Bel-Ami (Oxford World's Classics)

by Guy de Maupassant

  On Maupassant’s part, there is less judgement than a sense of wonderment at such a world. Financial transactions are arbitrary and absurd. His Paris is the antithesis of the primeval desert ‘where every drop of water is worth its weight in gold’ and ‘where commercial honesty is more highly developed than in civilized societies’ (p. 23). The price of the same loan-bond moves by the hour; the same prostitute offers the same services for 20 or 30 francs to a local and 100 to a foreigner (p. 13); you can fill your stomach for ‘a couple of francs’ borrowed from a doorman (p. 79) or 130 at the Cafe Riche (p. 66) leaving as a gratuity the five francs on which Duroy had depended to eat and drink for a day. He spends on a watch and bracelet (p. 239) more than twice his entire annual 1,500 franc salary at the beginning of the novel. He haggles for those in much the way as he beats down the price of Rachel’s body to less than that of a newspaper article or a round of beers (p. 16) and eventually to 50 per cent of the discounted rate at the very moment he could at last afford to pay more (p. 54). But it is precisely M. Walter’s analogous avarice (p. 50) which secures discounts from his creditors and allows him to maintain a double-fronted house by letting half of it (p. 91). Notwithstanding the fact that Duroy’s salary doubles, and then trebles again, he tells Suzanne that ‘we can’t even keep our own carriage’ on ‘an income of forty thousand’ (p. 246); and he is still left feeling that 70,000 francs from an effortless scam is a humiliating trifle compared to the 100,000 which pays off Vaudrec’s legitimate heir; and the half-a-million thereby acquired is an insult compared to M. Walter’s ‘real luxury’ (p. 247). Receiving France’s highest decoration thanks to Laroche-Mathieu, Duroy says of the cross of the Legion of Honour: ‘I would rather have had ten million. This doesn’t cost him much’ (P. 254).

  In the great scheme of things, as Norbert de Varenne insists, money is worthless: ‘To do what with it? To buy women? What kind of happiness is that? To overeat, grow obese, and suffer the torments of gout all night long?’ (p. 105). But, in the here-and-now, it seems supremely important: it shapes the limbs of impoverished peasants (p. 164); it determines the suffering of the ‘desperately poor’ woman vainly seeking compensatory salvation in the church (p. 202); it provides M. Walter with the opportunity to cash in on the ‘financial straits’ of the Prince de Carls bourg by buying his house and garden at a knock-down price (p. 241), or to exploit the talents of ‘starving’ painters (p. 101). These contrasting destinies generate neither sympathy nor stricture. They are as indifferently noted as the levelling deviousness of petty swindles and grand larceny. Adjectives like ‘pitiful’, ‘wretched’, and ‘clever’ are always located within the point of view of fictional characters rather than offered as authorial comment. Money is simply the oil of envy, revenge, even happiness. There is little sign of generosity or altruism: a gift of 200 francs from Duroy is merely to ‘placate’ his covetous parents (p. 169); the ‘faint clink of money dropping into bags’ (p. 192), the 3,000 franc proceeds of a charity occasion, is drowned by laughter and people gorging themselves, leaving ‘after all the expenses were paid, two hundred and twenty francs for the orphans of the sixth arrondissement’ (p. 195). To obtain money, human beings are seen lying, ‘cheating at cards’ (p. 108), gambling away the savings of ‘ordinary people’ (p. 222) and the investments of the state. And consumerism for its own sake becomes a genuine pleasure: in the sensual delectation of ‘oysters like tiny ears encased in shells, that melted between palate and tongue like salty bonbons’ (p. 63); a celebratory ‘tasty lunch’ is followed by Duroy going ‘into several shops to buy small things, purely for the pleasure of having them delivered to his place’ (p. 47).

