Bel Ami (Oxford World's Classic Guy de Maupassant

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.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’.3It 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 powerAs 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.On Maupassant’s part, there is less judgement than a sense of wonderment at such a world.Financial transactions are arbitrary and absurd [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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