Not
everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth
reading. "Something old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique
classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.
“PIERRE ET JEAN” by Guy de Maupassant (first published
1888; various English translations)
What is the
general reputation of Guy de Maupassant (1850-93) among English-speakers?
To most
Anglophones I think he is best, and perhaps exclusively, known as a short-story
writer. Sometimes you find ill-informed textbooks telling students that de
Maupassant wrote only sting-in-the-tail short stories, and evidence of this
misconception is found in his famous story La
Parure (The Necklace) with its
surprise ending. In retaliation, de Maupassant translators and scholars are at
pains to point out that such stories were only a small part of de Maupassant’s
output. The Penguin Selected Short
Stories of de Maupassant, which sits on my shelf, has the translator Roger
Colet pointedly excluding The Necklace
from the selection because, he explains, it is so unrepresentative of de
Maupassant’s 300-odd short stories. For the more informed Anglophone reader, de
Maupassant is known as the purveyor of ironical, and sometimes cynical, realist
narratives, just a whisker away from Zola’s naturalism. His masterpiece (I
remember it from Stage 2 French) is often said to be one of his very first
works, the long short story Boule de Suif,
with its Franco-Prussian War setting and its ironical account of a prostitute’s
exploitation by self-interested people. Flaubert, de Maupassant’s literary
mentor, proclaimed it a masterwork as soon as it was first published.
Focus on the
short-story writer, however, ignores the fact that de Maupassant was also a novelist.
He wrote six novels. The only one to gain much traction with English-speakers
seems to be Bel-Ami (1885), the
chronicle of a cynical journalist sleeping his way to the top. It was once made
into a (bowdlerised) Hollywood film. In France, de Maupassant is as well known
for the novels Une Vie (1883) and Fort Comme la Mort (1889).
And then there
is Pierre et Jean (1888) which French
connoisseurs regard as his best, even if English readers hardly know it. (Apparently
there is an Oxford World’s Classics translation.)
Now what brings
me to write about this particular novel?
Sheer
serendipity. In Paris recently, and looking for something manageable to read, I
found a good copy of Pierre et Jean
in a second-hand bookshop, going for the princely sum of one euro. I snapped it
up and enjoyed it in brief moments from travel. It’s a short novel (de
Maupassant’s shortest by a nose) and easily read, and as I interpret it, it has
a central situation rather than a plot as such.
Thus it goes.
Monsieur Roland
is a retired Parisian jeweller, living with his wife Louise in Le Havre. He
loves playing at boats, going out frequently on fishing expeditions with a
Captain Beausire. He is the epitome of a city businessman in retirement, imagining
he is some sort of adventurer.
M. and Mme.
Roland have two very different sons. The elder – aged about 30 – is the
dark-haired and rather saturnine Pierre, a doctor, who is pensive, laconic,
brooding and more than a little cynical. The younger – in his early 20s – is
the fair-haired Jean, genial, loquacious, sociable and a lawyer with a fairly
uncomplicated view of life. Attached to this small family there is a wealthy
and still-young widow, Mme. Rosemilly. Her late husband was a sea-captain,
which is one reason why the sea-loving M. and Mme. Roland chose to socialise
with her. In a vague sort of way, Pierre and Jean are rivals for her hand and
her wealth.
All this is
established in this short novel’s opening chapter. Whereupon the Rolands are
jolted by the news that an old family friend, M.Marechal, has died and has most
unexpectedly left his whole legacy to the Rolands’ younger son, Jean.
At first Pierre
congratulates Jean on his good fortune, but then jealousy begin to gnaw at him.
As his black moods increase, he suspects that Jean can only have been
bequeathed the legacy because he is really M.Marechal’s illegitimate son by an
adulterous affair with Mme. Roland.
De Maupassant
writes in the third person, but for most of the novel we see things exclusively
from Pierre’s viewpoint as he rationalises his jealousy. His suspicions of his
mother’s adultery grow to a certainty. It is clear that Pierre is not a very sociable
person – his only friend is the Polish pharmacist Marowsko, who is dependent
upon the doctor Pierre for his customers. It is also clear that Pierre is far
more aware of social and financial realities than Jean is.
How does it all
end? I will provide no spoilers, but there are intense scenes between the
mother and each of her sons; and a downbeat ending. One could compare the tale
with other classic stories of contrasting and rival brothers (Balzac’s La Rabouilleuse, for example, or
Stevenson’s The Master of Ballantrae),
except that de Maupassant’s realism makes him concentrate on credible observation
rather than melodramatic turns of a plot. This is at its best as a study in
jealousy, its most striking scenes being those where Pierre keeps imagining
what he could do with an inherited
fortune, such as setting himself up in a more opulent surgery than the one
where he works.
As far as
verisimilitude is concerned, the chief flaw in the story is the thinness of M.
Roland’s character. Being such a gormless caricature, he contrasts with his
intense and emotional wife and her intense and emotional sons. One has to
suspend an awful lot of disbelief to accept that he has never suspected what
his two sons so easily find out. Yet M. Roland is very much in the mould of so
many married men in de Maupassant’s stories. They tend to be harmless or
foolish dupes who are unaware that they are being cuckolded or otherwise
deceived behind their backs.
Reading this
trim and accessible novel, I kept considering the time in which it was
And yet one
still has the impression of a naturalist situation
spun out until the fierce conclusion between mother and sons.
So was de
Maupassant really better as a short-story writer than as a novelist?
Just as we are
about to ask this, however, we are trumped by the excellent polemical
introduction which de Maupassant wrote for Pierre
et Jean. He argues that critics too often expect novels to do the same
thing, no matter who is writing them. The introduction is one of the best
pre-emptive biffs I have ever seen a writer throw at potential critics, and
leads me to reconsider and ask – what, after all, is wrong with a novel that is
as much reflection upon a situation as a march of events? Hawthorne wrote such
a novel in The Scarlet Letter and
really all Kafka’s novels have a similar conception. So why can’t we enjoy de
Maupassant’s use of the form?
Sensible
footnote: Having read this novel, I owe to Francis
Steegmuller’s ancient study of de Maupassant (Maupassant, published in 1950) the knowledge that Pierre et Jean was regarded as
“faultless” by Henry James and was much admired by Vincent van Gogh.
Steegmuller also points out that this (largely) sober, rational and realistic
novel was written after de Maupassant’s story of madness Le Horla, which has sometimes been falsely assumed to signal de
Mupassant’s own final descent into mental breakdown.
Silly
footnote: Reading the French text, I was foxed by
the word “salicoques”, which the male Rolands were said to be hunting on night
expeditions. I guessed it referred to flatfish or flounder. But it turns out
“salicoques” are prawns.
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