  The relation between money and sexual pleasure is most obviously underlined by the theme of prostitution which informs Bel-Ami from beginning to end. Duroy’s initial ‘urge to meet a woman’ (p. 4) can only be paid for from the same purse which must satisfy his other physical needs. The theme itself, however, is extended well beyond his repeated encounters with women selling themselves on the streets. The irony of his contemptuous rejection of accosting whores who fail to note his frock-coat (‘Couldn’t those tarts tell the difference between men?’ (p. 98)) is underlined by commodity exchanges in more bourgeois settings. When Duroy is overcome by lust, a bunch of flowers for Madeleine (pp. 170–3) or a bag of sweets for Mme de Marelle (p. 226) have their desired effect. And the association between money and sex is established at every level. Adultery is ‘complicated by blackmail’ (p. 21). Duroy’s father (who ‘had an eye for the ladies, in the old days’) finds his son’s expensively dressed new wife ‘very much to his taste’ (p. 165). But the luxury of the Café Riche and high society’s drive back down the Champs Élysées from the Bois de Boulogne also lead directly to bed. Fortunes are made from wives and mistresses (p. 108). Duroy’s concupiscent appraisal of Suzanne’s ‘slender waist, shapely hips and breasts’ (p. 184) prefaces a marriage transformed into a business deal with her father, trumping those in which the latter would have ‘sold’ her in exchange for some ‘rusty title’ in the gift of the Marquis de Cazolles (p. 246) as her sister is handed over to the Comte de Latour-Yvelin. And, in a blatant inversion of roles, Duroy’s affair with Mme de Marelle (in a room rented for him) is reliant on her paying the bills and her dropping coins into the lining of his clothes, which is entirely consistent with both his acclaiming the ‘showy luxury’ ‘a well-known courtesan … had earned in bed’ (p. 109) (aware of what they have in common) and his affinities with the prostitutes by profession, ‘rubbing shoulders with them … feeling them around him’ (p. 4).

  As Duroy fails to ‘feel for them any of the family man’s innate contempt’ (p. 4), Bel-Ami is certainly not a book designed to reassure those who subscribe to ‘traditional family values’. Its parks (p. 33) and churches (p. 201) are the waiting-rooms for sex, peopled exclusively by those engaged in clandestine affairs. Monogamy is the exception rather than the rule. Mme Walter is astonishing precisely because, as Duroy is told, ‘she’s remained faithful’ to her husband (p. 184). Mme de Marelle has an ‘arrangement’ with hers, and has clearly taken advantage of it prior to Duroy (‘Of course she’d had lovers before’, p. 76). Forestier’s deathbed confession that he had been ‘sinfully acquiescent’ (p. 138) intimates the extent to which he too has allowed his wife her sexual freedom in return for Vaudrec’s money. Madeleine, it almost goes without saying, is the daughter of a ‘schoolmistress who’d been seduced’ (p. 167). For this is a social world registered as sexual traffic: watching from the Avenue du Bois de Boulogne, Duroy enumerates the ‘secret stories’ of galloping riders and horsewomen: ‘the names, titles, and qualities of the lovers they had had or were said to have had’ (p. 108). In the brothel-like décor of the Café Riche, such generalizations include the admission that all women would cheat on their husbands if they could get away with it. Nor is this licence exclusively heterosexual: there are those ‘of the lesbian persuasion’ (p. 108); and Mme de Marelle loves dressing up ‘as a schoolboy’, allowing her the carnivalesque liberty of ‘going to all these places single men go to, and women don’t’ (p. 76).

  It has to be said, nevertheless, that this is a notably male-orientated (not to say misogynist) novel. In spite of an oft-avowed insistence on hiding an authorial point of view, Bel-Ami is punctuated by knowing aphorisms on the ways of women: their smiles promising imminent ‘surrender’ (p. 68); a look that ‘reveals all the pain in a woman’s heart’ (p. 155); the ‘manner’ of ‘a slighted woman’ (p. 185); ‘one of those attacks of hysteria that fling women to the ground’ (p. 205). And the turns of phrase, whether clichéd or heartfelt, sometimes resemble those of a conversation between men: ‘obsessed with her image, as occasionally happens when you have spent a delightful interlude with someone’ (p. 60); ‘one of those bright feminine glances that go straight to the heart’ (p. 25); the ‘satisfied sensuality, that comes from being loved by women’ (p. 187); ‘one of those rapid, grateful glances that make us their slaves’ (p. 90); the ‘fury smouldering in
the heart of every male when faced with the capriciousness of female desire’ (p. 181). And Madeleine Forestier seems to be the only exception in a cast of female characters who are largely swooning and empty-headed creatures. With her intelligence, political insight, and the financial acumen of a ‘businessman’ (p. 158), Madeleine is interesting precisely because she sees through Duroy and resists his seductiveness. But it is clear that her strength is likened by Maupassant to a properly masculine one. Even Rachel, who has the temerity to refuse Duroy on one occasion (p. 88) and challenge his adopted airs and graces (p. 85) reveals herself (p. 55) to be no more than a ‘tart with a golden heart’.

