Les Dimanches dun bourgeois de Paris (Littéra) (French Edition)

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With Bouilhet's death in , Flaubert's influence became predominant, although it would be some time before Maupassant abandoned his poetic aspirations. The Franco-Prussian War, which broke out in July , was further instrumental in forming the young writer. Maupassant, who had gone to Paris to study law, enlisted in the army immediately, so eager was he to participate in a victory he felt to be imminent.

He was bitterly disappointed by the devastating outcome, and the civil war that followed nourished his pessimism, destroying the last of his beliefs in the power and grandeur of France. His experience was to bear fruit a decade later in "Boule de Suif" "Ball-of-Tallow," , the first of many war stories and the one that made him an overnight celebrity.

During this period he came to know--and to despise--the tedious life of a civil servant, another vein that he was to exploit in his stories. One of his encounters was to prove fatal: Trop de putains, trop de canotage, trop d'exercice! Too many prostitutes, too much canoeing, too much exercise! Maupassant was devoting a great deal of his time to writing, and he had turned to the theater, which allowed him to indulge his taste for farce.

His first play, an obscene comedy entitled A la feuille de rose. Maison turque Turkish Brothel , coauthored by his friend Robert Pinchon, was presented in and earned the disgust of Edmond de Goncourt , while Flaubert quite enjoyed its scatological humor. Although they were more respectable than his first effort, it soon became apparent that Maupassant's talent as a playwright was limited. Furthermore, his poetic endeavors still failed to impress Flaubert, although the latter persisted in encouraging his young friend and in trying to find a publisher for his work.

One of his poems, "Au bord de l'eau" At the Water's Side, , concerns the dangers of excessive sensuality. Republished as "Une Fille" A Prostitute under the pseudonym of Guy de Valmont in , the poem nearly caused judicial problems for him because of its allegedly pornographic content. Flaubert, who had himself undergone the ordeal of the trial of Madame Bovary ; translated, , rallied to his disciple's cause and prevented the case from being heard in court.

Nevertheless, the publicity that surrounded the case served Maupassant well at a time when the publisher Georges Charpentier was preparing his collected poetry for publication. In the meantime, however, he took full advantage of the fame that he acquired as soon as the collection appeared. The critics were unanimous in their praise of his contribution, "Boule de Suif," which was widely regarded as the best of the collection. The jubilant Flaubert hailed it as a masterpiece. With the publication of this single story, Maupassant's career was brilliantly launched. Today "Boule de Suif" remains one of Maupassant's most famous stories.

A tale of hypocrisy and betrayal, it was a stinging indictment of Rouen's "respectable" society, the upstanding citizens who made France's defeat by the Prussians inevitable. Using a moving vehicle as a setting one of his favorite devices , Maupassant assembles a diverse society composed of nuns, aristocrats, bourgeois shopkeepers, and a republican activist in a coach together with the titular heroine, a corpulent prostitute. All are fleeing Rouen as the enemy approaches; but only the prostitute has valid reasons for her flight, the others being motivated by cowardice and greed.

Initially disdainful of their traveling companion, the honorable company befriends her when they grow hungry, for she alone has brought provisions. Indignant at the idea of giving herself to the enemy, Boule de Suif is finally won over by her fellow travelers through a carefully planned and slyly executed verbal seduction. This time she has neglected to pack food for the journey.

The stunning success of "Boule de Suif" results not only from its technical perfection and its realistic portrayal of a historical period by means of a single anecdote, but also from its sobering assessment of the causes of France's ignominious defeat in the war against the Prussians. In Maupassant's story the prostitute becomes a symbol of France herself, invaded and violated by the enemy with the full cooperation of her most "honorable" citizens.

Ten years after the fact, the French were able to accept a harsh perspective on the war that they would have found unpalatable earlier. Less than two weeks later, by a strange irony of fate, Flaubert succumbed to a cerebral hemorrhage on 8 May His role in the establishment of Maupassant's career had been substantial. Besides offering encouragement to his young friend and intervening on his behalf in securing publishers for his early work, the master had shared with the disciple his own philosophy of letters, insisting on the necessity of finding le mot juste the precise word to describe each concept and thing, as well as on the importance of accurate observation.

