Bel-Ami (Oxford World's Classics)

by Guy de Maupassant

  It has been shown that La Vie française, without corresponding precisely to any of them, is in fact modelled on a number of papers: the proximately titled La République française, which orchestrated the campaign against the colonization of Tunisia; Le Gaulois, with its own ‘Un domino’ not unlike the pseudonym of ‘Domino Rose’ (p. 96); and, above all, the Gil Bias, whose licentious tone did not preclude its also publishing the work of creative writers such as Maupassant himself. Similarly, the staff of Le Vie française are verifiably composite portraits of journalists Maupassant knew at first hand. The most sustained literary detective-work has been devoted to finding the real-life model for M. Walter, its founder. The obvious suspect is Arthur Meyer (1844–1924), the director of Le Gaulois who shared with his fictional counterpart his race, competitive rapacity, business cunning, reputed avarice, and paradoxically luxurious ostentation. It was even rumoured that, to be employed by Meyer, his editorial staff had to be as good at cup-and-ball as are the journalists in Bel-Ami (p. 41). But M. Walter also has something in common with other press barons of the period: the wealthy Auguste Dumont (1816–85), of the Gil Bias; or Edmond Magnier (born 1841), of L’Événement, equally as adept at exploiting the gossip column for his own ends and bribing colleagues and rivals alike.

  Far more problematic, and yet itself exemplary of Maupassant’s handling of his historical sources, is the case of Georges Duroy. He borrows traits from Catulle Mendès (1841–1909) only to the extent that the latter too, like Duroy in the novel (p. 256) was physically likened by contemporaries, not least by Maupassant himself, to Jesus Christ. Another journalist and friend of Maupassant’s, René-Jean Toussaint (1856–1918), with his military background, lifestyle, and lack of moral scruples recounted in his Amours de garnison (published under his pseudonym of René Maizeroy in 1886), also bears an uncanny resemblance to Duroy. But however many names suggest themselves, we are finally forced to subscribe to Maupassant’s denial that his protagonist is based on the personality or career of an identifiable individual. In his response to his critics, he was at pains to stress that Duroy was less a professional journalist than a contemporary type for whom journalism was merely a convenient stepping-stone: ‘I simply wanted to recount the life of a careerist of the kind we bump into in Paris every day of the week, and whom we come across in every profession’. In that sense, Duroy has both numerous models and none. The historical context in which Bel-Ami is set provides countless examples of men of humble origins who made gigantic fortunes by fair means or foul.2 And confirmation of the accuracy of Maupassant’s portrait is underlined by the irony of life ultimately imitating art: not long after the appearance of his novel, one of the Third Republic’s most prodigiously successful representatives–whose anonymity scholars once felt bound to respect–quickly found himself nicknamed ‘Bel-Ami’, so closely did the mechanisms of his acquired wealth and of his rise to power resemble those of Maupassant’s central character.

  Maupassant’s realism

  As a direct result of publishing ‘Boule de Suif’ in Les Soirées de Médan (1880), the volume put together by a group of writers consisting of Émile Zola and his circle, Maupassant has often been pigeonholed as a Naturalist. Yet, within Bel-Ami, there is a belittling reference to ‘the quarrels of the Romantics and the Naturalists’ (p. 106) which better reflects Maupassant’s aesthetic positioning. For there is, on his part, a consistent distancing from all literary schools, let alone from the furious doctrinal debates of the early 1880s. In the latter, faced with accusations of the gross exaggerations of L’ Assommoir, Zola mounted a defence based on the argument that the veracity of his descriptions was supported by published sources and his own empirical observation of the social worlds represented in his novels. Polemical pressures so vitiated Zola’s accounts of his own achievement (with the strategic analogy of the novelist and natural scientist hardening into a militant Naturalism) that, by 1880, in his best-known theoretical work, Le Roman expérimental, he was going so far as to claim that the documents assembled by Naturalist writers like himself were entirely responsible for the structure and content of their work: they both preceded the elaboration of character and plot, and were transposed so directly that the creative imagination was virtually redundant. However misleading such dogmatic statements are, they were in any case anathema to Maupassant. Indeed, as long ago as 1877, at the very moment he was about to become publicly associated with the most prestigious authors of his day (through his presence at the historic ‘Diner chez Trapp’ held in honour of Flaubert, Zola, and Edmond de Goncourt), his private feelings on aesthetic labels are uncompromising: ‘I don’t believe in Naturalism any more than I do in Realism or Romanticism,’ he wrote to a correspondent. ‘In my view, all such terms are meaningless’. That the ambitious young writer should have contributed to Les Soirées de Médan, which in effect served as a Naturalist manifesto, is perfectly understandable; but there is no doubt that he continued to respect Gustave Flaubert’s profound distaste for the collective ethos of such an enterprise.

