Paris
A major reason, of course, why we suspend our disbelief is the quality of Maupassant’s evocation of contemporary Paris. And we should not forget, in this respect, his deserved reputation for describing his native Normandy and the fact that he only arrived in Paris in 1872, remaining to some extent a less Parisian novelist than many of his contemporaries. The stage on which the dramas of money, sex, and power are played out is a very particular part of the French capital, inseparable from the very subject of Bel-Ami. The ‘curtain rises’ therefore on the Boulevard des Italiens: dividing the second and ninth arrondissements, and running between the Place de l’Opéra and the Boulevard Montmartre, this boulevard epitomized Parisian social values in the second half of the nineteenth century; it was the heart of the capital’s theatre-land; at its northeastern end is the financial district around the stock exchange and where the main newspaper offices were to be found; it was the meeting-point of journalists and the rich and famous, lined as it was by the great cafés of the age; to be anybody (in Duroy’s terms), it was there that one had to be seen. The private mansions of the nouveaux-riches, on the other hand, were further west, along the Boulevard Malesherbes. As he enters it from an impoverished Montmartre at the beginning of the novel, this lateral space is Duroy’s territory; and at the far limits of his ambitions lie the Champs-Élysées with its Arc de Triomphe and the seat of political power, the Palais Bourbon across the river from the Place de la Concorde. Urban geography is thus precisely aligned to a fictional destiny.
Leaving aside its Norman interlude, this is not to say that Bel-Ami is set exclusively in this Right Bank triangle formed by the Place de Clichy, the Rue Druot, and the Arc de Triomphe. With Mme de Marelle (who herself lives on the Left Bank), he visits the outer boulevards with their working-class taverns, ‘bare-headed girls’, soldiers, cabbies and filthy drunks, almost in a calculated authorial acknowledgement of Zola’s L’Assommoir. In Part Two, Chapter 9, there is an outing to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, preceding the elopement with Suzanne to La Roche-Guyon which replays, in a different mode, the earlier excursion along the Seine, to Rouen, with Madeleine. His duel, of course, is fought in the Bois du Vesinet outside the western fortifications. And there are interpolated references to Duroy’s love of well-known riverside haunts to the west of Paris. But, to all extents and purposes, Maupassant’s Parisian novel is firmly located in the eighth and ninth arrondissements of the city, allowing a focus on a specific milieu in both social and physical terms. Gradations of wealth and power within it are ranked by address, from the Rue Fontaine in the east to the Rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré where M. Walter asserts his social triumph. Particular cafes and restaurants are synonymous with the importance of their clienteles. Even the names of streets are used by Maupassant to symbolic effect, while Duroy’s movements along them are seldom as arbitrary as they might seem. Paris is exploited, in other words, within a fictional design rather than simply being a picturesque or monumental backcloth. Assembled for our viewing at dinner-tables and receptions, and in their carriages returning from their ‘playground’ of the Bois de Boulogne, the social world described by Maupassant revolves around the haute bourgeoisie, but it remains one in which class itself is not distinct. For the social world he describes is in symptomatic flux reflecting, as much as Duroy himself, the mobilities and contaminations generated by new-found affluence and sexual alliances in a society in which butlers seem more assured than those they serve: a world of press barons and aristocratic residues; society ladies and riff-raff; politicians and common prostitutes elevated to the status of courtesans.
