Bel-Ami (Oxford World's Classics) Read online

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

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  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  Bel-Ami

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT

  Translated by

  MARGARET MAULDON

  With an Introduction and Notes by

  ROBERT LETHBRIDGE

  OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS

  BEL-AMI

  GUY DE MAUPASSANT was born of upper-middle-class parents in Normandy in 1850. After the failure of his parents’ marriage he lived with his mother at Étretat, a newly fashionable seaside resort. Having enrolled as a law student in 1869, he was called up after the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870 and served as a quartermaster’s clerk in Rouen. Following the war he left the army and eventually secured a post as a minor civil servant. His favourite pastimes included boating, especially at Argenteuil on the Seine, which was also a favourite haunt of the Impressionists. Flaubert, whom he knew through his mother, encouraged his literary activities and shaped both his style and his pessimistic outlook on life. Through Flaubert he came to know the leading figures in Parisian cultural life, notably Emile Zola, who recruited him to his new ‘Naturalist’ school of writing. ‘Boule de Suif, his short story about a prostitute during the Franco-Prussian War, was hailed as a masterpiece by both Flaubert and the reading public. A leading figure in fashionable society and artistic circles, Maupassant wrote prolifically and was soon the bestselling author in France after Zola. During the following decade he wrote nearly 300 stories, 200 newspaper articles, six novels, and three travel books. He earned substantial sums of money, which he spent on yachts, women, travel, and houses, and on his mother, and his younger brother Herve, who eventually died insane in an asylum in Lyons in 1889. Despite his enthusiasm for outdoor pursuits, Maupassant’s own health had never been good. A nervous disorder possibly inherited from his mother was compounded by syphilis, contracted in 1876, and he consulted numerous doctors in the course of his short life. On New Year’s Day 1892 he attempted suicide with a paper-knife and was removed to the clinic of Dr Blanche at Passy, suffering from the syphilitic paresis, or general paralysis, which had driven him mad. He died on 6 July 1893 at the age of 42.

  MARGARET MAULDON has worked as a translator since 1987. For Oxford World’s Classics she has translated Zola’s L’Assommoir, Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma, Huysmans’s Against Nature (winner of the Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation, 1999), and Constant’s Adolphe.

  ROBERT LETHBRIDGE is Professor of French Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of Maupassant: ‘Pierre et Jean’ (Grant & Cutler, 1984) and co-editor of Zola and the Craft of Fiction (Leicester, 1994), Maupassant conteur et romancier (Durham, 1994), and Artistic Relations. Literature and the Visual Arts in Nineteenth-Century France (New Haven, 1994). For Oxford World’s Classics he has edited Zola’s L’Assommoir (1995) and La Débâcle (2000).

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on the Translation

  Select Bibliography

  A Chronology of Guy de Maupassant

  BEL-AMI

  PART ONE

  PART TWO

  Explanatory Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  Bel-Ami is a novel about money, sex and power. As such, one dimension of its modernity is the sense in which the reader feels that it explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own. For Maupassant depicts the relationship between politics and the press not as the mere backdrop to an individual’s fictional biography; instead, that context is integral to both personal destinies and an entire social world dominated by ferocious self-interest and prostituted values. It is almost jolting to note that Bel-Ami was published as long ago as 1885. For only the novel’s specific historical references and its evocation of a Paris of horse-drawn carriages, gas lights, and the contemporary sites immortalized by the Impressionists remind us that Bel-Ami is in fact firmly located in the early 1880s. Indeed, the text also enjoys the status of an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic. So rigorously has Maupassant adhered to the imperatives of verisimilitude that ‘rarely’, wrote Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906), the leading critic of the day, ‘has a novel so closely mirrored reality’. Such a creative tension between its analysis of modern behaviour and its identifiably late-nineteenth-century fabric is one of the reasons why Bel-Ami remains one of the finest French novels of its time as well as being recognized as Maupassant’s greatest achievement as a novelist.

