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

  He had had some successes with women during his time in the army, mostly of the easy kind available to soldiers, but there had been a few in better circles. He had seduced a tax-collector’s daughter who had wanted to give up everything and follow him, and a solicitor’s wife who, when he abandoned her, had in her despair tried to drown herself.

  His fellow-soldiers said of him: ‘He’s a crafty, wily devil, he’s got his wits about him and knows how to keep his nose clean.’ And indeed he had promised himself to be crafty and wily and quick-witted.

  His native Norman wit, whetted by daily contact with garrison life and broadened by the instances he saw in Africa of looting, illegal perks, and questionable deals, had been given a new edge by the notions of honour current in the army, by military bravado and patriotic sentiments, by tales of selfless heroism told in the sergeants’ mess and by all the cheap glory of the profession; so that it had become like a box with multiple false bottoms, in which you could find a bit of everything.

  But the passion to succeed was what predominated.

  Without realizing it, he had begun day-dreaming again, as he did every night. He imagined a magnificent love-affair which would bring him, in one single move, to the fulfilment of his hopes. He would marry some banker or nobleman’s daughter; they would meet in the street, and she would fall in love with him at first sight.

  He was aroused from his dream by the strident whistle of an engine that, emerging on its own from the tunnel, like a big rabbit coming out of its burrow, was racing along the tracks at full steam, making for the depot, where it would be able to take its rest.

  Then, once more under the spell of the vague, cheerful optimism that as a rule never left him, he blew a kiss, for luck, into the night, a kiss of love for the woman he was awaiting, a kiss of desire for the riches he coveted. Then, closing the window, he began to undress, muttering: ‘Oh well, I’ll find it easier in the morning. My mind’s not clear tonight. And then, I may have had a bit too much to drink. You can’t work properly in that state.’

  He got into bed, blew out the light, and went to sleep almost immediately.

  He awoke early, as you do when you are full of hope or anxiety, and, jumping out of bed, went to open his window, to drink in what he called a good cup of fresh air.

  The houses of the Rue de Rome opposite, beyond the deep ditch made by the railway cutting, were shining in the rays of the rising sun, as if painted with a dazzling bright light. Over to the right, in the distance, you could make out the slopes of Argenteuil, the Sannois hills, and the mills of Orgemont,* through a bluish, thin mist that floated like a little transparent veil that someone had flung over the horizon.

  Gazing for a few minutes at the distant countryside, Duroy murmured: ‘It would be damn nice, out there, on a day like this.’ Then he thought that he must get to work, and straight away, and also tip the concierge’s son ten sous to go and tell them at the office that he was ill.

  He sat down at his table, dipped his pen in the inkwell, leant his forehead on his hand and tried to think of some ideas. It was no use. Nothing came.

  However, he did not feel discouraged. He thought: ‘Oh well, I’m not used to this. It’s a job you have to learn, like any other. I must have some help at the beginning. I’ll go and find Forestier, who’ll get my article into shape for me in no time.’

  He dressed. Once in the street, he felt it was still too early to turn up at his friend’s, who probably slept late. So he strolled about slowly under the trees of the outer boulevard. It was not yet nine o’clock when he reached the Pare Monceau,* which was still cool and damp from being watered. He sat down on a bench, and again began to day-dream. A young man was walking back and forth in front of him, a very elegant young man, no doubt waiting for a woman.

  She appeared, her face veiled, her step rapid, took his arm after quickly shaking his hand, and they walked off.

  Duroy’s heart was filled with a fierce longing for love, for affairs that were elegant, perfumed, delicate. He stood up and started walking again, thinking about Forestier. What a lucky fellow he was!

  He arrived at his door at the very moment his friend was coming out.

  ‘You here! At this time of day! What do you want?’

  Duroy, embarrassed at meeting him like this, just as he was leaving, stammered:

  ‘It’s um… it’s… I can’t manage to write my article, you know, the article that M. Walter asked me to do on Algeria. It’s not very surprising, considering that I’ve never ever done any writing. It needs practice, like everything else. I’ll pick it up fast, I’m sure, but, just at the beginning, I don’t know how to set about it. I’ve lots of ideas, lots, but I can’t put them into words.’