  The whimsical Mme de Marelle prattles and, at least when her husband is out of town, is always available (lovers’ tiffs apart). Mme Walter is reduced to putty by Duroy’s sweet-nothings and to an infantile wreck by his manipulative cruelty. The doll-like Suzanne returns from the chaste honeymoon of her abduction with her naivety untouched: ‘I was so enjoying being your wife’ (p. 280). For Duroy himself, accordingly, virtually nothing seems to stand in the way of a rampant promiscuity.

  Compared to the uncensored renderings of our times, Maupassant’s description of all this sexual activity is notably discreet. It usually stops at bedroom thresholds, leaving to the reader’s imagination the intimacies sparked by flirtation and inviting caresses: Madeleine ‘followed him into their room, tickling his neck between his collar and his hair with her fingertip, to make him go faster’ (p. 173). Nothing more needs to be said. After Duroy is seen ‘passionately kissing’ Mme de Marelle’s hair, there is a gap: ‘an hour and half later, he took her to the cab-stand’ (p. 71). But that does not preclude the suggestion of a brutal physicality, whether in Mme de Marelle’s surrender in the cab (p. 67), the ‘violent, clumsy coupling’ with Madeleine in a train-compartment (p. 161) or Duroy’s stripping Mme Walter of her underwear ‘with the light touch of a lady’s maid’ before carrying her, naked but for her boots, to his bed (p. 212). In preparation, Duroy’s predatory hands rove and fondle (pp. 67, 158), grab and maul (p. 197). His eyes feast on women’s bodies, picturing ‘plump and warm’ flesh (p. 35), making out through soft gowns, ‘froths of lace’ or negligés, a ‘supple figure’ (p. 19) and ‘generously rounded breasts’ (p. 187). His nose picks up ‘a faint fragrance’ and ‘the scent of someone who has just washed’ (p. 35). And, in spite of the text’s many silences, euphemisms, circumlocutions, and displacements (‘the cab … was rocking like a ship’, p. 200; or the delicacies at the Café Riche as erotically consumed as in Fielding’s Tom Jones), there are textual moments rich in sexual overtones, such as the ‘sensual aroma’ given off by ‘intertwined couples’, those ‘two creatures in every carriage, lying back silently on cushions and clasping one another tightly, lost in the delusion of their desire, trembling in anticipation of the approaching embrace’ (p. 178). Yet it is exactly here that Maupassant, in refusing to be taken in by such delusions, refers to an ‘ever-present animal desire’, thereby alerting the reader to the unpalatable fact that, beneath every expression of tenderness in the novel, there are sexual drives indistinguishable from carnal appetites.

  This reduction of ‘passion’ to bestiality serves as an ugly reminder of Maupassant’s scatalogical and scabrous definitions: sexual intercourse as God’s bad joke; a kiss as ‘an exchange of spittle’; physical love as a ‘disgusting’ and ‘ridiculous’ mating. In Bel-Ami itself, Madeleine underlines for Duroy the distinction between the male and female of the species: “I know perfectly well that for you love is simply a kind of appetite’ (p. 89). It is, therefore, at first sight almost surprising to find in the text an analysis of male sexual psychology not restricted to the frustration of Duroy’s enforced chastity, when a two-week gap in his affair with Mme de Marelle makes him feel ‘as if several years had elapsed since he had held a woman in his arms’ (p. 87). Seduction is enjoyed as a refined game rather than simply a means to an end: running across his skin, Duroy feels the excitement of an imperceptible touch or of a glance of illicit attraction; along with the tactics of the chase, there is the heightened pleasure of deferral; and when satisfaction is achieved, there is (in the case of both his wife and Mme Walter) a loss of interest. There are contradictions: between Duroy’s taste for defiling innocence, his paradoxical impatience with Mme Walter’s awkward inexperience, and his curiously wounded pride at Mme de Marelle’s allegation that he has slept with Suzanne (when, in fact, ‘he knew how to control himself’, p. 280); between icy-cold tactical acumen and losing his head. Selfish insistence is followed by pathetically sincere gratitude. Mme Walter’s possessiveness is as dreaded as Madeleine’s initiating tickle at the back of his neck. His sexual confidence is perilously close to a fear of rejection. Duroy’s idyllic morning with Madeleine is chillingly deflated by Vaudrec’s sudden entrance, leaving him miserably uncertain, ‘haunted’ by an indefinable anxiety (p. 40). He is tortured by jealousy and yet aroused by speculating about his mistresses’ past lovers, obsessed by wanting to know whether Madeleine had cheated on her late husband, and what he was like in bed. The object of his desire is continually displaced, as he juxtaposes alternatives and thinks of Mme Walter while making love to Mme de Marelle. His pleasures come in different forms: savouring the ‘delicious pleasure’ (p. no) of becoming M. de Marelle’s trusted friend while sleeping with his wife; seeing in the priest (to whom Mme Walter turns) a sexual rival to be trounced: ‘Today it’s the priest’s turn, tomorrow it’ll be mine’ (pp. 207–8).