  Maupassant the novelist

  Maupassant has a formidable reputation as a short-story writer, not least
for an Anglo-Saxon public always more receptive than the French to that genre. To some readers, it comes as a considerable surprise to learn that Maupassant wrote novels at all, let alone that Tolstoy hailed his first extended fiction, Une vie (1883) as the greatest French novel since Hugo’s Les Misérables (1862). Yet Maupassant himself was anxious to demonstrate the importance of his work as a novelist. Not long before his death in 1893, at the age of 42, he calculated that the sales of his novels in fact outnumbered those of his contes and nouvelles; and he could claim, with some justification, that, second only to Zola, he was the most commercially successful novelist of his generation. What is more, the decade 1880–90, which is the most productive period of Maupassant’s career, saw him gradually moving away from the short-story form, particularly after the success of Bel-Ami itself. The appearance, in rapid succession thereafter, of Mont-Oriol (1887), Pierre et Jean (1888), Fort comme la mort (1889), and Notre cœur (1890), together with the steadily decreasing number of published short stories, makes it clear that the genre in which Maupassant had originally established his reputation with ‘Boule de suif’ (1880) was being relegated to a secondary activity.

  Paradoxically, this change of direction was partly inspired by the very admiration his stories had provoked, and can be seen as a challenge to the implications of the disparity between the talent of the author and the inherent limitations of an essentially journalistic medium. Growing critical impatience to see him undertake substantial projects merely confirmed Maupassant’s awareness that the novel was the privileged contemporary form. For example, while the nine volumes of short stories Maupassant published between 1884 and 1886 were hardly noticed, the discussion generated by Zola’s L’Assommoir in 1877 provided the spectacular proof that the novel was the genre in which the serious writer could make his fame and fortune. And that same year saw the difficult beginnings of Maupassant the novelist, an ambition so deeply held that, by 1891, he could confide to a colleague that he intended never again to write a short story, reserving all his creative energies for his mature fiction. With its extended genesis (1877–83), its stitching together of earlier texts, its Norman setting during a thirty-year span beginning in 1819 and its story of private failure, that first novel, Une vie, could not be more different from Bel-Ami. Maupassant wrote the latter in the space of nine months, starting it in the summer of 1884 and finishing it by the end of February 1885, thereby testifying to a new-found fluency and confidence. This was repaid in the shape of an instant as well as durable commercial success: 13,000 copies of the book were snapped up when it appeared in volume form on 22 May 1885; within two years, it had reached its fifty-first edition (i.e. sales of over 50,000).1 In spite of many differences, Bel-Ami also bears witness, of course, to the same pessimistic vision we find in Une vie. But what really distinguishes his second novel is its altogether broader canvas and its evocation of a specific period. It accounts for Maupassant’s claim to a significant place in the French literary tradition which brings both fictional characters and aspiring authors to Paris. While it is inevitably situated in the shadow of that tradition, the originality of Bel-Ami lies in its reconfiguration of the themes and structures of the classic nineteenth-century realist novel.

  The historical context

  Bel-Ami supposedly opens in June 1880 and ends in the autumn of 1883, a time-frame so immediately adjacent to its own composition that the novel has to negotiate the risks, as well as the advantages, of topicality. He certainly did not need to do any research for it: Maupassant’s familiarity with its context, simultaneously writing as a Parisian journalist for the Gil Bias, Le Figaro, and Le Gaulois, undoubtedly partly explains the speed with which he was able to produce the 436 manuscript pages of Bel-Ami. On the other hand, a novel based on current affairs may be less interesting to posterity once it has overcome charges of being a roman-à-clef. In respect of the latter, Maupassant was forced to publish (in the shape of an open letter to the Gil Bias on 1 June 1885) a long defence against the accusations of slander levelled by contemporary critics who unsurprisingly objected to the devastating portrayal, in Bel-Ami, of the newspapers for which they themselves worked.

  The more transparent indexation of current affairs lies in his allusions to the very political situation which helps us reconstruct the novel’s fictional chronology. In particular, Bel-Ami transposes the stage of French colonial expansion between 1880 and 1885 which generated a debate to which Maupassant himself contributed. The government of Jules Ferry (1832–93) which, for economic and military reasons (as well as those of national prestige) had advocated an enhanced French presence in the Gulf of Tonkin, Madagascar, the Congo and North Africa, was bitterly contested by those who argued that such an investment of resources would divert France from its priority of reclaiming the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine lost as a result of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1. The parliamentary manifestations of that debate are echoed in Part Two, Chapter 5 of Bel-Ami (p. 213). The novel includes, indirectly in conversations and asides, a number of the political and military figures involved; and its topicality was underlined by the fact that, only a few days before its serial publication in the Gil Bias (6 April-30 May 1885), Ferry lost a vote of confidence generated by opponents to his Tunisian policy.