  He stopped, hesitating a little. Forestier was smiling mischievously: ‘I know just what you mean.’

  Duroy continued: ‘Yes, it must happen to everyone at the start. So, well, I’ve come… I’ve come to ask you to give me a hand… You’d get my article into shape for me in a couple of minutes, you’d show me the right approach. You could give me some pointers about style; without your help I’ll never be able to pull it off.’

  The other man was still smiling cheerfully. Tapping his former comrade on the arm, he said to him: ‘Go and find my wife, she’ll solve your problem for you as well as I could. I’ve trained her to do this work. I myself haven’t the time this morning, otherwise I’d have been very glad to do it.’

  Suddenly daunted, Duroy hesitated, not daring: ‘But, surely I can’t call and see her as early as this?…’

  ‘Yes, you certainly may. She’s up. You’ll find her in my study, putting some notes in order for me.’

  Duroy refused to go in. ‘No, I can’t possibly…’

  Forestier took him by the shoulders, turned him around, and pushed him towards the stairs: ‘Oh go on up, you great idiot, since I’m telling you to. Surely you’re not going to force me to climb those three flights again, to take you in to her and explain what it is you want!’

  So then Duroy agreed. ‘Thanks, I’ll go. I’ll tell her that you forced me, literally forced me, to come and find her.’

  ‘Yes. Calm down, she won’t eat you. But don’t you forget, this afternoon, at three.’

  ‘Oh! Don’t worry!’

  And Forestier hurried away, while Duroy began climbing slowly up the stairs, step by step, wondering what he was going to say and uneasy about the welcome he might receive.

  The servant came to open the door. He was wearing a blue apron and had a broom in his hands.

  ‘Monsieur is out,’ he said, without waiting for the question.

  Duroy held his ground: ‘Ask Mme Forestier if she can see me, and tell her that I come at the suggestion of her husband, whom I met in the street.’

  Then he waited. The man returned, opened a door on the right, and announced: ‘Madame will see you, Monsieur.’

  She was sitting on an office chair, in a small room whose walls were entirely covered by books neatly arranged on black wooden shelves. The bindings of different shades, red, yellow, green, purple, and blue, added colour and brightness to this monotonous alignment of volumes.

  She turned round, still smiling; she was enveloped in a white negligé edged with lace; and she held out her hand, revealing her bare arm through the wide opening of the sleeve.

  ‘So soon?’ she said. Then she went on: ‘That’s not a reproach, it’s a simple question.’

  He stammered: ‘Oh, Madame, I didn’t want to come up, but your husband, whom I met downstairs, made me. I feel so embarrassed that I daren’t say what brings me here.’

  She indicated a chair: ‘Sit down and tell me.’

  She was nimbly twirling a goose-feather quill between two fingers, and in front of her lay a large sheet of paper, half covered in writing which the young man’s arrival had interrupted.

  She seemed to feel at home seated at this writing-desk, as much at ease as if she were in her own drawing-room, busy with her normal duties. A faint fragrance arose fr
om the negligé, the fresh scent of someone who has just washed. And Duroy tried to discern, fancied he could picture, the young, pale body, plump and warm, that was gently enveloped in the soft fabric.

  As he sat silent, she repeated: ‘Well, tell me, what’s this all about?’

  He murmured hesitantly: ‘You see… No, really, I don’t dare… It’s just that I was working very late last night… and very early this morning… to do that article on Algeria that M. Walter asked me for… and I couldn’t write anything good… I tore up all my efforts… I’m not used to this kind of work, so I came to ask Forestier to help me… just this once…’

  Gratified and flattered, she interrupted him with a burst of happy laughter: ‘And he told you to come and find me…? How very nice…’

  ‘Yes, Madame. He told me that you’d help me out of my difficulties better than he could… but I didn’t dare, I didn’t want to. Do you know what I mean?’

  She stood up. ‘It’ll be wonderful to work together like that. I love your idea. Here, sit down in my chair, because they know my writing at the paper. And we’re going to do your article for you, one that’s a real hit, you’ll see.’

