at Musard’s: Philippe Musard (1792–1859) had organized public concerts, in the summer evenings, off the Champs-Élysées; in 1860 entry was one franc and ladies had to be accompanied. By the period in which Bel-Ami is set, the original establishment had been replaced by Le jardin de Paris, but nostalgic Parisians still spoke of going to ‘Musard’s’.
the Folies-Bergére: as well as having a magnificent garden, the Théâtre des Folies-Bergére offered an astonishing diversity of entertainment, from trapeze-artists to trick-cyclists. This music-hall was also known, however, as one of the capital’s major centres of prostitution. See Introduction, p. xxix.
Italians: i.e. the Théâtre Italien, once situated near the present-day Opera, and so called because it was sited where troupes of Italian singers and actors had made it their destination from the seventeenth century onwards. It closed in 1878, but there were attempts to reopen it only during the 1883–4 season; so here the novel’s chronology is slightly at odds with reality.
Saint-Lazare or Lourcine: originally for lepers in medieval times, the Saint-Lazare remained a women’s prison from the Revolution until 1935, a large section of which was reserved for prostitutes and with a hospital annexe for the treatment of venereal diseases. Located at 97–107 rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, it was destroyed in 1942. The Lourcine hospital, in the former Rue de Lourcine (now the Rue Broca, in the fifth arrondissement, thus explaining why it changed its name to the Hôpital Broca in 1893) was originally for beggars but, since 1836, had also specialized in medical treatment for prostitutes. Both were as well-known as the meaning of a station hygiénique there (as the original French puts it).
Third floor: in nineteenth-century Paris, the higher the floor one lived on, the higher one’s social standing.
Louvre: i.e. the Magasin du Louvre, on the Rue de Rivoli, one of the great department-stores of the era, founded in 1855. Shirts were far cheaper there than at a high-class shirtmaker (like the Grande Maison de Blanc in the Boulevard des Capucines), and this is the point being made here.
Midi: the South of France.
colonization of Algeria: see Introduction, pp. ix-xi.
Corton or Château Larose: respectively, a very famous red burgundy from the commune of Aloxe-Corton in the Côte d’Or and a Saint-Émilion from the right bank of the valley of the Dordogne.
three provinces: those of Oran, Algiers, and Constantine.
the Mzab: in the Algerian Sahara, with its main oasis town of Ghardaïa some 500 km. due south of Algiers. It had ceased to be an autonomous ‘little Arab republic’ in 1853, the year in which the French occupied Ghardaïa.
a johannisberg: a fine white wine from the Moselle.
Paris Métro: initiated in 1855, it was only in 1877 that plans were elaborated to bring the encircling lines to a central point within the city. In 1898 the present-day métro became part of the capital’s public transport system, with the first line (Porte de Vincennes-Porte Maillot) opening for the 1900 Universal Exhibition.
omnibuses: forerunners of the modern bus, but of course horse-drawn at this time.
Rue Boursault: off the Boulevard des Batignolles, in the distinctly unfashionable and materially deprived seventeenth arrondissement.
immense cutting of the Western Railway: where the lines out of the Gare Saint-Lazare converge.
tunnel by the Batignolles station: the present-day Pont-Cardinet station, at the intersection of the Rue de Rome and the Rue Cardinet and adjacent to the Square des Batignolles. The tunnel used to reach as far as Rue de la Condamine, before the line was opened to the sky in 1921.
Asnières: then still a village on the left bank of the Seine, now part of the western suburbs (cf. note to p. 104).
the terrible year: the original French here, l’année terrible, is shorthand (made familiar by Victor Hugo’s 1872 volume of poetry with this title) for 1870–1, marked by France’s catastrophic defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and by the civil war of the Commune.
to the sea: the Western Railway (the ‘Chemin de fer de I’Ouest’) goes from Paris (via Rouen, 123 km. north-west of the capital) to the port of Le Havre.
Canteleu: village 6 km. to the west of, and overlooking, Rouen.
Argenteuil, the Sannois hills, and the mills of Orgemont: a view to the west only possible because the area beyond the Rue de Rome had not yet been fully developed during this period.
reached the Pare Monceau: about a kilometre from Duroy’s address in the Rue Boursault (cf. note to Pare Monceau, p. 11); Duroy takes the ‘outer boulevard’ following the line of the old city wall demolished just prior to 1860 (when the number of arrondissements was increased from twelve to the present twenty).
Doctor Ipecac: ipecac is the name of a drug which induces vomiting.
Saïda: some 135 km. south-east of Oran.
esparto factory at Aïn-el-Hadjar. village south of Lake Sebkra (in the province of Oran and over 1,200 km. from the Mediterranean) known for its colonialist (especially Spanish) exploitation of this crop.
a Duval restaurant: the ‘Bouillons Duval’, named after their founder (a butcher by trade, 1811–70) were the first example of what we now think of as a restaurant ‘chain’. They became popular after his death, developing their menus beyond the original bouillon and beef while remaining cheap and gastronomically mediocre.
cup-and-ball: a game that was all the rage in 1880s Paris, particularly in newspaper offices (see Introduction, p. xii).
game of écarté: card-game for two players, so called because each (with the other’s agreement) can lay aside (écarter) cards and substitute new ones for them.