  That is not to deny that Maupassant’s work as a whole is informed by a pervasive materialism and by a conception of the determinants of human behaviour which Zola would recognize as his own (leaving aside the latter’s insistence on heredity as one of them). Maupassant deserves a place among the Naturalists by virtue of, in his own words (in Le Gaulois of 17 April 1880), ‘a similar philosophical tendency’. Coloured by Maupassant’s own reading of Schopenhauer, this ‘tendency’ is essentially the grimly secular vision of Man elaborated by the world-weary poet, Norbert de Varenne, during his evening stroll with Duroy in Part One, Chapter 6 (pp. 104–7). And Bel-Ami also shares with Zola’s literary project the deliberate investigation of a particular social world. Les Rougon-Macquart, itself inspired by Balzac’s earlier fictional reconstruction of the history of the Restoration (1815–30) and the July Monarchy (1830–48), is organized as a vast panorama of the Second Empire (1852–70). Most of the novels in Zola’s twenty-volume series are individually focused on distinct worlds and key historical moments: the rebuilding of Paris (La Curée, 1872); the working-class (L’Assommoir, 1877, and Germinal, 1885); politics (provincial in La Fortune des Rougon, 1871, and La Conquete de Plassans, 1874, Parisian in Son Excellence Eugène Rougon, 1876); high-class prostitution (Nana, 1880), etc. To start itemizing Zola’s subjects in this way is to do scant justice to the imaginative power of his writing. But it is revealing that the contemporary press, while it obviously figures in the margins of a number of Zola’s novels, is not treated as a subject in its own right. Here, in other words, was a social, financial, and political world which Maupassant could explore while staking out a claim to originality, acutely aware as he was of working in the shadow of Zola’s ambitions and achievement (with Les Rougon-Macquart, by 1884–5, well on the way to completion). Bel-Ami is not only Maupassant’s longest novel. It is arguably the one which, in its detailed texture and internal organization, comes closest to Zola in providing us with a historical record of its times.

  On the other hand, Maupassant never equates novelistic truth with quasi-scientific evidence and he eschews Zola’s pedagogic perspective. Instead, he emphasizes the primacy of a necessarily subjective vision, retaining a preference for an ‘Objective mode’ (as he puts it in the September 1887 preface to Pierre et Jean) which excludes the fracturing presence of authorial omniscience, while substituting for an absolute the notion of sincerity. In other words, he stresses that ‘reality’ is not an invariable; it is the construction of the individual. And the artist’s role is to give a faithful rendering of his own version of it, without interposing judgements which would remind us that the novel we are reading is less a ‘slice of life’ than a commentary on it. It has to seem as if it is unmediated (or ‘transparent’), giving us immediate access to the reality we are shown. The logic that ‘to be truthful consists in rendering the complete illusion of truth’, in distinguishing the literally accurate from the imperatives of verisimilitude, leads Maupassant to the stri
kingly modern conclusion that ‘gifted Realists should really call themselves Illusionists’.

  His own terminology apart, what such remarks reveal is a permanent debt to Flaubert. For most of the preferences expressed in this 1887 essay, as well as in his other forays into literary criticism, can be traced back to his seven-year literary apprenticeship under Flaubert, whose seminal influence Maupassant always explicitly acknowledges and which by no means came to an end with the former’s sudden death on 8 May 1880. In particular, the 1887 essay repeats many of the points made in his articles on Flaubert in the winter of 1884–5, precisely at the time he was writing Bel-Ami. In discreet but significant ways, Maupassant’s own version of a ‘sentimental education’ pays homage to the author of L’Éducation sentimentale (1869), not least in Norbert de Varenne’s obliquely autobiographical discourse punctuated by the emotional reference to the exceptions to the general mediocrity of human beings: ‘I’ve known a few such men; they’re dead’ (p. 104). Nor does it seem by chance that Duroy’s return to his paternal origins takes him to Flaubert’s hamlet of Croisset (p. 167), near Rouen. The panoptic view of the city (pp. 162–3) transcribes, virtually word for word, the view from Flaubert’s window which Maupassant evoked in the 1884 preface to an edition of the former’s letters to George Sand (1804–76). So too, Duroy’s erotic cab-rides (pp. 66–7, 200, 211), his euphoria at having seduced a married woman (p. 67), the quasi-conjugal bliss enacted in a rented room with Mme de Marelle (p. 73), and his clandestine meeting with Mme Walter in a church (p. 203) all gesture towards the corresponding episodes between Emma and Leon in Madame Bovary (1857). Even in Madeleine’s idealized, if hastily revised, vision of rural life on her visit to Rouen (p. 166), we can detect an ironically inverted echo of Emma Bovary’s frustrations and day-dreams. The initial view of the city itself is directly comparable to the one which prefaces Emma’s own ‘honeymoon’ there in Madame Bovary. Suzanne Walter imagines ‘nocturnal abductions’ (p. 271) in precisely the same romanticized terms (p. 273) which Emma had drawn from her reading. And in the opening paragraphs of Bel-Ami, Maupassant seems to ‘take his hat off’ to the Flaubert who had said to him: ‘When you pass by a shopkeeper sitting on his doorstep, or a concierge smoking his pipe, next to a rank of carriages, show me everything about that shopkeeper or concierge (how they look, how they’re sitting, and in those outward physical details—thanks to the acuteness of your images–their inner character), and in such a way that I would never confuse them with any other shopkeeper or concierge.’ How strange, to say the least, that, as we accompany Duroy into the novel: ‘Under arched carriage entrances, shirt-sleeved concierges sat astride straw-bottomed chairs, smoking pipes, while exhausted passers-by plodded along, bare-headed, carrying their hats’ (p. 4).

