Something Old

 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.

“BEL-AMI” by Guy de Maupassant (first published in serial form in the newspaper Gil-Blas in 1885; published in book form later in the same year )

            Three times before on this blog I’ve considered works by Guy de Maupassant (see the postings on Pierreet Jean, Une Vie and Fort Comme la Mort). Each time I’ve made the points that de Maupassant (1850-93) is a writer whom I find easy to read in the original French; and that he was as much novelist as short-story writer, even if English-speaking readers know him mainly for his short stories. But there is one of de Maupassant’s novels which has become internationally known. Bel-Ami is the novel which, I believe, cemented in English-speakers’ minds the notion that the French are a sexually-scandalous race, especially as the novel appeared in the late nineteenth century and its frank depiction of a serial seducer could never have been published in contemporaneous Victorian England. When a (slightly bowdlerised) English-language translation of the novel finally appeared in the early 1900s, it added to the title the subtitle “The Story of a Scoundrel”, just in case readers didn’t agree that the protagonist should be viewed as a wicked, wicked man. Bel-Ami was an enormous hit on its first publication in France. In the annotated French “Lire et Voir” edition in which I read it, the editor notes that the novel ran through 51 re-printings in the first two years after its first publication. It made de Maupassant rich and freed him from journalistic hack-work.

To simplify brutally, Bel-Ami concerns a careerist who sleeps his way to the top. 

Georges Duroy is a handsome, down-on-his-luck ex-army sergeant aged about 30. De Maupassant often refers to him as “un jeune homme”. In Paris and without a job, he meets his old army buddy Charles Forestier who is now making a living as a journalist. Forestier and his wife Madeleine find Duroy work on the newspaper La Vie Francaise, but Duroy (whose writing abilities are minimal) finds he can’t rise above being a lowly paid “reporter” (the English word is used in the original French text). Madeleine Forestier – who really writes her husband’s articles for him – advises Duroy that he will get ahead if he seduces the influential Madame Clotilde de Marelle. Duroy does so and, through Clotilde de Marelle’s influence and contacts, he begins to flourish in journalism and gets an increased salary. It is Clotilde’s little daughter Laurine who gives Duroy the nickname “Bel-Ami” (meaning, approximately, “sweetheart”), by which he soon becomes generally known. But when Forestier dies (he has been presented as a sick man since the novel’s beginning), Duroy promptly dumps Clotilde de Marelle and marries the widowed Madeleine Forestier, who has even more wealth and influence than his mistress. Of course Madeleine keeps the aristocratic lover she already has, and Duroy continues his priapic adventures. Even the jilted Clotilde is happy to become his mistress once again.

But Duroy, now well-paid and the newspaper’s chief political correspondent, still wants to climb higher. He is nettled that his colleagues all know it is really his wife Madeleine who writes his articles. Within his hearing they even call him “Forestier”. So how can he get ahead? Simple – seduce the fluttery and silly middle-aged Virginie Walter, the wife of the newspaper’s millionaire owner. Of course he is soon bored with Virginie’s sentimentality and clinginess and wants to dump her; but through what we would now call “insider trading” both Duroy and Virginie’s husband gain much wealth. And Duroy is able to bully his wife Madeleine into giving him half the handsome legacy her aristocratic lover leaves her when he dies. He then unceremoniously divorces Madeleine by getting the vice-squad to burst in and catch her sleeping with one of her other lovers, the Foreign Minister forsooth.

Duroy is now rich and well-connected, but he has one more step to take before he reaches the top. Virginie Walter’s naïve adolescent daughter Suzanne, unaware of her mother’s boudoir behaviour,  thinks Duroy is wonderful. M. and Mme. Walter want Suzanne to marry an aristocrat, but Duroy elopes with her. To prevent a scandal,

M. and Mme. Walter agree that Duroy can marry Suzanne. As the Church sees his first (civil) marriage as no marriage at all, and can therefore ignore both his marriage and his divorce, Duroy is able to get a big society church wedding at La Madeleine. He is now editor-in-chief of La Vie Francaise. He is rich. He has managed to be awarded the Legion of Honour by corrupt officials and he has even expunged from common knowledge his humble peasant origins by having the aristocratic title of Baron conferred upon him. Georges Duroy, “Bel-Ami”, is now officially Le Baron Du Roy de Cantal. What more could a conniving arriviste want?.... And of course, he will still be keeping his knowledgeable mistress Clotilde de Marelle.