Budget Commission: rather like a parliamentary select committee, i.e. a group of deputies charged to scrutinize (in this case) government spending plans.
the Chinese General… at the Continental, and the Rajah … at the Hotel Bristol: the two hotels were amongst the finest in the city, the Bristol in the Place Vendôme and the Continental, hardly a stone’s throw away, in the Rue de Castiglione; while the names of the personages are invented, since 1881 the French had been negotiating with China in order to reinforce her influence in the Gulf of Tonkin. It has been noted that a certain Rajah of Abusahib Koanderao died on the Normandy coast during the summer of 1884, providing Maupassant with the opportunity to describe the incongruity of an Indian funeral-pyre in his native resort of Étretat (in ‘Le Bucher’, Le Figaro, 7 September 1884).
Orléanist: i.e. of the party supporting the branch of the Bourbon monarchy represented by Louis-Philippe, Due d’Orléans (1773–1850), the last French king (1830–48). During a period marked by the politics of restoring the monarchy, the Orléanists were opposed by the Legitimists who supported the heirs of Charles X, deposed in 1830.
Fervacques: see Introduction, p. xvii.
gossip column: better captured by the original French term, the échos (on the front page immediately below the leading article) consisted of a column and a half of snippets, and often second-hand at that: rumours and scandal; trivial anecdotes; sightings of prominent figures; political, financial, and literary information; and even items picked up from other newspapers. For the kind of paper exemplified by La Vie française, there was no more influential section than this, a measure of its penetration into the social and commercial world of the French capital, and thereby guaranteeing the column’s continuing reverberations in Parisian conversations.
self-publicity: a trick of the trade (to which Maupassant was not averse) was to insert within this often anonymously written column an admiring reference to one’s own publishing and other activities.
a club: in the original French, du cercle, i.e. (generically) one of the numerous private gambling clubs; of none of which, of course, would Duroy have been a member, given his lack of means and status.
a Château-Margaux from an Argenteuil: i.e. between one of France’s finest vintages (from the Bordeaux wine area) and a local vin ordinaire.
Rue de Verneuil: in the seventh arrondissement, in the stolidly upper bourg
eoisie Saint-Germain area. Critics of Bel-Ami have pointed out that this is an unlikely address for Mme de Marelle, given her character and lifestyle, let alone for ‘the inspector in the Northern Railway’ (p. 39) to whom she is married.
Café Riche: at 16 boulevard des Italiens and the corner of the Rue Le Peletier, one of the most famous of contemporary restaurants. Named after its founder in 1847 and surviving until 1916, it had a wine-cellar of 200,000 bottles and a gastronomic reputation to match.
private dining-room: the so-called cabinet particulier was a nineteenth-century institution which provided both the illusion of domesticity and a service so discreet that it was the perfect location (with the appropriate furniture!) for amorous encounters.
‘Ah! Bel-Ami!’: for a discussion of the name ‘Bel-Ami’, see Introduction, p. xxxv.
an “express”: a petit bleu (in the original French), so-called because of the blue colour of the form on which one copied the message to be telegraphed.
rue de Constantinople: in the eighth arrondissement.
Lubin water: an eau-de-toilette popularized by a perfume manufacturer by the name of Lubin.
Père Lathuile’s: high-profile restaurant (founded 1793) on the Boulevard de Clichy, immortalized in Manet’s 1879 painting, Chez le Père Lathuile (Tournai, Musée des Beaux-Arts).
bare-headed girls: not to wear a hat was contemporarily synonymous with lower-class.
the Café Anglais: one of the finest restaurants in Paris, at 13 boulevard des Italiens, almost opposite the Café Riche (cf. note to p. 61).
La Reine Blanche: the Bal de la Reine-Blanche, famous since the Romantic period and until its demise in 1889, was on the Boulevard de Clichy on the site of the present-day Moulin-Rouge. Such dance halls were notorious for the vulgarity of their entertainment and clientele.
rhinestones: i.e. crystal of various colours, used for costume jewellery.
Luxembourg: i.e. the Luxembourg Gardens, suitably embellished in 1867 to make it a fashionable place for an evening stroll.
Batignolles: the emphasis implies the base origins from which he comes (cf. note to Rue Boursault, p. 29).
Boulevard Malesherbes: opened in 1840, this wide avenue traversing the wealthy eighth arrondissement was soon lined with the great homes of the newly rich.
the Moroccan question … the war in the East … problems England was encountering in the southernmost tip of Africa: these references speak of a somewhat muddled chronology. While the ‘Tunisian question’ has to be substituted for the first of these (see Introduction, pp. ix-xi), the novel’s own time-scale situates this conversation before 1881 when Italy began to challenge French sovereignty there. The ‘war’ in the East barely fits the localized uprisings (and Franco-British diplomatic protests) in Egypt at the end of 1881; it is more likely that it refers to the conflict with China in 1884 (i.e. at the very moment Maupassant was writing Bel-Ami). The final reference to England can only relate to events leading to the Boer War at the end of 1881.