Maupassant learned his lesson well, as his highly visual descriptions and his remarkable concision amply demonstrate.

Flaubert further aided the apprentice Maupassant by introducing him into literary circles that included not only Zola but also Turgenev, Alphonse Daudet , Edmond de Goncourt , and Paul Bourget , and if some of these literati most notably Goncourt criticized Maupassant in their writings, their scorn was motivated more by jealousy of his successes with women as well as with the public than by any real lack of esteem. By the end of May , just weeks after Flaubert's death, Maupassant had become a regular contributor to a respected Paris newspaper, the Gaulois.

His first publications were stories written in the s and reworked for the occasion under the global title of Les Dimanches d'un bourgeois de Paris The Sundays of a Parisian Bourgeois. They were linked by their central character, a minor government employee named Monsieur Patissot, who becomes for Maupassant the personification of stupidity. Maupassant's journalistic collaboration would soon be expanded to include the Gil Blas and the Figaro.

In the meantime he spent less and less time in the Ministry of Public Education, requesting--and obtaining--repeated medical leaves with the support of his physician. In fact, his health problems were very real, and he took advantage of his freedom to travel to Corsica, not only to be with his mother, who was ill, but because he hoped the climate would alleviate some of his own physical ailments as well.

Although Maupassant received extensions of his leave until , he had, for all intents and purposes, left the ministry by Maupassant's collaboration with the journals of his day was to increase as his reputation grew, so that in later collections most if not all of the stories had been published in periodicals prior to being gathered in a volume. And, as would also be the case with most of the later volumes, Maupassant selected as his collection's title that of the story he wished to highlight.

Here, as elsewhere, the chosen story was distinguished from the others in the collection by its greater length, a nouvelle long story rather than a conte. Critical reaction to La Maison Tellier was some-what mixed, but sales were spectacular. Appealing to the public imagination by again focusing on the figure of the prostitute, Maupassant was both conforming to a current vogue Huysmans, Zola, and Edmond de Goncourt were also exploiting this vein and hoping for a success equal to the one brought to him by his first fictional whore.

He was not disappointed. The story, based upon a playful juxtaposition of the house of ill-repute with the house of God, narrates the excursion of Madame Tellier and her employees to her niece's First Communion in a neighboring town, their emotional reaction to the religious service, which awakens in them dim memories of their own long-lost purity, and their willing, even joyful, return to their "professional" duties after the Mass. The Communion wine corresponds with the champagne served gratis to customers upon their return: Maupassant's audacity in narrowing the gap between the sacred and the profane, the bourgeois and the harlots, and his scarcely veiled suggestion that the latter are necessary to the former, was applauded by the critics and ensured the success of the story and of the collection to which it gave its name.

As with most of Maupassant's collections, the stories brought together by this volume are unified neither in tone nor in subject.

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Indeed, in their variety they present a microcosm of Maupassant's fictional universe, for many of the subjects that were to preoccupy him throughout his creative life were already present here. Both end on an optimistic note, with the discovery of a surrogate father. Four other tales, "Une Partie de campagne" "A Country Excursion" , which features Parisian shopkeepers in a deeply moving tale that was later turned into a masterful film by Jean Renoir; "La Femme de Paul" "Paul's Mistress" ; "Au printemps" "In the Spring" ; and "En famille" "A Family Affair" betray Maupassant's early cynicism with regard to love, marriage, and family, a cynicism that was to grow with the passing years.

Yet in spite of this apparent disparity, a common thread runs through many of the stories: The collection is interesting from a narratological viewpoint as well, for it serves as an illustration of Maupassant's storytelling technique at the beginning of his career.

Only one of the stories, "Au printemps," makes use of a framing device, something that he was to exploit increasingly as the years went by. Encouraged by the success of La Maison Tellier , Maupassant returned to a manuscript on which he had been working intermittently since , that of his first novel, Une Vie ; translated as A Woman's Life , But once again he interrupted his writing, first to travel to Algeria as a reporter for the Gaulois there is evidence that his anticolonialist sentiments developed during this period , then to continue to write stories for the periodical press.

