Maupassant’s novel ultimately makes the same demands on us. For we are constantly made aware of Duroy’s illusions and yet subscribe to his point of view. As the Échos of La Vie française lose none of their impact by being echoed in others, the reflections in Duroy’s mirror tend to be confirmed rather than exploded by our perception of the mirroring process. The name ‘Bel-Ami’ is a conflation of Bel-Homme and Bon-Ami (a cross between ‘Handsome’ and ‘Lover-Boy’); but even this frivolous product of childish adoration is finally the one through which the eponymous hero’s story is authoritatively told. At his ‘coronation’ in the Rue Royale, we may well overlook the word-play (only caught in the original French) of the invisible narrator: Duroy ‘se croyait un roi’ (‘felt like a king’, p. 289). To do so is to be equally blind to the fact that this ‘novel of ascent’ is organized in patterns of stasis, circularity, and regression.
In so far as they end with his ‘campaign … of conquest … begun’ (p. 28), the opening chapters of Bel-Ami are exemplary in this respect. They appear to set in motion the dynamics of differentiation and future triumph, while simultaneously establishing a paradigm of subversive ironies. The scene at the Folies-Bergère thus functions as yet another mirror in which Duroy, with his own hair parted ‘in the centre’ (p. 4), fails to recognize himself in the figure of the trapeze artist:
You could see the muscles of his arms and legs outlined by his close-fitting costume; he puffed out his chest to disguise his all too-visible paunch, and he looked like a barber’s assistant, for his hair was divided into two identical sections by a carefully drawn parting exactly in the centre of his skull. With a graceful leap he caught the trapeze, and, hanging from his hands, turned over like a whirling wheel; or else, his body straight and arms rigid, he remained motionless, lying horizontally in the void, connected to the stationary bar purely by the strength of his wrists, (p. 13)
Duroy has the same ease of movement (p. 5) and is also repeatedly admired for his strength; that immobility located within the trapeze artist’s performance, however, punctutates his perambulations (pp. 3, 4, 6, 28) and his fearful contemplation of the duel (p. 120); and it anticipates the novel’s close when he is transfixed on the steps of the Madeleine (p. 290). That, of course, was his original destination (p. 4), so that via another Madeleine (Forestier), he has come full circle. Asked where he is going, Duroy replies: ‘Nowhere in particular, I’m taking a turn [tour] before going home’ (p. 7), as a later walk does, taking him to a symbolic Arc de Triomphe (p. 51) and back again.
In a sense, the novel as a whole simply repeats Duroy’s earlier experience, as we are told of his ‘successes with women during his time in the army, mostly of the easy kind available to soldiers, but there had been a few in better circles. He had seduced a tax-collector’s daughter who had wanted to give up everything and follow him, and a solicitor’s wife who, when he abandoned her, had in her despair tried to drown herself (p. 32), thereby prefiguring a sexual destiny which takes him from Rachel to Mme Walter and her daughter. In due course, Mme Walter is described as attaching herself to him ‘with desperation, throwing herself into this love-affair the way people throw themselves into a river, with a stone tied round their necks’ (p. 217). The underlying structure of Bel-Ami is itself reduplicative, with its repeated scenes of self-contemplation, its staircases and dinner-parties, and its complementary views of Paris and Rouen. Such symmetries serve to erode the illusion both of movement and difference. As the reporters at La Vie française are differentiated only by their flat-brimmed top hats, ‘as if that shape set them apart from the rest of mankind’ (p. 9), so the presence of prostitutes at all levels in the rising tiers of seats at the Folies-Bergère undermines the semblance of social hierarchy (pp. 12–15); and, in the same way, Duroy’s dealings with categories as apparently distinct as cabinet-ministers and cab-drivers leave him ‘not discriminating between them’ (p. 56). Between the dinners at the Forestiers, the Café Riche, and the family tavern, equally characterized by smut, there is only the superficial difference of decor. Parallels between the text’s female figures have an analogous function, in the pairing, for example, of Laurine and Suzanne and their respective mothers. The two prostitutes at the Folies-Bergère are recalled in Mme Forestier and Mme de Marelle (p. 19), and the sequence of early morning visits to the latter pair and to Mme Walter align them as surely as the process of substitution is confirmed by Duroy’s subsequent return to Rachel when his society mistresses are not available. A ‘portrait of a tall woman with large eyes reminded him of Mme Walter’ (p. 187). ‘A small woman’ in the street ‘who resembled Mme de Marelle’ (p. 97) makes his heart pound as much as if he had not been mistaken. The hesitant seduction of the experienced Madeleine finds its inverted image in Mme Walter’s virginal timidity, divested of its emotional particularity in Duroy’s ‘As if I care!’ (p. 212) and his imbibing the same ‘language of passion’ (p. 226) irrespective of the object of desire.
