, had remained almost brown and gave his face a rare expression of energy and pride.

  Standing in front of the mirror, heels together, body straight, he awarded the dumbbells their proper movements and their proper rhythm at the ends of his long, muscular arms, his eyes following every gesture with an expression of calm satisfaction. But suddenly, in the depths of the mirror in which the whole studio was reflected, he saw a curtain shift, and then a woman’s head appeared, just the head, taking in the room. A voice behind him inquired, “Are you here?”

  He answered “Present” as he turned around. Then, dropping his dumbbells on the carpet, he ran toward the door with a rather forced sprightliness.

  A woman had come in, her dress glowing in the dark studio. As they shook hands she said, “You were doing your exercises, weren’t you.”