This second group of tales would be collected under the title Mademoiselle Fifi Seeking to exploit anew the basic thematics of "Boule de Suif," Maupassant chose to give prominence to a tale of war and prostitution, originally published under another of his pseudonyms, Maufrigneuse. However, the eponymic Mademoiselle Fifi is not, as one might expect, the prostitute, but rather a sadistic Prussian army officer who is so nicknamed because of his favorite expression, "fi, fi donc" pooh! Like "Boule de Suif," "Mademoiselle Fifi" recounts the heroism of a harlot here named Rachel , which serves as a striking contrast to the cowardice of her more respectable fellow citizens.

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And, like "La Maison Tellier," "Mademoiselle Fifi" is based upon a conjunction of religion and prostitution, for it is the village priest who protects Rachel by hiding her in the church belfry after she stabs the brutal Prussian officer to death when he makes insulting remarks about France. Maupassant had a special weakness for prostitutes, representing them in his fiction as victims of fate who seek--and find--their "morality" in a nonsexual sphere.

Moreover, for an author as preoccupied with masks as was Maupassant, prostitutes were refreshingly candid members of a hopelessly hypocritical society. Mademoiselle Fifi includes seven stories, all but one featuring women in central roles, and, as is the case with the first collection, Maupassant's cynicism with regard to male-female relationships is evident. Yet this misogynistic perspective is balanced by the sensitive portrayal of a young woman who is ridiculed and ostracized because she had been sexually abused as a child "Madame Baptiste".

Besides illustrating its author's compassion for society's victims, whether male or female, "Madame Baptiste" is notable as an example of the framed tale, in which a first narrator yields to a second and then, at the conclusion of the embedded tale, resumes the narration to achieve a satisfying closure. The links between frame and inner story often orient the reader's interpretation of the text.

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Moreover, the framing technique also gives the narrative an oral quality, for the embedded tale is generally presented as an oral narration. This in turn contributes to the ease and rapidity of the reading process. The commercial success of Mademoiselle Fifi allowed Maupassant to have a chalet built in Etretat. Maupassant's first novel, Une Vie , originally serialized in Gil Blas , was several years in the making, and his correspondence with his mother reveals that he had a great deal of trouble with the transitions.

Incorporating tales he had published previously, Maupassant wove the narrative of a young Norman woman, Jeanne Le Pertuis des Vauds, who is in turn dominated by her father; her husband, Julien de la Mare; and her son, Paul nicknamed Poulet. Her life is one of disillusionment: Julien betrays her, first with her maid and then with a neighbor; she learns at the bed-side of her dying mother that the latter had been an adulteress; and her son, a good-for-nothing drifter who gets in touch with his mother only when he needs her financial support, fathers a child with a mistress who dies in childbirth.

Even religion offers no solace, for the town's kindly old pastor is replaced by a fanatic young priest who finds relief for his own sexual frustrations by delivering thunderous sermons and exercising a cruel tyranny over his flock. In the novel's final scene, Jeanne, impoverished because of her son's excesses, has sold the family home and is moving to more modest lodgings. As she travels to her new house, which is far from her beloved sea, she holds her infant grandson on her lap. Maupassant gives her maid Rosalie the last world: Although it was on the whole well received by the critics apart from a few who objected to its bleak pessimism and enjoyed an immense popular success, Une Vie is not regarded today as one of Maupassant's most felicitous novelistic efforts, and it is often compared unfavorably to Madame Bovary , with which it bears many affinities.

Nevertheless, as his first sustained narrative, this novel offers many useful insights into Maupassant's developing attitudes. The reader senses his almost visceral love of his native province and of the sea, his equally visceral horror of maternity as expressed by Julien , his fascination with the untamed beauty of Corsica where Jeanne and Julien honeymoon , his anticlerical sentiments, his sympathy for the plight of a lonely woman the fictional figure is said to have been inspired by his mother , and his pessimism with regard to the possibility of happiness in marriage.