As far as Duroy himself is concerned, a text which ends with the declaration that he is ‘above others’ (p. 288) in fact reveals that differentiation to be illusory. Others are judged by him as hypocritical and corrupt; he is only vaguely aware, however, that ‘they had something in common, a natural bond, that they were of the same breed’ (p. 109). He and Mme de Marelle are fellow-members of the same ‘breed’ too, of ‘high-society vagabonds’ (p. 220). His colleague Thomas also has an adopted name: ‘they nicknamed me Saint-Potin at the paper’ (p. 50). Duroy’s status as ‘one of the masters of the earth’ (p. 288) simply echoes the description of M. Walter as ‘one of the masters of the world’ (p. 241). Another Duroy, in a sense (bearing in mind the reference to his residual ‘interest in the affairs of the village’, p. 98), is the contemptible Laroche-Mathieu, ‘considered … very able’ ‘thanks to his village machiavellianism’ (p. 174); as the former does in the Marelle household, he takes over in (to restore the French pun) the maison Du Roy the role of ‘second master’ (p. 243) vacated by the Vaudrec who had preceded Georges in Madeleine’s extramarital affections. And we are told of her, in epilogue-like fashion, that Duroy’s successor is a Jean Le Dol, ‘a young man, good-looking, intelligent, who’s of the same breed as our friend Georges’ (p. 285). The most explicit surrogacy remains, of course, the pairing of Duroy and Forestier, with their double-act reflected in that of the two trapeze artists. From the moment he dogs his footsteps on the pavement when they renew their association, Duroy’s illusions of individuality are subverted by the husband he eventually replaces. As his literary apprenticeship repeats Forestier’s own, he appropriates his domestic chair and professional responsibilities, his newspaper column and his pen, his salary and decoration, his cup-and-ball set and his home, to the point where ‘they never called him anything but Forestier’ (p. 175). Waiting for Mme Walter in the church, he spots a stranger engaged on an identical mission, only to imagine in this provincial reflection of himself ‘that he resembled Forestier’ (p. 207). And, in his deteriorating relationship with Madeleine, his retrospective jealousy foregrounds an obsession with difference which Forestier’s posthumous presence consistently denies.
What this network of parallels underlines is that though he may seem self-assertive, thrusting ‘his way roughly down the crowded street’ and ‘jostling people, rather than deviate from his course’ (p. 3), Duroy is ultimately, as this first glimpse of him already suggests, subordinate to the collective ‘stream of promenaders’ (p. 14). Later, he is swept along in the procession of carriages likened to a ‘vast river of lovers’ (p. 178). Apparent conquest, in other words, is merely surrender to those material and social determinants characteristic of the Naturalist aesthetic to which, as was indicated above, Bel-Ami subscribes. In a fictional world elaborated in structures of causality which make of individuals impotent victims of such fatalities, Duroy’s power is relativized by his passivity. If his motivation is explained in terms of economic circumstances, he is equally subject to his chemistry and appetites. As he is unable to resist que
nching his thirst (p. 5), so his perception of triumph is figuratively intoxicating (‘draining his glass at one gulp’, p. 25). Moving towards the Champs-Élysées, he goes down the significantly entitled Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette (see Explanatory Note to p. 3), his progress checked by sexual desire (p. 4) and his aspirations for elegant love-affairs interpolated by the temptations of the base; and his ‘real success with the ladies’ (p. 15) is ironized by the bestiality which attracts him to the ‘fat brunette’. An unrefined violence lies only just below the surface of the control he sometimes barely maintains, ‘driven by a kind of malicious rage’ (p. 182), ‘overcome with rage at that old bitch Mme Walter’ (p. 228), exploding in the ugliness of beating Mme de Marelle to the floor (p. 282). And Maupassant’s metaphorical assimilation of Duroy’s superficially different conquests is particularly revealing. Each of them, ubiquitously in the original French, is marked out as a prey: as Laurine is ensnared (apprivoisée, p. 28) by his charm, he jumps on his new wife ‘like a sparrow-hawk on its prey’ (p. 158) with the same savagery he displays in his treatment of Mme Walter; that she too is ‘pounced on’ ‘like a bird of prey’ (p. 212) further reminds us of his fantasy of wringing the necks of the rich as he had the chickens of the Arabs (on whom ‘he used to prey’, p. 5), themselves la proie naturelle du soldat (‘more or less fair game for soldiers’, p. 5). In the very first lines of the novel, what is underlined is Duroy’s ‘predatory glance’ (p. 3). As Jean Béraud’s Upper and Lower points to carnality, the novel’s animal imagery is reflected in another invented painting, A Rescue, with its feline contemplation of a drowning fly (p. 100). Duroy himself later thinks of ‘flies, that live a few hours, of animals that live a few days, of men who live a few years’ (p. 141). Because it dramatizes such a struggle for life, Bel-Ami exemplified, for contemporary reviewers, ‘literary Darwinism’. But the survival even of the fittest is framed by the biological destiny voiced by Norbert de Varenne: ‘everything we do is part of dying. Indeed, to live is to die!’ (p. 105).