  For it is ultimately Flaubert’s conception of realism that marks Maupassant’s own, with its emphasis on the recognizably realistic, the typical which is not exactly identifiable, an apprehension of reality so unique to the artist that it remains the only guarantee of originality, the necessity of the writer being ‘present everywhere, but visible nowhere’, the rejection of a realism in any sense photographic, the key function of tiny details within an overall design, an autonomous artistic structure which is based on reality but which transcends it in its general implications. From Flaubert, Maupassant took his insistence on verbal clarity and precision (le mot juste), as well as the more overarching advice: ‘In everything, there’s something waiting to be discovered, simply because we tend to look at the world only through the eyes of those who have preceded us.’ Maupassant’s achievement in Bel-Ami is a result of seldom losing sight of these criteria.

  The reworking of reality, without forfeiting the novel’s realistic effect, takes a number of different forms. Bel-Ami’s historical coordinates, its references to contemporary figures, its setting in a recognizable Paris, all refer us to a world which undoubtedly (for the present tense of our reading) exists. But it is clearly not a history book, a biography, or a sociological treatise. For what Maupassant does, in the same way as he exploits his historical context, is disguise his reworkings. And he clearly takes a delight in doing so, not unlike Mme de Marelle whose origins can be detected through the incomplete disguises which allow her to move transgressively across boundaries and taboos (pp. 76–7). There is, indeed, almost a wilful deflection of the reader’s recuperative temptations. Thus, for example, the transposition to Tunisia of the Moroccan campaign does not preclude separate references to the colonization of Tunisia itself. To identify Jacques Lenoble’s gallery as that of Georges Petit is then to be put off the scent by finding Petit himself on the next page (pp. 242–3). In the case of the press, Maupassant places the fictional La Plume, Le Salut, La Planète, and La Vie française itself alongside an inventory of real newspapers like Le Figaro, the Gil Bias, Le Gaulois, L’Événement, Le Rappel, Le Siècle, La Lanterne, Le Petit Parisien (pp. 45–6) and Le Voltaire (p. 133), not least as a way of proving that they should not be confused. The manuscript of the novel confirms this: for the invented La Planète, for whom Forestier occasionally writes literary columns (p. 7), was originally the Gil Bias. And the same is true of Maupassant’s fictional reporters: before deciding on the names of Garin and Montel (p. 10), he had inserted here two of the most famous journalists of the period, Albert Wolff (1833–91) and Aurelien Scholl (1833–1902), and, what is more, subsequently introduced the latter again before settling on ‘Fervacques’ (p. 50). Nor should names themselves be taken too seriously: Laroche-Mathieu vaguely points to the real-life politician Laroche-Joubert (1820–83); Rival may be based on the Baron de Vaux, equally known as an author of a work on fencing, but his onomastic potential matches that of the Vicomtesse de Percemur (p. 102) Crèvecœur, and Carvin (p. 190), to cite only the most obvious. Maupassant’s love of word-play (starting with his own name: ‘je suis le mauvais passant’) is legendary, and should probably inflect conclusions about the pre-emptive wisdom of his avoiding the prosecution which might have resulted in ‘naming names’. In any case, the mixture of real and imagined frigates sitting at anchor off Cannes (p. 136) offers a less litigious example of Maupassant’s realist technique. For his is essentially an art of allusion: it both intercalates the real and the imaginary in a seamless narrative texture and, as Christopher Lloyd has written, it allows the novelist ‘a certain distance from reality, a degree of fictional autonomy’.3