Today, the novel is taught rather frequently in women's studies courses, where it is valued for its perceived documentary realism. Although the stories are introduced, in the tradition of Giovanni Boccaccio, as tales told in turn by members of an assembled group, in this case hunters whence the title , this fiction is not sustained, and the stories differ widely in both narrative technique and subject.

As with his first two collections, Maupassant simply assembled previously published stories, waiting until he had enough to make a volume before submitting them. There was no serious attempt at coherence, and his ends were purely mercenary. Others adopt a lighthearted approach to serious subjects "L'Aventure de Walter Schnaffs," which recounts the war of from the viewpoint of a cowardly Prussian soldier. On the whole, though, one discovers here Maupassant's deep understanding of the Norman temperament and his mastery of le parler normand Norman speech , reproduced in the many dialogues of this collection.

The sobering pieces in this collection drew their inspiration from the war "La Folle" ["The Madwoman"] , from their author's fear of paternity "Un Fils" ["A Son"] , of aging "Menuet" , and of fear itself "La Peur" ["Fear"]. The years to were especially productive for Maupassant: This period also saw the death of Turgenev, one of Maupassant's most ardent admirers, who had played an important role in promoting the Frenchman's work in his native Russia. Maupassant's extraordinary productivity during this time he was contributing one to two stories weekly to newspapers, in addition to chronicles on various topics is all the more remarkable when one considers that he was suffering from debilitating migraines that prevented him from working for hours, sometimes days, at a time.

Emile Blanche's sanitarium in In fact, Tassart continued to visit him daily during his internment.

Several of the stories in Clair de lune treat the subject of madness, for Maupassant's first serious doubts about his own sanity date from this period. The view of woman as temptress is balanced in Clair de lune by that of woman as victim: This sympathy is further manifested in the title tale of the next collection, Miss Harriet.

Her brief, unrequited love for him drives her to despair, and she drowns herself in the inn's well. This story is important for two reasons. In the first place, it serves as an example of one of Maupassant's many memorable portraits of the English. His youth in Etretat, a favorite vacation spot for visitors from across the Channel, provided him with ample opportunities to observe their idiosyncrasies and linguistic tics.

Secondly, "Miss Harriet" illustrates his compassion for those who, by chance or design, lead celibate lives, a theme he also treated elsewhere "Regret," "Clair de lune," and "Mademoiselle Perle". There is some irony--perhaps poignancy would be a better word--in the fact that Maupassant was also a consummate cynic with regard to the possibility of finding "true love. Perhaps the most revealing tale in the collection is "Idylle" , which recounts the chance meeting, in a train carriage, between a hungry Italian laborer and a young wet nurse who has not given the breast in two days and suffers from an overabundance of milk.

The undisguised sensuality of the nursing episode that ensues lends itself to a psychoanalytical interpretation. Intrigued by her elegant style and weary of the high-society women he was forced to frequent, Maupassant welcomed this diversion, and he responded eagerly; there followed a correspondence of some months, which lasted until the death of the young woman.

Her name--Maupassant was eventually able to pierce her anonymity, although it is doubtful that he ever met her--was Marie Bashkirtseff. Another woman, Countess Emmanuella Potocka, occupied an important place in his sentimental life at about the same time. During this period early Au soleil , Maupassant's first volume of travel memoirs, based upon his voyage to Africa, appeared. Two more collections, Les Sours Rondoli and Yvette , were published that year. In both title tales, the point of view is that of a disillusioned man-about-town who takes his pleasure where he finds it, most often in the company of women of easy virtue.

In a more somber register, "Yvette" a reworking of "Yveline Samoris," published in the Gaulois [20 December ] evokes the plight of a young woman who comes to realize that her mother is a courtesan and her apparently distinguished friends nothing but customers posing as aristocrats. The portrait of Yvette is drawn with great sensitivity. As with prostitutes and spinsters, young girls are often presented as victims in Maupassant's work, suggesting once again that the traditional characterization of the author as a complete misogynist needs to be qualified.