That hybrid world is identifiable at the Folies-Bergère, located just beyond the margins of the respectable quartiers of the city centre and exemplifying the juxtaposed, interpenetrating and blurred values of a modernity at a far remove from the nostalgically recalled elegance akin to Musard’s or the orderly paths of the Pare Monceau (p. 11). Édouard Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (painted in 1881–2 and dominating the Manet retrospective in the very year Bel-Ami was written) is the emblematic record of that social world. And Maupassant’s wonderful description of it is both a set piece (pp. 12–14) and the one literary representation of the Folies-Bergère habitually cited in many pictorial analyses of Manet’s own masterpiece.4 What it also exemplifies is the novelist’s talent, more generally, for creating an atmosphere, whether in the plunging view down on to the Gare Saint-Lazare in the approaching dusk or in his evocation of the escape from the ‘overheated city’ to the Bois de Boulogne, with the cool ‘damp of the tiny creeks you could hear running under the boughs’ (p. 179). And nowhere is this more evident than in the opening pages of Bel-Ami: the stifling early summer heat with its stale smells ‘belched into the street’; the endlessly jostling and anonymous crowds, claustrophic and directionless in the collective rituals of individual evening strolls; the harshly lit cafés with tables spilling out over the pavement and loaded with ice-cold drinks shimmering in their reflected glare; the perfume-laden whores whispering their enticements to lonely men. As surely as its mist of tobacco smoke rising into the air and its ‘illuminated clocks in the middle of the road’ (p. 6) intimate the transience of this febrile and artificial urban scene, Maupassant’s glittering jungle substantiates the hopes and fears of his characters and pulls the reader into a Paris vibrating with the intensity of the real.
The art of illusion
Readers of Bel-Ami have seldom been in any doubt about the novel’s significance. For it is seen as Maupassant’s most fully developed novel of manners (or roman de mœurs) in the Balzacian tradition which explores the life of the French capital through the eyes of a young man leaving behind his provincial origins to make his fame and fortune in Paris. That tradition could in fact be extended all the way back to Marivaux’s Le Paysan parvenu (1734–5). But its apogee in French nineteenth-century literature is obviously related to sociological realities which coincide with the contemporary novel’s own historical ambitions. One need only think of Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir (1830), with its famous analogy (of the novel as a mirror reflecting the route it travels) prefacing the narrative of Julien Sorel’s picaresque ascent to the Parisian stage. Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series charts a whole family’s destiny in its relation to the wealth and power to be found there. And Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale reworks in an ironic mode the tropes and structures which we associate, above all, with Balzac. The author of so many romans de mœurs parisiennes is indeed the standard point of reference in assessments of Bel-Ami. The figure of M. Walter is ‘straight out of Balzac’ (p. 49), to the extent that he follows a succession of Jewish brokers of power and money who dominate the financial corridors of La Comédie humaine. The fact that Bel-Ami’s central protagonist makes his career in journalism inevitably invites comparisons with Illusions perdues, the second part of which (Un grand homme de province à Paris, 1839) brings Lucien de Rubempré into contact with a press as unscrupulous as the one described by Maupassant, and which, for Balzac’s hero too, is the entry-point for a corrupting experience in the world of high society. On the other hand, Lucien is ultimately defeated by, and expelled from, that world. And, for that reason alone, it is instead the Rastignac of Le Père Goriot (1834–5) who is cited as the most pertinent model for Bel-Ami simply because, in the words of the most authoritative Maupassant scholar of his generation, ‘Duroy, like Rastignac, is successful’.5
It is not difficult to understand why Bel-Ami should be seen as ‘a novel of ascent’.6 This can be qualified, of course, by the recognition that the success of a mediocre individual is simultaneously an indictment of the society which has allowed him to flourish. ‘Wishing to analyse a scoundrel’, Maupassant wrote in self-defence, ‘I placed him in a world which would bring out his qualities’ (Gil Blas, I June 1885). Jean-Paul Sartre goes so far as to compare Duroy to a mechanized figure in an equilibrium-chamber ‘whose rise merely testifies to the decline of a whole society’.7 The illusion of upward movement nevertheless remains a
powerful one. Many critical guides to Bel-Ami include vertical diagrams which confirm that Duroy’s apparent rise is minutely charted. The distance between the opening and closing pages of the novel seems self-evident: the unknown provincial eking out a living on the margins of society has a personal and material triumph consecrated in the fashionable heart of the capital; a Georges Duroy too poor to buy a drink has become the Baron Du Roy de Cantel, his sights now set on the political arena which seems to beckon the conquering hero. ‘Challenging … the entire city’ (p. 3) at the beginning, he ends the novel looking out towards the Palais Bourbon with an all-encompassing gaze reminiscent of Rastignac overlooking Paris from Père Lachaise and laying down that most famous of gauntlets: ‘A nous deux, maintenant!’ There is a properly euphoric tone to the final chapter of Bel-Ami, so that Duroy’s confidence is complemented both by the admiration of the assembled onlookers at his feet and the complicity of Maupassant’s readers undeniably inscribed within this double point of view.