  It remains to be asked, of course, how much of his own lived experience Maupassant has put into Bel-Ami, thereby reinforcing its credibility. Given his notorious personal promiscuity, such enquiries have taken many a prurient turn. They include: the copies of the novel he sent to female admirers signed by ‘Bel-Ami’ (not to mention the fact that he gave his yachts the same name!); a seductive moustache at least as effective as Duroy’s; mistresses who have apparently contributed traits and personal habits to the protagonist’s conquests; a psychological profile complete with sexual proclivities. Less sensationally, an entire network of parallels has been adduced to elaborate on the title of Armand Lanoux’s famous biography, Maupassant le Bel-Ami (1967): the people he knew; the papers he worked for; the money he earned; the cafés he frequented; the addresses he lived at; the furnishings he preferred. Yet, as Maupassant himself wrote, if authors always put themselves into their books, ‘the skill consists in not allowing ourselves to be recognized by the reader under the various masks we adopt’. It is thus too simple, or at least misleading, to equate Duroy and his creator. For not only is the self-portrait disguised, but it is also variegated across different characters. On the one hand, Duroy displays characteristics entirely foreign to Maupassant’s nature; on the other, a figure like Norbert de Varenne (who has also been identified with the poet Théodore de Banville (1823–91), amongst others) has a vision of experience which is patently Maupassant’s own. But, there again, both the Forestiers share something with him, and even M. Walter collects some of his favourite painters. If it remains more interesting to discern how these ‘various masks�
� reflect a shifting relationship with his text, it is relatively easy to confirm that one of the reasons why Bel-Ami persuades us to suspend our disbelief is its reworking of some of the fabric of Maupassant’s life. But it is also true that what authenticates his art of illusion, whether in historical or autobiographical perspectives, is the novel’s exceptional purchase on the materiality of the real.

  Money, sex, and power

  As a formula for readability, the triangulation of money, sex, and power is virtually irresistible. Maupassant is neither the first, nor the last, creative artist to explore, in these intertwined human appetites and desires, the dynamics of a modern society shorn of traditional values, metaphysical certainties, and constraining boundaries. Seldom in the French nineteenth-century novel, however, has a text so brutally and so precisely integrated the driving forces of such a newly unstable world. In exemplary fashion, Bel-Ami starts with the small change from a five-franc piece; its last word, with Duroy about to leap to political power, is ‘bed’.

  As far as money is concerned, the text’s plausibility is less reliant on the standard mechanisms used by Maupassant to explain Duroy’s transformation into a millionaire (a double dowry, a legacy, and a speculative operation) than on the concentration, in utterly prosaic detail, on the cost of things, the means of purchasing them, and the psychological vicissitudes of poverty and wealth. For this is a book saturated with monetary denominations, mental calculations, and even the feel and the colour of coins, with money itself less a theoretical system of economic exchange than the very stuff of survival, personal relationships, social standing, and identity. We are told the price of everything: a sausage, a glass of beer, a meal, a dinner, a cab, a newspaper, a dress-shirt, a cup-and-ball set, a room, a mansion, a painting. We learn the salaries of riding-instructors, clerks, and journalists; the rates of pay for a 200-line article; the amounts charged by paper-suppliers, different categories of prostitute and restaurant; the tips for waiters and coachmen, and for the concierge’s son to run a message. One consequence of such a proliferation of price-tags is that, even when they are absent, they remain implicit: ‘Thirty francs a day came to nine hundred by the end of the month. And that sum didn’t allow for all those expenses of clothing, shoes, linen, laundry, and the like’ (p. 78). Bel-Ami is a text full of objects shopped for, procured, bought on credit, or stolen, from the most basic necessities to those obtained by virtue of a whim, vanity, or pure greed: a cutlet, a bar of soap, a curling iron, a sponge, a bottle of perfume, two vases, silverware, a chafing-dish, finery, the entrance ticket to a café-concert, the ‘gold buttons and scarlet facings’ of servants’ uniforms (p. 91), ‘pistols from Gastine Renette’ (p. 123), a villa, a splendid horse and carriage. And it is a text the very narrative of which is structured by budgetary pauses, in Duroy’s rebalancing of income and expenditure with the rigour of an accountant, the feverish rescheduling of his debts, the fine-tuning of marriage-contracts, and the disbursement of an inheritance.