The implications of the Duroy-Forestier substitution are inescapable. The advice that, given the necessary bearing, you can get away with anything (p. 8) is offered by a character whose substantial appearance only masks his inner disintegration. The warship the two ex-soldiers see off Cannes is appropriately called the La Dévastation (p. 136), and when Duroy climbs up to the Villa Jolie to begin his wooing of Madeleine, the spectacle of Forestier’s death brings him face to face with a vision of his own. He is haunted throughout the novel by this alter ego; Forestier’s imminent physical disappearance accordingly gives Duroy the illusion of freedom and a new-found independence, ‘a feeling of deliverance, of space opening up before him’ (p. 130). Yet that space is ultimately the same as ‘the infinite … nothingness’ he will perceive (p. 141), the ‘deep chasm’ (p. 29) below his own Rastignac-like view of Paris, the ‘depths of the dark pit’ of the station and the tunnels in which surrogate trains are buried, the sense of a ‘tomb’ experienced in the cellar in which he practises before the duel (p. 118), the ‘cavern’ of Rival’s fencing chamber (p. 189), and the ‘hollow’ left by his body on the bed (on which his discarded clothes are likened to ‘garments left unclaimed at the Morgue’, p. 30), as Laroche-Mathieu’s shape in his wife’s is that of a corpse (p. 264). For the sub-text of this ‘novel of ascent’ is the emptiness at its centre, the nothingness of human toil represented in another group of paintings whose titles are solemnly intoned (p. 100), and most fully articulated by Norbert de Varenne. Here, Maupassant’s ferocious pessimism receives expression in an almost embarrassingly explicit commentary. Norbert’s discourse, however awkwardly inserted in the fiction, nevertheless illuminates the true significance of Bel-Ami’s vertical structures: ‘Life is a hill. While you’re climbing up, you look towards the summit, and you’re happy; but when you reach the summit, suddenly you can see the slope down, and the bottom, which is death’ (p. 104). This encroaching mortality, he tells us, has ‘disfigured me so completely that I don’t recognize myself’. In the same way, Duroy can barely recognize the dying Forestier (p. 131), and nowhere is that characteristic alienation in the mirror more uncompromisingly explored than on the night before the duel when ‘he hardly recognized himself’ (p. 120) in the contemplation of his own death. Norbert’s speech opens up a ‘pit full of bones, a hole into which he was inevitably destined one day to fall’ (p. 107), prefigured in Duroy’s sensation of ‘falling down a hole’ (p. 62) at the Café Riche and recalled as he finds himself ‘staring straight into that tiny, deep, black hole in the barrel, from which a bullet would emerge’ (p. 121). As his social persona is no more than the reverberation of his name in ‘an empty room’ (p. 91), so he and Madeleine’s self-admiring ‘triumphant laugh’ is undercut by their spectral reflections in the glass, ‘about to vanish into the night’ (p. 240).
The force of these thematic patterns and remorseless symmetries is to equate all human activity with an illusion of the ego which seeks to assert its own reality in the face of nothingness. The repeated church scenes thus erode the apparent differences between an illicit liaison, a wedding, and a funeral. Like that of the trapeze artists, such behaviour is essentially a performance in ‘the void’ (p. 13). For the trivial games that people play, whether cup-and-ball or cards, are indisguishable from their overtly serious concerns. Colonial rapacity is an ‘escapade’ (p. 5) embracing the hunting metaphors of Duroy’s later exploits. ‘I play all day long’, he tells Laurine (p. 60), and then engages in a game with her which exactly anticipates his chasing Mme Walter round her chairs (p. 197). Sophisticated conversations about elections to the Académie Française are reduced to a ‘game of death and the forty old men’ (p. 93). Related to its theatrical conception of experience, major episodes in Bel-Ami constitute a miming of action and a substitute for it. Complementing the visit to the Folies-Bergère, the ‘frenzied display of gymnastics’ (p. 191) of the ‘theatre’ (p. 189) into which the fencing exhibition is transformed (Part Two, Chapter 3) also has more than an anecdotal function. For the combat enacted by ‘two flesh-and-blood marionettes’ (p. 190) refers us back to the duel Duroy had imagined as real–in spite of its absurd pretext and the overwhelming backcloth of an indifferent nature (as in the landscape paintings, p. 100) which invalidates its significance. Conversely, Norbert’s existential musings are set against the outline of the Palais-Bourbon (p. 107), the summit of worthless political ambitions towards which Duroy looks at the novel’s close. His stabbing his rival’s visiting card with a pair of scissors (p. 119), his practice shooting at a dummy ‘as if the duel were actually taking place’ (p. 117) and shadow-boxing against the wall (p. 155) are all seen in a similarly ironic perspective. Where this is again more problematic, in respect of Bel-Ami’s own mimetic status, is Maupassant’s extension of an oblique self-portrait to include Duroy’s ‘game’ of observing his society at play (p. 108) or Madeleine’s ‘vague kind of game which never broke her concentration’ (p. 38) while filling in the unwritten page.