That we should suspend our disbelief in this way is, of course, Maupassant’s realist achievement. His own literary techniques as one of those ‘Illusionists’ which he defines ‘gifted Realists’ as being, as has already been underlined, serve to erode the dividing-line between Bel-Ami’s imaginary world and the reality outside the novel to which the fiction effectively refers. He also stresses in that same 1887 essay, however, that, behind the resulting ‘appearances’, such techniques themselves disguise ‘the real meaning of the work’. And, in inviting the perceptive reader to discover ‘all the minute, hidden, virtually invisible threads which modern artists have substituted for The Plot’, Maupassant alerts us to the potentially deceptive qualities of the latter. To base one’s interpretation on the shape of such a conventional plot merely reveals how completely we have forfeited our critical detachment. And it is all the more ironic that we should subcribe to the illusions of Bel-Ami at the same time as being afforded a privileged view of the construction of such linguistic fictions. For one of the book’s explicit preoccupations is, precisely, the language of duplicity. Forestier’s advice to Duroy is couched in instructive terms: ‘all you need in order to pull the wool over other people’s eyes is a dictionary’ (p. 8). Much of the novel demonstrates the efficacy of such a strategy, as the manipulation of words becomes synonymous with the manipulation of others, whether for speculative or seductive ends. What is true of sexual dalliance, marked by ‘artful suggestiveness, of words lifting veils like a hand lifting a skirt’ (p. 65), is equally true of the journalist’s profession, ‘insinuating rather than explicit’ (p. 95). Above all, in both the private and public domain, language is seen as a substitute for reality rather than a reflection of it. The practices of La Vie française speak of an utter contempt for readers unable to differentiate between fact and fiction. The paper’s very existence is inseparable from the fascination exerted by its frontage’s ‘three dazzling words’ (p. 9). And, in the same way, Duroy’s own identity literally depends on the self-assurance provided by seeing his name in print, perceived by others in the article he signs (‘in large letters’, p. 45) or the visiting cards he needs in order to confirm his new persona (p. 47). Conversely, self-doubt is equated with a blank where his name should be (p. 55), and an attempt to write is the immediate reaction to compensate for a threatening loss of outline (p. 121).
The significance of this preoccupation is considerably enlarged, indeed, by the fact that Duroy’s gradual assimilation of social eloquence is reflected in an apprenticeship which takes him from creative impotence to the acknowledgement of his status as a writer (p. 288). Here the obviously autobiographical dimension of Bel-Ami, referred to earlier, is extended to a demystificatory stance, that ability to strip bare the pretensions, motives, and vanities around him (pp. 108–9); but also to those secretive verbal procedures (p. 143) which Maupassant insists elsewhere are the most prominent features of his own art. And this by no means precludes the irony of lucid self-appraisal. Duroy’s lessons in grammar and style (pp. 36–8) point to Flaubert’s former pupil as surely as his ‘writer’s sensitive pride and vanity’ (p. 175) wounded by allegations that his texts are barely distinguishable from those of his mentor; so too does the detail that he ‘found it hard to begin, and had difficulty finding the right words’ (p. 172), and the reference to Duroy’s habit of reworking earlier material (p. 209), within yet another novel in which Maupassant himself, on as many as thirty occasions, does precisely that. Potentially more problematic, however, is the way in which, once again, imaginative elaboration is seen to be divorced from experience, Duroy ‘being unable to translate words into action’ (p. 203) and being incapable of writing what he feels (p. 121). The novelistic ‘pathetic tale’ (p. 81) is a form of deceit, his ‘dramatic story’ (p. 126) of the duel a blatant fabrication, and his ‘Recollections of an African Cavalryman’ a self-conscious exercise in metaphor and rhetoric.