  He sat down, picked up a pen, spread a sheet of paper in front of him, and waited.

  Mme Forestier, still standing, watched him make these preparations; then she took a cigarette from the mantelpiece and lit it: ‘I can’t work without smoking,’ she said.

  ‘Well, let’s see; what do you want to say?’

  He looked up at her in astonishment. ‘But I don’t know myself; that’s why I came to see you.’

  She continued: ‘Yes, I’ll fix it up for you. I’ll make the sauce, but first I need the dish.’

  He was nonplussed; finally he said, hesitating: ‘I’d like to describe my travels, right from the beginning…’

  At that she took a seat opposite him, on the other side of the large table, and, looking him in the face:

  ‘All right, talk to me about it first, just to me, you understand, nice and slowly, not leaving anything out, and I’ll decide what to use.’

  But as he did not know where to start, she began questioning him like a priest in the confessional, asking precise questions which reminded him of details he had forgotten, important people he had encountered, faces he had merely glimpsed in passing.

  When she had made him talk like that for a little while, she suddenly interrupted him: ‘Now we’re going to begin. First, we’ll pretend you’re sending your impressions to a friend, which will allow you to put in a whole lot of nonsense, and make all kinds of remarks, and be natural and funny, if we can manage it. Now begin:

  ‘My dear Henri, you want to know what Algeria’s like, well you’re about to find out. Having nothing to do, here in the little hut of dried mud that serves as my home, I’m going to send you a kind of journal of my life, day by day, hour by hour. It will be a bit coarse at times. Well too bad, no one’s forcing you to show it to your lady friends…’

  She interrupted herself to relight her cigarette, which had gone out; and, immediately, the high-pitched scratch of the goose quill on the paper stopped.

  ‘Let’s go on,’ she said.

  ‘Algeria is a large French possession on the frontier of those vast unknown regions we call the desert, the Sahara, central Africa, and so on. Algiers is the gateway, the charming white gateway to this strange continent.

  ‘But first you have to get there, which is not a piece of cake for every one. As you know, I’m a fine horseman–I train the colonel’s horses–but you can be a good rider and a bad sailor. That’s the case with me.

  ‘Do you remember Major Simbretas, whom we used to call Doctor Ipecac?* When we felt we were ready for twenty-four hours in the blessed land of the infirmary, we would go to see him.

  ‘He’d be sitting on his chair, his fat thighs in their red trousers thrust well apart, his hands on his knees, his arms akimbo and his elbows sticking out, rolling his big goggle-eyes and chewing on his white moustache.

  ‘You’ll remember his prescription: “This soldier is suffering from an upset stomach. Give him one of my number threes as an emetic, then twelve hours of rest; he will recover.”

  ‘This was a sovereign remedy, sovereign and infallible. So you swallowed it, since it was unavoidable. Then, when you had endured Doctor Ipecac’s formula, you enjoyed twelve hours of well-deserved rest.

  ‘Well, old chap, to reach Africa, you must endure, for forty hours, another kind of infallible emetic, the Transatlantic Shipping Company’s formula…’ She was rubbing her hands in delight at her idea.

  She stood up, lit another cigarette, and began to walk about, still dictating, and blowing out thin trickles of smoke which at first rose straight up from a tiny round hole made by her pursed lips, then grew larger, evaporating, and leaving grey threads here and there in the air, a kind of transparent mist, a gossamer vapour. Sometimes, with a movement of her open hand, she would erase the more persistent of these faint traces; and sometimes she would cut across them with a slicing movement of her forefinger and then watch, with grave attention, as the two sections of barely perceptible vapour slowly disappeared.

  And Duroy, raising his eyes, followed every gesture of hers, every attitude, every movement made by her body and her face, as she played this vague kind of game which never broke her concentration.

  Now she was imagining incidents on the journey, portraying travel companions she herself had invented, and sketching in a love-affair with the wife of an infantry captain who was on her way to rejoin her husband.