Academy: i.e. the Académie Française, established in 1795 and with a membership of forty as the self-appointed electoral college to fill vacancies as they arise. The names of the candidates mentioned here are both inventions; the second is hardly innocent, given the meaning of cabanon as a hut in which madmen were incarcerated, and le bas signifying his unworthiness. Maupassant was never less than scathing about the institution itself, as is also evident from the subsequent demystification of the so-called ‘Immortals’ in Duroy’s allusion to the ‘game of death and the forty old men’ (p. 93).
Don Quixote: such a verse adaptation of Cervantes’s novel (1605) is almost certainly another authorial invention on Maupassant’s part, intended to underline the ‘quixotic’ criteria determining the preferences of the Academy.
the Odéon: i.e. the Théâtre de l’Odéon, one of the capital’s most traditional théâtres; founded in 1797, rebuilt and re-established in 1819, and ultimately annexed by the venerable Comédie-Française in 1946.
Lope de Vega: Spanish dramatist (1562–1635).
head of the gossip column: (cf. note to gossip column, p. 51). To be appointed ‘chef des Échos’ was to take responsibility for the paper’s topical interface with its Parisian public and therefore puts Duroy in a key social and political position.
‘Domino Rose’ and ‘Patte Blanche’: virtually untranslatable; the half-mask worn at a masquerade to conceal the wearer’s identity is obviously appropriate for a pseudonym; the ‘white glove’, on the other hand, suggests a passe-partout ability to open any door.
Antilles: the Caribbean.
Rue de Londres: crossing the dividing-line of the eighth and ninth arrondissements, just north of the Gare Saint-Lazare, which would take Duroy from work back towards his lodgings in the Rue Boursault.
M. Laroche-Mathieu: there has been speculation that this figure is based on the real-life deputy, Laroche-Joubert (1820–83), famous for his political volte-faces, (see Introduction, p. xviii). But he may also be partly modelled on Léon Renault (born 1839), the deputy for Grasse from 1882 and head of the centre-left grouping in the Assemblée Nationale.
landscapes: by, successively, Antoine Guillemet (1842–1918), Henri Harpignies (1819–1916), Gustave Guillaumet (1840–87). None of the details of the individual paintings are sufficiently precise to allow one to identify them.
Major paintings: what is called (in the original French, and following the classic taxonomy) la grande peinture. Henri Gervex (1852–1929) was a close friend of Maupassant’s; the picture mentioned here at least evokes his L’Autopsie à l’Hôtel-Dieu (1876) (now lost, but reproduced in the Catalogue of the 1992–3 Gervex retrospective, p. 98), but also his Le Bureau de bienfaisance (1883) which incongruously decorates the ‘salle des manages’ in the Mairie of the nineteenth arrondissement. Jules Bastien-Lepage (1848–84) was once famous for his paintings of rural life. William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905), now often dismissed as a mere ‘academic painter’, had an exceptionally successful career: his work was so avidly collected in America that attempts, in 1878, to assemble an exhibition in France were abandoned; he commanded high prices from the moment he distinguished himself in the 1848 Prix de Rome; and the widely known huge cost of a Bouguereau added greatly to the prestige of the purchaser. Jean-Paul Laurens (1838–1921) was much admired as a history painter, though the picture described here is not identifiable.
Vendée: appropriately, given the long counter-revolutionary history of this area of western France (in the Loire-Inferieure and Maine-et-Loire); between 1793 and 1799–1800 half a million of its inhabitants were killed resisting ‘the French Republican Army’.
lighter works: in the original French, les fantaisistes. Jean Béraud (1849–1936), much liked by Maupassant himself, was one of the foremost painters of Parisian life, specializing in street-scenes. Eugène Lambert (1825–1900) was nicknamed ‘Lambert des chats’, so often did he paint them. Édouard Detaille (1848–1912) made his reputation by depicting scenes from the Franco-Prussian War. The anecdotal scene here bears no resemblance to his epic and history paintings. Maurice Leloir (1853–1940) was another friend of Maupassant’s, but was principally an illustrator and stage-designer; he is probably being confused here with his brother, Louis (1843–84), known for his watercolours.
Salon Carré: it was in this room in the Louvre, otherwise known as the Grand Salon, that an annual art exhibition (thus called the Salon) was held between 1725 and 1848. In 1852 it was reorganized, on the model of the Tribune in the Uffizi, in order to accommodate the most prestigious works in the Louvre’s collections.
Vicomtesse de Percemur: probably based on Jeanne-Thilda (on the staff of the Gil Bias), and on ‘Daniel Dare’, the pseudonym of another such journalist, Marie Serrur.
the Seine at Asnières: it was here that the sewers of the capital emptied their contents. The river was so polluted at this point that the many Impressionist pictures of it are as deceptive as the subsequent evocation of it, in Bel-Ami itself (p. 156), describe
d as ‘thronged with boats, anglers, and people rowing’.