Much of this, it need hardly be said, is thematically consistent with the duplicity which informs the entire novel. Its emphasis on appearances embraces the poses and facial expressions characters adopt, the clothes Duroy hires, and the decorations he uses to hide the prosaic ugliness of his room. What lies behind the mask is mercilessly exposed. For Bel-Ami is no exception to Maupassant’s familiar exploration of the theatrical. How things are staged for the spectator is the overriding concern of both the offices of La Vie française, with its ‘showy staircaise’ (p. 40), and M. Walter’s residence; within the latter’s sumptuous decor we are treated to ‘an endlessly rehearsed, decorous comedy of manners’ (p. 92); when he moves to an even grander address, Parisian society made up of those ‘who frequent opening nights’ (p. 245) is invited to a public viewing advertised in the papers and organized with immaculate technical attention to the backcloth, foreground, lighting, and vanishing-points (pp. 244–8). Duroy’s shock at realizing the two Walter daughters are in fact grown women is likened to witnessing a ‘scene-change’ (p. 99) not hidden behind the stage-curtain. Those privy to scandal fall into the category of ‘protagonist [acteur], confidant, or just an onlooker’ (p. 63). Love-affairs are similarly defined: Mme Walter surrenders with a ‘mini-comedy of childish modesty’, avowing her bliss ‘like an ingénue in a play’ (p. 218); and Mme de Marelle, faced with her husband’s importunate return, announces to her lover: ‘we must schedule a week’s intermission’ (p. 74) (with Maupassant using the specific theatrical term relâche to signal the temporary break). Duroy himself contemplates his reflection ‘like an actor learning his part’ (p. 18), and becomes a consummate performer: ‘speaking, now, with an actor’s intonations and comic grimaces’ (p. 160), as he parodies, with overlaid erotic connotations, his earlier inadequacies as a writer.
As Duroy’s ‘transparencies’ (p. 70), however, also reflect his state of mind, so too, it can be suggested, Bel-Ami offers us more than a transparent screen through which the world’s hypocrisy is revealed. For in the same way as a preoccupation with writing is potentially self-reflexive, the text intermittently mirrors its own design. The paintings which decorate the novel’s interiors, for example, have not been innocently invented. Mme de Marelle’s ‘four second-rate pictures, depicting a boat on a river, a ship at sea, a mill on a plain, and a wood-cutter in a wood’ (p. 58) all refer us back to Duroy’s impoverished isolation at the time; at his parents’ home, by contrast, ‘two coloured pictures representing Paul and Virginie under a blue palm tree, and Napoleon I on a yellow horse’ (p. 165) reflect the context of a triumphant honeymoon, as well as being subsequently, and ironically, echoed in the Virginie (Walter) he seduces, whose husband conceives ‘an idea worthy of a Bonaparte’ (p. 241). The latter’s own series of pictures are significant in a rather different way, elaborated to the point where a number of them constitute a veritable microcosm (and a mise-en-abîme) of the novel’s thematic concerns: apprenticeship in The Lesson, the struggle in The Obstacle, and, above all, vertical perspective in Upper and Lower (pp. 100–1).
It is a critical commonplace
to point out that, throughout his career, the most prevalent of Maupassant’s motifs is that of the mirror–both literally and as metaphor–which dramatizes the tension between self as identity and self as other. In Bel-Ami this is repeatedly used as a means of presenting the protagonist’s introspection within the contraints of aesthetic objectivity. But Duroy’s alienating self-spectacle is also emblematic. For the text too bears witness to what Maupassant calls in Sur l’eau (1888) ‘a sort of doubling’ transforming the writer into both ‘actor and spectator of himself and of others’. This sense of watching himself ‘in the mirror of my mind’ in the very act of observing reality may well account for the ambivalence of the self-portrait located in Duroy. Yet that ambivalence is thereby extended to the novel itself, lodged between the realities it records and the imaginative construction it must necessarily be if it is to articulate a distinctive vision. In a society in which art is a commercial proposition and occupies a decorative space, Bel-Ami thus provides alternative images of itself: on the one hand, as has been suggested, there are Duroy’s empty journalistic inventions; on the other there is the Marcowitch painting, explicitly self-referential (‘he looks like you, Bel-Ami’, p. 256) and described as ‘powerful and unexpected, indisputably the achievement of a master … one of those works that turn your ideas upside down, and linger in the mind for years’ (p. 248); but, as we are reminded, ‘you had to look closely, in order to understand’ (p. 247).