            You will agree that this account of a man winning, without any retribution, wealth and position by progressing cynically through at least four women’s beds (not to mention short-term affairs en route) is something that could not have been published in Victoria’s England.

            Yet the element of sex is worth considering in more detail. For all the protagonist’s obvious amorality, for all the depiction of a society where marital infidelity is the rule rather than the exception, and sex is routinely exchanged for money, there are no explicit sex scenes in this novel. De Maupassant, whenever he establishes that Duroy has made another conquest, always breaks off before the bedroom is reached.

His depiction of sexual relations is brutal. It is clear that at least two of Duroy’s women have a taste for “rough”. Clotilde de Marelle insists on being taken by Duroy to the haunts of prostitutes, especially the promenade of the Folies-Bergere, and it is clear that she is both used to, and admires, the aggressive men to be picked up there. (One of the novel’s cruellest scenes has Duroy running into one of his casual women – the prostitute Rachel – at the Folies-Bergere and a fight ensuing when she realizes that she has been dumped for the woman with more social influence.) Madeleine Forestier eagerly wants to meet Duroy’s lowly peasant family once she has married the cad. Again, she wants something tougher, rougher and hornier-handed than the boyish journalists who have previously filled her bed.

And there is that little matter of how we, as readers, are supposed to take Duroy’s sex-life. How much, as he ostensibly condemns a corrupt society, is de Maupassant in fact celebrating penis-power? (This is similar to Zola’s ostensibly negative view of captalism in LaCuree – you can’t help noticing how much Zola in fact admires money-power and what it can do.) Some of the episodes in Bel-Ami are like a roue’s fantasy:- Duroy seducing Madeleine Forestier when the corpse of her first husband in still warm; Duroy getting to seduce and sleep with both mother Virginie Walter and daughter Suzanne Walter. Other episodes seem very close to the life of de Maupassant himself, a big, virile man who was also the serial seducer of women from a higher social class than the one he was born to. (He once described his hobby as “seducing duchesses”.) De Maupassant, after this novel won him riches, named his yacht “Bel-Ami” and mimicked Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary, c’est moi!” by saying “Bel-Ami c’est moi!”. Francis Steegmuller’s 1950 biography says very quaintly “It can scarcely be denied that someone possessing de Maupassant’s savagely utilitarian approach to most of womankind, with all the brutal details of relationship which it implies, must necessarily have certain traits included in any definition of the word blackguard.” As a major criticism of this novel, I found it hard to believe that so many women would so easily fall for the handsome Georges Duroy. To me, this seemed like something of a wishful male’s fantasy. Yet, as de Maupassant himself clearly knew his way around the country of Seduction, he presumably knew what he was talking about.

De Maupassant disingenuously said this novel was based on nobody in particular, but it has been easy for literary historians to trace the real-life originals of journalists, mistresses and society people whom de Maupassant used as his models.

For balance, it has to be said that in Bel-Ami de Maupassant is as much concerned with the shabby state of journalism, and the state of politics in the France of his day, as he is with sex. He is savagely critical of France’s expansionist imperialism. Episodes in the novel concerning fictitious events in Morocco really reflect shady French dealings in Algeria. He sees public honours as a sham – the Legion of Honour is awarded to people who have either powerful friends in government or the money to buy influence. Politicians are mainly concerned to amass fortunes for themselves, as in the novel’s treatment of “insider trading” by government ministers. Venality rules society with a savagery that would have startled even Balzac. As for the newspapers, it is clear throughout the novel that they are all controlled by political interests and are in effect propaganda sheets.  In the novel, Georges Duroy learns from other journalists how to use ghost-writers when he is incapable of writing something himself; how to fake interviews with visiting celebrities; and how to gather malicious and slanted information to produce “echos” [a gossip column]. The irony is that the fictitious newspaper La Vie Francaise was closely based on Gil-Blas, the newspaper where de Maupassant worked for years, and in which some of his novels (including this one) were first serialised. Another reason for seeing some identification of Duroy with his creator.