Nevertheless, it is perhaps symptomatic of his growing cynicism that whereas in "Yveline Samoris" the young heroine succeeds in committing suicide upon learning the truth about her mother's "profession," Yvette makes only a half-hearted attempt to kill herself and in the end resigns herself--almost happily--to the necessity of following in her mother's footsteps. In earlier years Maupassant turned out stories as quickly as he could, relying on his earnings to meet day-to-day expenses of Parisian life, haggling with his editors for every last franc.

At this juncture, however, he began to show a preference for longer narratives both "Yvette" and "Les Sours Rondoli" are, properly speaking, nouvelles rather than contes , a testimony to his financial independence as well as to his desire to realize a loftier professional ambition, that of becoming a respected novelist. This is not to say that he did not continue to write shorter narratives: This collection resembles the others in that it offers a blend of the merely amusing and the deeply disquieting whence perhaps the title.

It differs from them in that all of its stories are brief, and that a greater geographical diversity is represented in the settings, at least half of the stories taking place outside of Normandy, either in Paris, in the south of France, or in Corsica. This shift in locus corresponds to the movement of Maupassant's life: He had not yet become the chronicler of high society, however, and his most memorable portraits of Parisian life were still situated in the milieu of the civil servants.

The twist ending, later exploited by O. Henry , was in fact not typical of Maupassant's stories. Maupassant was also gaining familiarity with the world of journalism, so it is not surprising that his second novel which was to be his longest , announced by Havard in May , covers the world of Paris journalism.

Drawing on current events the rise of the large daily newspaper, the French incursion into Tunisia for background, Maupassant painted a sordid picture of a city he had come to know and, in his Norman heart of hearts, despise. Gone are the loving descriptions of nature that characterize Une Vie ; gone is the interest in provincial nobility. In what appears at first glance to be a classic Bildungsroman although recent criticism has disputed this appellation , Bel-Ami recounts the adaptation of a creature to its milieu.

A handsome but destitute young army officer from the provinces, George Duroy is working as a government employee at the Gare du Nord when he chances upon an old army friend, Charles Forestier.

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The encounter is most fortuitous: An opportunist and a womanizer who accepts with pleasure the fitting nickname "Bel-Ami," bestowed on him by the daughter of one of his mistresses, Duroy owes his professional success to the women who fall prey to his charm. He begins with Madame de Marelle, Madame Forestier's best friend, who introduces him to the newspaper's "inner circle" and slips coins into his pockets.

From her he moves to Madame Forestier herself, an intelligent and independent woman who reluctantly agrees to marry him upon the death of her husband and who serves as his ghostwriter, as she had for Forestier. Her continued infidelity as much as his insatiable lust for power leads an increasingly cynical Duroy to seek reassurance of his virility in the arms of another. His choice, Virginie Walter, the aging wife of the editor in chief who has never before been unfaithful to her husband, is foolishly sentimental, and Duroy finds her childish conduct irritating and embarrassing.

Thus, although it proves to be both financially and professionally rewarding, the affair does nothing to restore Duroy's ailing ego. Abandoning her brutally, he plans and executes an artful seduction of her daughter, Suzanne. The novel's final scene features a symbolically deified Duroy at the altar of the Church of the Madeleine, exchanging wedding vows with Suzanne Walter and basking in his new power: Lest the reader mistakenly assume that Duroy intends to be faithful to his young bride, Maupassant closes his novel with the description of a nostalgic Duroy reminiscing about Madame de Marelle.

Bel-Ami is a biting satire of Parisian society in general, and of the journalistic milieu in particular. The theme of Duroy's triumphant climb through the echelons of a fictitious--and highly disreputable--Paris daily newspaper allowed Maupassant to question the tremendous political power wielded by the press and to expose the abuse to which such power was susceptible. It further allowed him to criticize France's policy of colonial expansion, the taking of Tunisia being rather thinly disguised in the novel as "the Moroccan adventure.