  It is that French colonization of Tunisia that Maupassant barely disguises in his references to Morocco throughout the text. That country, too, by virtue of its proximity to Algeria, found itself within France’s sphere of influence. In reality, however, it was not until 1905–12 that French intervention in its affairs led to the establishment of a protectorate. The substitution of names in Bel-Ami in no way constrained Maupassant from integrating into its texture both a personal experience of North Africa and the politics of its colonization. He had spent two months there during the summer of 1881, reporting for Le Gaulois on native insurrections in the Algerian province of Oran. His familiarity with its landscape and customs is reflected in Duroy’s evocations of them under the heading of his ‘Recollections of an African Cavalryman’ (p. 24), the substance of which draws on some of Maupassant’s own articles in the press between 1881 and 1884. And the fictional character, no less than his creator, displays an incisive understanding of the moral, financial, and strategic issues at stake in the French appropriation of territory on the other side of the Mediterranean.

  Ever since its conquest of Algiers in 1830, France’s incremental expansion of its rule into the interior had gradually turned its attention to Tunisia, the country to the east of Algeria. Not only was the instability of this kingdom a potential threat to French hegemony on its borders, but the competing claims of Italy (which had, by 1884, 10, 000 of its citizens there compared to a mere 900 French) lent an added urgency to relieving the hereditary Bey of Tunisia of his unserviced debts, referred to in Bel-Ami as ‘the Moroccan loan’ (p. 223). On the pretext of driving back tribal incursions across the Algerian frontier which had supposedly resulted in the deaths of five French soldiers at the end of March 1881, France invaded Tunisia and (by the May 1881 treaty of the Bardo) established a protectorate before proceeding, in subsequent military expeditions until the end of 1881, to suppress local opposition to its self-declared mandate. The government was less successful in securing formal ratification of the latter, faced as it was by a virulent press campaign focused on the speculative gains made by those ‘prescient’ enough to foresee that the French underwriting of the Tunisian national debt would result in the doubling of a bond-price which had been depressed by official denials of planned intervention. This is exactly the machination related in Bel-Ami (pp. 222–4). And, as in the novel itself, the principal target of the polemical campaign was those Jewish financiers, later also held responsible for the 1882 stock exchange crash, who were accused of manipulating the government and the press in order to make enormous profits from the Tunisian affair.

  But while the above provides Maupassant with a key moment in his narrative, his more general analysis of the political and financial role of the press is a
lso grounded in the particularities of its development in the years immediately prior to his writing of Bel-Ami. For a law of 29 July 1881 had liberated French journalism from a panoply of state controls, leading to a proliferation of papers exploiting a new-found editorial freedom and the financial opportunities afforded by the technical advances underpinning mass-circulation (notably the rolling presses which meant that, by 1882, Le Petit Journal had a daily print-run of 700,000 copies). One consequence of that freedom was the licence to engage in scurrilous gossip-mongering of the kind in Bel-Ami which leads to Duroy having to fight a duel with the journalist from La Plume (pp. 113 ff). Another was the widened scope of a newspaper’s conception of the ‘public interest’, retailing the private lives, domestic interiors, and fashionable entertainment of high-profile figures. Alongside serialized literary texts, genuine facts, and serious political comment, the modern newspaper now also offered its readers, within its broadsheet-formatted four pages, a virtually unregulated concoction of anecdotes, trivia, rumour, and advice. And its own existence as a speculative capitalist venture, backed by powerful commercial interests, meant that its involvement in monetary affairs extended well beyond reporting on movements on the stock exchange. As we are told of M. Walter’s paper in Bel-Ami, ‘La Vie fratiçaise was above all a financial paper’ (p. 94), ‘only founded to further his dealings on the stock market and all his various other enterprises’ (p. 49). For, in the climate of stupendous economic growth which characterizes the fin-de-siècle, the press becomes a lever of astonishing influence in the financial domain. Given, however, the imbrication of politics and economics, it also assumes (as it arguably does today) such a role in shaping opinion that governments and ministers are in its thrall and at its mercy. Maupassant’s invention of La Vie française (in which the politicians Firmin and Laroche-Mathieu are its ‘unacknowledged editors’, p. 99) perfectly captures the tactical inventiveness, brazen energy and bankrupt integrity of a certain kind of French newspaper in the early 1880s.