Abstracted from it in this way, Maupassant’s novel may well seem to us as contrived as the geometry of its paintings or the conservatory-arrangement of the Forestiers’ drawing-room with its plants which ‘seemed improbable, artificial, too beautiful to be real’ (p. 26). The fact that we take the ‘Illusionist’s artifice at face value–at the level of appearances in spite of its thematic subversion–is nevertheless revealing. Duroy’s progress does indeed seem uninterrupted in so far as we can discount his return to his origins or to his first article, and are barely conscious, at its climax, that the final image is of him going down yet another set of stairs, subject once again to the animal sensuality of Mme de Marelle. Even the text’s internal rhythm sustains a forward momentum hardly checked by its narrative interludes or the prosaic ‘Georges Duroy had resumed all his old habits’ (p. 149) at the opening of Part Two, which takes us back to the beginning. And Norbert’s gloomy truths introduce a merely temporary anxiety, not only on account of their incongruous design, but above all b
ecause they are rapidly displaced by the confidence of Duroy’s alternative focus. Authorial self-effacement leaves his as the privileged point of view within which the reader shares the illusion of mastering the world of people and events. For that reason, too, Duroy is not an unattractive figure. Or at least Maupassant’s refusal to direct our judgement (which is not inconsistent with an ambiguous moral neutrality) creates what Christopher Lloyd calls ‘the central area of ambivalence in the book’, in the contradictions located in the fascination exerted by ‘a protagonist who, if considered dispassionately, seems somewhat repellent’.8
To acknowledge that a sneaking sympathy is not Maupassant’s alone is to admit our enjoyment of both Duroy’s demystificatory stance and the vicarious, albeit gendered, experience of domination and control. The text provocatively establishes the challenges to be overcome. Madeleine’s declaration that she will never be his mistress (p. 89) is an invitation to read on as surely as Mme Walter’s reputation as being ‘beyond reproach’ (p. 184) whets Duroy’s appetite: ‘it was precisely the difficulty of seducing the Director’s wife which sexually excited him, as well as the novelty which men always want’ (p. 198). Referred to here in the French as La Patronne, in that respect she is not unlike Mme Tourvel, the présidente of Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), whose virtue becomes a legitimate target in the same insidious way. Henry James, it must be said, was outraged by the Mme Walter episode. One is left wondering how many other readers of Bel-Ami can retain the same admirable moral rectitude faced with the choice between cynical intelligence and the blindness of piety. And in the comic scene in which Laroche-Mathieu is discovered inflagrante delicto (pp. 263–8), the reader long held in suspense about the basis of the rumours surrounding the awesome Madeleine is likely to identify with Duroy’s machinations and the disappointed satisfaction of knowing the truth. The conventions of dramatic irony ensure that we do not take the side of the gullible; when we witness Duroy’s financial trickery or his plans for the abduction of Suzanne, his stature is enhanced. He emerges in the reader’s mind as somehow superior to those he dupes, so that when an individual as obviously successful as M. Walter marvels at Duroy’s cunning, his ‘All the same, he’s strong’ (p. 277) secures our assent and reinforces the character’s subjective view of his own abilities. As we follow the underdog up the stairs of social values or the recurrent hills which afford an overview of the novel’s topography, that subjectivity is itself validated. The self-deception we may not notice is, in any case, relativized by the delusion of others. As Norbert puts it, ‘in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king’ (again with the punning on roi and Duroy, p. 104), as he in due course becomes ‘a king … acclaimed by his people’ (p. 289). In all these ways, it can be suggested, the rascal’s illusion of ascent and superiority becomes a reality as difficult to resist as his charm.