  Then, sitting down, she questioned Duroy on the topography of Algeria, of which she knew nothing. In ten minutes she knew as much about it as he did, and she wrote a brief section on political and colonial geography to bring the reader up to date, and prepare him to understand fully the serious questions that would be raised in future articles.

  Next she continued with an expedition into the province of Oran, an entirely imaginary expedition which was mainly concerned with women, Moorish women, Jewish women, Spanish women.

  ‘That’s the only thing people are interested in,’ she said.

  She concluded with a visit to Saïda,* at the foot of the high tableland, and with a charming little affair between the NCO Georges Duroy and a Spanish girl employed at the esparto factory at Aïn-el-Hadjar.* She described nocturnal trysts on the bare stony mountain, with jackals, hyenas, and Arab dogs whining, barking, and howling among the rocks.

  Then she announced cheerfully: ‘To be continued tomorrow!’ Next, rising to her feet: ‘That, my dear M. Duroy, is how to write an article. Sign, please.’

  He hesitated.

  ‘Come on, sign!’

  He began to laugh, and wrote at the foot of the page: ‘Georges Duroy.’

  She was still smoking as she walked about, and he was still gazing at her, finding nothing to say to thank her, happy to be near her, filled with gratitude and with the sensual pleasure of this budding intimacy. It seemed to him that everything that surrounded her was part of her, everything, even the walls covered with books. The chairs, the furniture, the air in which the smell of tobacco floated, had some special attribute, something good, sweet, and charming, that came from her.

  She asked abruptly: ‘What do you think of my friend Mme de Marelle?’

  He was taken aback: ‘Well… I find her… I find her extremely attractive.’

  ‘Isn’t she?’

  ‘Yes, yes indeed.’

  He wanted to add: ‘But not as much as you.’ He did not dare.

  She went on: ‘And if you knew how funny she is, how original, how intelligent! She’s a bohemian, in fact, a real bohemian. That’s why her husband isn’t all that fond of her. He only sees her faults and doesn’t appreciate her qualities.’

  Duroy was dumbfounded to learn that Mme de Marelle was married. Yet it was perfectly natural.

  He asked: ‘Goodness… so she’s married? And what does her husband do?’

  Mme Forestier gave a little shru
g and raised her eyebrows very slightly, in a single movement that was full of unfathomable meaning.

  ‘Oh, he’s an inspector in the Northern Railway. He spends a week per month in Paris. What his wife calls “compulsory service”, or “the week of forced labour”, or even “Holy Week”. When you know her better, you’ll realize how clever, how nice she is. So go and see her one of these days.’

  Duroy was no longer thinking about leaving; he felt as if he would be staying for ever, as if he were in his own home.

  But the door opened noiselessly, and a tall gentleman walked in, unannounced. On seeing another man, he halted. For an instant Mme Forestier looked embarrassed, then she said in her normal voice, although a trace of pink had spread from her shoulders to her face:

  ‘Do come in, my dear man. Let me introduce a good friend of Charles, M. Georges Duroy, a future journalist.’ Then, in a different tone, she announced: ‘The Comte de Vaudrec, the best and closest of our friends.’

  Eyeing one another, the two men bowed, and Duroy immediately made his farewells.

  He was not urged to stay. He stammered his thanks, shook the hand the young woman held out him, bowed again to the new arrival, whose face still expressed the cold formality of those who move in the best circles, and departed, feeling thoroughly flustered, as though he had just committed a blunder.

  Back in the street again, he felt depressed, ill-at-ease, gripped by an obscure awareness of some hidden sorrow. He walked along, wondering why this sudden melancholy had come over him; he could think of no reason, but the severe countenance of the Comte de Vaudrec, already rather elderly, with grey hair, and the calm, insolent air of a very wealthy, self-confident man, kept haunting him.

  He realized that the arrival of this stranger, interrupting a delightful tête-à-tête to which his heart was already growing accustomed, had prompted in him this feeling of cold and despair that an overheard word, a glimpse of someone’s wretchedness, the most trivial things are sometimes sufficient to inspire in us.

  And he felt also that this man, for some unknown reason, had been displeased to find him there.