In Bel-Ami the reduction of all activity to the venal bears testimony not only to Maupassant's contempt for the crassly commercial society in which he lived but also to his lack of esteem for the journalistic medium in which he was forced to publish. Greeted with anger by those who felt personally targeted, Bel-Ami was nevertheless reviewed favorably by most critics. Moreover, despite Maupassant's fears that Victor Hugo 's death would have a negative impact on sales, his novel was ultimately an immense commercial success.

Maupassant had proven himself capable of une ouvre de longue haleine a substantial work , for, although he constructed his second novel in much the same way as his first, incorporating stories and articles published previously, they are better integrated into the whole, the transitions are smoother, and the plot is better constructed and more coherent. If Une Vie records the descent of a female protagonist, Bel-Ami records the ascent of a male. With the exception of Mont-Oriol ; translated, , which grants equal importance to male and female perspectives, all future novels would feature a masculine point of view.

Although the treatment was in the long run inefficacious, the experience did bear fruit in the writing of his next novel, Mont-Oriol. In the meantime, however, he continued to write stories, and three more collections appeared, Monsieur Parent , Toine , and La Petite Roque The first two, which appeared only a few weeks apart-- Monsieur Parent put out by Ollendorff in December , Toine by Marpon and Flammarion in January Maupassant deliberately avoided submitting all his work to one publisher, so as to give himself a broadly based power over the Paris publishing industry --are as disparate in their composition as the stories in Contes du jour et de la nuit.

Returning once again to the practice of naming his collection after the longest tale, Maupassant highlighted for the first collection the story of a doubtful paternity. In the second collection the title story concerns a Norman bon vivant who suffers a paralyzing stroke and is recruited by his wife for the job of hatching eggs, while the third collection begins with the story of a provincial mayor who rapes and murders a young girl.

The subject of the illegitimate child had fascinated Maupassant from the earliest days of his career; he was to return to it repeatedly, with multiple variations on the same theme. The biological fathers of Maupassant's fictional universe are rarely imbued with paternal sentiments. Ironically, perhaps, the wronged husbands generally feel most strongly the bonds of paternity toward those they assume falsely to be their offspring.

This is the case with Monsieur Parent, and Maupassant tells with great compassion the man's horrifying discovery that his beloved son is not his own, his anguish when the child goes to live with his mother, and the aimlessness of the life Parent leads after the separation. With "Toine," Maupassant returned to the lighthearted tone of the Norman farce in what the critic Louis Forestier termed the fabliau tradition. However, as Forestier also remarked, beneath the comic surface one senses some of Maupassant's preoccupations: At least two of the stories, "La Chevelure" "A Woman's Hair," and "Un Fou" "A Madman," , are inspired by the fear of madness, a theme Maupassant was to treat with increasing intensity and frequency.

In fact the number of stories that refer to madness in their titles "Fou? He succumbs to the temptation to kill, beginning with the mutilation of a defenseless goldfish, and "graduating" to the murder of a young boy. One finds here the postmortem "exposure" of one who was believed to be virtuous as in "Les Bijoux" ["The False Gems," ], Une Vie , "Le Testament" ["The Will," ] and Pierre et Jean [; translated as The Two Brothers , ] , a theme that may well have been inspired by Maupassant's fear of self-revelation through his fiction.

Furthermore, the story describes the pleasure--distinctly erotic in nature--of killing, a theme that is also treated in the many hunting stories of Maupassant's corpus for example, "Amour" ["Love," ], "Le Loup," "Farce normande," and "Un Coq chanta". These two themes--that of the posthumous revelation and that of the link between sexuality and violence--are combined in the title tale of La Petite Roque. The protagonist of this story is a town mayor, Renardet, who, suffering from an imperious sexual hunger since the death of his wife, comes upon a young girl la petite Roque--the little Roque child--of the title bathing in a woodland pond and rapes her, "sans comprendre ce qu'il faisait" without understanding what he was doing.

Renardet, who must direct the investigation into the death of the child, writhes in the grip of fear and remorse, becoming prey to hallucinations and eventually losing his mind. The tale ends when he leaps to his death after trying unsuccessfully to persuade the postman to return a letter of confession he has written to the examining magistrate in a moment of weakness. But it is also possible that Maupassant's own obsessions--he was suffering terrifying hallucinations, a condition that resulted indirectly from his own insatiable carnal appetite--were finding expression in his fiction.

