Bel-Ami
The novel is largely set in Paris during the 1880s, the period of the Third Republic following the fall of Napoleon III’s Empire. France, governed by an unscrupulous and corrupt political class, is embarking on its colonial adventure with the conquest of North Africa. Georges Duroy is a young man > tall, well-built, fair, with a reddish-tinged chestnut blondness, upturned moustaches that seemed to foam upon his lips... he looked remarkably like the worst rogue of popular romance . He is a young man from the provinces who has arrived in Paris without any precise aim, save for the allure of > places where _filles publiques_ swarmed, their dance halls, their cafés, their streets; he loved to follow them, speak to them, use familiar address, breathe in their violent perfumes . In short, he is a good-looking fellow, shallow and conceited, who will rightly come to be nicknamed Bel-Ami. Penniless, he can do little more than drift with the crowd until he happens upon a former comrade from his military service, Forestier, who has become the political editor of the newspaper _La Vie française_, owned by Monsieur Walter, an ambitious social climber who entwines business and politics, weaponising the press for his own, often illicit, ends. His friend secures him a post at the newspaper, and thus, despite himself, the young man launches into a journalistic career. Maupassant depicts with subtle irony this nascent world of the press, already by that time a compliant instrument in games of power. Duroy’s swift indoctrination enlightens the young man as to the true nature of journalism. One day, he is dispatched alongside a more seasoned colleague to interview several ambassadors. The two stop at a café; after all, there is no need to gather actual news—it suffices to construct it from secondhand information, even inventing it if necessary, and to cobble together with minimal effort an article containing precisely what the master desires. Are we speaking of nineteenth-century France or of contemporary Italy? Moving in Forestier’s social circle allows the young man to meet two women who will prove pivotal to his Parisian fortunes: Clotilde, "a little brunette, of the sort one calls pretty dark-haired women," and Madeleine, Forestier’s wife. The former shares Duroy’s tastes: she loves pleasure, is unpretentious, and takes life as it comes. She soon becomes Duroy’s ideal mistress, the only woman in whose presence he feels truly at ease and for whom he feels genuine sexual attraction, perhaps because Clotilde is somewhat of a _fille publique_. Madeleine is a modern, independent woman who relishes meddling in political and financial intrigues. As a woman, she cannot expect to play a leading role in the public sphere; she operates instead from behind the scenes through her men—her husband (a mediocre sort), her powerful lover, and Duroy himself, who allows himself to be steered, even as he chafes at her intellectual superiority. For Bel-Ami is vain and frivolous, yet the acute awareness of his own intellectual and moral inferiority breeds in him a vengeful resentment toward the very people from whom he receives aid—often crucial aid—for his career. Upon Forestier’s death, Duroy marries Madeleine; their relationship resembles a business partnership far more than a conjugal bond. Bel-Ami knows full well that Madeleine has several lovers (all men of prominence and power), but he cares little, not least because he too reaps tangible benefits from his wife’s connections: confidential intelligence, money, and honours. Yet he consistently harbours a certain bitterness and disdain toward Madeleine, who endures it patiently, perhaps out of genuine affection for the young man. Out of pure caprice and vanity, Duroy also seduces Madame Walter, the wife of the newspaper’s proprietor; she proves, however, to be a tiresome mistress, having fallen genuinely in love with him and being plagued by guilt over betraying her religious and moral values. How curious—a sincere person in a world of artifice! Life suspended between Clotilde’s eroticism and Madeleine’s intellect might have carried on placidly enough—setting aside the tedium of his liaison with Madame Walter—were it not for Duroy’s decision to marry the newspaper proprietor’s young daughter (and thus Madame Walter’s child). He must rid himself of his wife, and so he arranges for Madeleine to be caught in flagrant adultery, thereby securing a divorce. He then succeeds in marrying the young and wealthy Walter girl, once again through deceit: he persuades the girl (not yet eighteen) to elope with him, creating the necessary pretext for a shotgun wedding. Has Duroy achieved his ends: power, wealth, success? In reality, Bel-Ami’s exploits—the betrayals, the ignominious acts, the abused affections—do not stem from the pursuit of grand ambitions: the young man seeks merely the gratification of his vanity. On the day of his lavish wedding, Duroy > walked slowly down the high steps between two rows of spectators. Yet he saw no one: his thoughts drifted back to the past, and before his eyes, dazzled by the blinding sun, hovered the image of Madame de Marelle (Clotilde), rearranging before the mirror the curls upon her temples, which were always dishevelled when she rose from bed The book may be regarded as a realist novel, insofar as it portrays, with a touch both light and brutal, Parisian high society, power struggles, the role of the press, the enchantment of the boulevards, and even emergent artistic currents. It is a period of monumental upheaval, cultural as well, yet an atmosphere of vacuity pervades the narrative. The social milieu, much like certain existential themes (death, for instance), serves merely as a backdrop to Duroy’s transformation into Bel-Ami, and thence into the wealthy son-in-law of a powerful bourgeois grandee. The young man slips down a moral slope, occasionally feeling revulsion at his own deeds, only to shrug off these fleeting qualms. He is embarrassed when Clotilde suggests he meet her husband—with whom the young man will subsequently become fast friends. When Madeleine inherits a substantial sum from a lover, the young man initially refuses with righteous indignation, as accepting would lay bare his wife’s liaison with the man; yet he soon convinces himself—and seeks to convince Madeleine—that if he pockets half the estate, appearances are preserved, and all is well. It has been called the novel of money, of the press, of politics and careerism; in truth, it is the book of vacuity. And it is noteworthy, whether intentional or not, that it falls to two women (the female sex being a mere instrument for Bel-Ami) to tear through this veneer of bourgeois morality. It falls to Clotilde to fling the truth in his face: > you deceive everyone, you exploit everyone, you take money and pleasure from everyone, and you expect me to treat you like an honest man? Yet what truly enrages him is his mistress’s accusation that he bedded the proprietor’s wealthy daughter before marriage—a girl he had, in fact, respected (out of vanity? or a genuine sense of honour?). "He could endure anything, but this falsehood drove him to distraction." The question remains, then, whether Bel-Ami is entirely incapable of decent feeling, or whether he is fundamentally swept along by circumstance. It falls next to Madeleine to prove that a path through life can be forged beyond the mere chase of petty gratifications. Unlike Bel-Ami, Madeleine possesses a project of her own: to act as a mentor to men, thereby redressing the subjugation of women in nineteenth-century bourgeois society. The greatest virtue of the book lies in the writing of _Bel-Ami_. Maupassant conjures a muted, realistic atmosphere across his settings, admirably capturing the spirit of nineteenth-century Parisian society. His descriptions often seem rendered in pastel, reminiscent of Degas’s portraits. His description, for instance, of the hotel room where Madeleine is caught with her lover succeeds, in just a few strokes, in evoking that sense of the vulgar and the drab one expects from an adulterous rendezvous (within nineteenth-century bourgeois culture): > it was an ordinary hotel room with standard furnishings, where hung that hateful, stale smell peculiar to hotel bedrooms—a smell that emanated from the curtains, the brasses, the walls, the chairs; the smell of all those who had slept or lived, for a day or six months, in this public lodging, leaving behind a trace of their scent, that human scent which, blending with those that had gone before, formed over time a confused, sweet, and intolerable stench, identical in all such places . Why read it? It is a remarkably modern work in its milieu and its characters. The prose is both pleasurable and refined.