  While a feminist or psychoanalytical interpretation of the above might detect in these scenarios less a narrative of conquest than a virility under threat and an ambiguous sexuality seeking a Don Juanesque reassurance, it is clear that Duroy’s underlying motivation is one of possession and control. For power and potency, in Bel-Ami, are inseparable. It is at the very moment that Forestier reminds Duroy of his subordinate position that he plans to have Madeleine. Mme Walter is a target because she is ‘the Director’s wife’, a further sign of her husband’s dominating status. In making his play for Suzanne, Duroy sets his sights on money, sex, and power in the same throw of the dice. He follows Forestier’s advice to make it to the top through women, with only Mme de Marelle and Rachel being used for pleasure rather than advancement. It goes without saying that, in this particular society, power is synonymous with wealth. This obviously applies to the appropriation of colonial as much as to personal resources, underlined here in Duroy’s consecration in the church of the Madeleine by ‘the newly appointed bishop of Tangiers’ (p. 287). And power in Bel-Ami is not simply ascribed, but performative in the most concrete as well as in the most minute ways: access to a box in the Folies-Bergère, the arrogance of presence in a salon, the positioning of a lolling chair, a look over a pair of glasses, a dismissive aside, the total lack of concern about those waiting for hours to make their entreaties. In the public domain it manifests itself in gawping crowds, fear, hushed tones, and grudging respect. In this novel, and whether in the portraits of individuals or in their relationships with others, power can be felt.

  What Maupassant has also done, however, is relate sex and money to political power in its own right, as well as binding together these themes in the intersections of his plotting. For a number of narrative threads come together in the final chapters of Part Two. On the one hand, Mme Walter’s infatuation with Duroy allows her to break a financial trust too by revealing to him what his own wife’s lover and M. Walter had concealed from him in respect of the Moroccan adventure. On the other, there is Duroy’s calculated revenge on Laroche-Mathieu for cutting him out of that colonial conspiracy, which takes the form of a sordid sexual humiliation that is also a political one. The result of this is to give Duroy plenty of reasons for jubilation: the profits from Mme Walter’s privileged information; liberation from Madeleine and the freedom to aim higher; the downfall of the Minister for Foreign Affairs. These aligned narrative threads rely, of course, on coincidences of chronology and the concatenation of events. But that novelist
ic, and even melodramatic, design is substantiated by our immersion in the intensely physical details of power lost and power won (pp. 262–8); the half-full glasses on the mantelpiece in the room in which Laroche-Mathieu is discovered in bed; the remains of an incongruous supper; a pair of trousers cast aside; two pairs of shoes ‘on their sides at the foot of the bed’ (p. 263); the stale stench of past lives; the risibly naked politician divested of his authority; the tone of voice of those now in charge. Madeleine’s pose, calmly smoking a cigarette to regain her composure, takes us back to another room, the neatly arranged setting of her controlling sensuality on a summer’s morning (pp. 35–9). Behind the broken door of this one, eventually lit by ‘ugly candelabra’, the reader finds enacted both a reversal of fortunes and a persistence, in the intrusion of public officials in a private space, of those desires at the very centre of Bel-Ami.