Whatever the case, the reputedly objective observer was clearly developing a taste for psychological analysis. There was no real unity in this collection of previously published stories, which Maupassant assembled with customary negligence when he was not traveling or working on his new novel, Mont-Oriol.

Begun in July , this third novel was more or less finished by April and was published serially by Gil Blas at the end of the year. It appeared in book form in January The writing of the novel, much of which took place in a rented villa, Le Bosquet The Grove , in Antibes, was punctuated by a trip to southern Italy and by Mediterranean excursions on his newly acquired yacht, purchased with royalties from his second novel and appropriately christened Bel-Ami.

A novel of manners like Une Vie and Bel-Ami, Mont-Oriol is the only one of Maupassant's novels to derive its unity--and its title--from geography. There is no single character through which events are filtered, as is the case in all of Maupassant's other novels. Although the name of the thermal station is fictitious, the setting is not: Grounded in historical reality, the novel chronicles the discovery of mineralized springs in a small Auvergne town and the subsequent establishment of a thermal station by the wealthy Jewish businessman William Andermatt, who engages in intense and not altogether scrupulous negotiations with the wily, suspicious peasants in order to persuade them to sell him their land.

Maupassant weaves a sentimental tale of love and betrayal against this backdrop of tough-minded financial maneuvering. Andermatt and his wife, Christiane, are staying at the neighboring spa of Enval when a boulder on the old peasant Oriol's property is dynamited, revealing a spring that inspires Andermatt to create a competing spa. The normally shrewd Andermatt, naive where his personal life is involved, assumes the child is his own. The spa, ironically, has provided a setting for Christiane's "cure" in a way Andermatt would never have suspected. Maupassant's correspondence reveals that he had a great deal of trouble with the sentimental passages, and although many of his critics welcomed the new, less cruelly objective narration, the author did not think highly of his creation.

The critic Edward Sullivan agreed, finding Mont-Oriol the weakest of Maupassant's novels and lamenting the absence of irony and the inadequate integration between the financial and the sentimental plots. Nevertheless, the novel is not without interest for the modern reader. It has considerable documentary value because it exposes with remarkable accuracy the mechanism of a typical business venture of the time and because it paints a fairly precise--although cynical--picture of the state of the medical profession in the early s.

The descriptions of treatments that resemble torture and of vicious competition among the spa physicians, who are presented as incompetent charlatans interested only in financial gain, may seem exaggerated to the modern reader, but in fact they rang true to Maupassant's contemporaries. Despite remarkable advances in medical knowledge and technology in the second half of the century, which propelled physicians to the most respected levels of society, the nineteenth-century Frenchman, still surrounded by quacks and subjected to inefficacious and painful treatments, was understandably skeptical where medical science was concerned.

With good reason the nineteenth century came to be known as the "age of heroic therapy.

Guy de Maupassant

In Mont-Oriol , Maupassant also gave expression to his preoccupation with the illegitimate child, this time from the viewpoint of the mother; related themes of the disgust inspired by the pregnant woman, the horror of paternity, and the inevitable disappointments of conjugal love were also treated, as was the sexual awakening of a young woman, here associated as in Une Vie with the magic of an aquatic setting.

If, as several critics have noted, many of the characters are without substance, being drawn according to stereotypes of the day the Jewish financier, the Don Juan, the dissipated former aristocrat, the avaricious peasant , his heavily caricaturized portraits of the spa physicians allowed Maupassant to give vent to his frustrations regarding his own disease, against which even the most respected physicians and the most elegant watering holes seemed powerless.

Indeed, Maupassant's deteriorating health had become by this time impossible to ignore, and both stories and novels betrayed his attempts to deal with his real-life drama. The definitive version of his most famous fantastic tale, "Le Horla" "The Horla" , published for the first time in May , just five months after the publication of Mont-Oriol , recounts the plight of a passive victim, an unwilling host to an invisible parasite that is slowly sapping his power and his life.