Some people have detected a teeny bit of antisemitism in the novel. The newspaper magnate Walter is a Jew who has opportunistically converted to Catholicism and is depicted unsympathetically as a grasping vulgarian. More pervasive, though, is the novel’s strain of anticlericalism where de Maupassant, like his contemporary Zola, satirises or attacks the Church. Mme. Walter is a pious church-going woman. Duroy’s first rendezvous with her is in a church, with its odour of sanctity. This scene has been compared with Emma Bovary’s first tryst, in a church, with her lover in Madame Bovary. Even more, it is reminiscent of Valmont wilfully seducing a pious church-going woman in Les Liaisons Dangereueses. Later, jilted, Mme. Walter confuses the image of Christ with the image of her seducer. Religious piety, in this outing, is just repressed sex. Then, of course, there is the whole sham of the elaborate church-wedding that caps Duroy’s worldly success.

Bel-Ami is a swift-moving and in it own way engaging novel, even if most of its characters are loathsome. Yet there is a point at which its gallop becomes wearisome. I think Odile Bombarde, the woman who wrote the introduction to the “Lire et Voir” edition, put her finger on it when she said of Georges Duroy  “il n’evolue nullement, il se contente de perfectionner ses moyens” (“he doesn’t evolve, he’s happy just to perfect his skills”). Later she describes the protagonist as “l’antithese d’un etre du roman au psychisme subtil” (“the opposite of a character found in a novel with subtle psychology.”). Once established as cad, bounder, seducer and arriviste, George Duroy stays that way, and even if specific episodes can’t be foreseen by the reader, the way Duroy reacts to anything becomes entirely predictable. In other words, it’s a little one-dimensional.

Cinematic Footnote: Gentle reader, let me tell you that a little superficial research (i.e. a quick squizz at Wikipedia) tells me that Bel-Ami has been filmed many times, including three times in English-language versions. In 1939, only a few months before war broke out, there was a German film version which was once interpreted as anti-French propaganda (“those decadent, immoral, conniving French” etc. etc.), but which has more recently been hailed as sprightly comedy. Oddly enough, this version (without subtitles) is readily available on Youtube.  In France itself there was a film version in 1955, a telemovie in 1982 and another telemovie in 2005. As for English-language versions, there was a BBC TV serial in the 1970s and a 2012 European version with an Anglophone cast.

But probably the most notorious, and notoriously silly, version was Hollywood’s 1946 attempt called The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami, directed by Albert Lewin and with an opening credit warning us “This is the story of a scoundrel”. Georges Duroy was played by Hollywood’s resident suave English swine George Sanders, the cadaverous John Carradine played his friend Charles Forestier, and the main women in Duroy’s life were played by Ann Dvorak and a very young Angela Lansbury. One genuine Frenchman was involved in the production – Darius Milhaud, who wrote the soundtrack score. But I cannot help wondering how much he might have laughed at the finished product. For The Private Affairs of Bel-Ami is so bowdlerised and altered from de Maupassant’s novel that is is usually hard to discern any real connection with its literary source. The occasional episode derives from de Maupassant, but the film quickly smothers it with moralising dialogue reminding us what a wicked man Duroy is. And of course Duroy has to be punished for his sins. In the film’s ending, he dies in a duel (there is a duel mid-novel, but it is an incidental thing), but not before repenting and regretting that he has never truly loved anyone. In short, this is a textbook example of how frank novels simply couldn’t be filmed in the days of the old Hollywood production code.

I regret to inform you, this is the only film version of the novel that I have seen in its entirety.