It is a role with which Maupassant identified most keenly, and one can trace the development of his fear--and his authorial skill--by examining the three stages in the writing of this well-known story. In the original tale, "Lettre d'un fou" "Letter from a Madman," , a somewhat complacent philosopher-narrator commits himself to a mental hospital when an experiment involving "exciting" the senses results in a temporary inability to see his reflection in a looking glass. To the empty-mirror scene of this preliminary sketch, the author added in the first version of "Le Horla" published in October the horror of being visited during the night by an invisible being that sucks his life from his lips.

Certain "objective" phenomena appear to establish the reality of the mysterious being, who has preyed upon an entire population in Brazil, and the narrator speculates that perhaps man's successor on Earth has arrived. The tale is framed by comments from his physician, who is himself uncertain as to whether or not his patient is insane, leaving the reader in that doubt which the critic Tzvetan Todorov finds to be the sine qua non of the fantastic genre.

The definitive version of "Le Horla," nearly three times as long as the version, is presented as the diary of a madman; the same incidents are repeated, but in more detail, and many "minor" incidents round out the tale. Here, the fantastic has been "internalized" so to speak; there is virtually no doubt about the diarist's madness, which is attested not only by the events themselves, but by the highly emotional and agitated style of the narration. Moreover, no physician is present to guide the reader in his interpretation of the text, and the story ends with the narrator's attempt to kill the invisible "monster" by setting fire to his house, which he immediately judges to be futile: I'm going to have to kill myself!

Maupassant predicted correctly that his own sanity would be questioned when this story appeared, but in point of fact, he was in full possession of his faculties during the writing of what has been considered a masterpiece of the fantastic genre. Although this story has a subtext that clearly reveals some of its author's most troubling obsessions, the role played by literary fashion must not be overlooked. The fantastic, introduced into France early in the century, when E. Hoffmann 's works were translated into French, had been reinvigorated by Charles Baudelaire 's translation of Edgar Allan Poe 's work at midcentury.

In particular, the idea of a successor to man who would prey upon him owes a great deal to Charles Darwin 's theory of evolution by natural selection. In a more general way, the pathology of mental illness fascinated the nineteenth-century Frenchman, and Maupassant himself was irresistibly drawn to this subject. The subject of mental pathologies is treated in this negative register throughout Maupassant's work, whether he focuses on magnetism, hallucinations, phobias, or neuroses. This was, after all, the period of the bacteriological revolution, when the discovery of microscopic organisms that could wreak havoc on the body gave new meaning to the concept of the invisible enemy.

Less than a month after "Le Horla" appeared, Maupassant was hard at work on his fourth novel, Pierre et Jean. Chez le ministre [ Chine et Japon [ Choses du jour [ Choses et autres [ Chronique 2 mai [ Chronique 14 juin [ Chronique 20 juillet [ Chronique Le Gaulois, 14 avril [ Clair de lune [ Claro de Luna [ Coco Coco [ Comment on cause [ Confesiones de una mujer [ Confessions d'une femme [ Conflits pour rire [ Cosas viejas Vieux objets [ Encuentro Rencontre [ En el mar En mer [ En la feuille de rose. Enthousiasme et cabotinage [ En voyage Le Gaulois [ En voyage Gil Blas [ Farewell Adieu [] - ENG Fin de saison [ Fini de rire [ Flaubert et sa maison [ Gustave Flaubert dans sa vie intime [ Histoire d'un chien [ Histoire d'une fille de ferme [ Historia corsa Histoire corse [ Historia de un perro Histoire d'un chien [ Ivan Tourgueneff Le Gaulois, 5 septembre [ Ivan Tourgueneff Gil Blas, 6 septembre [ Lettre d'un fou [ Lysistrata moderne La [ Mademoiselle Fifi Mademoiselle Fifi [ Marquis de Fumerol Le [ Messieurs de la chronique [ Mes vingt-cinq jours [ Miss Harriet Miss Harriet [ Mon oncle Jules [ La morte [ Notes d un voyageur [

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