‘Bel Ami’ by Guy de Maupassant

This novel was published in 1885 when Maupassant was thirty-five and a well-established author, mainly known and celebrated for his short stories. I first read it many years ago on the recommendation of my uncle, but remembered little about it. It concerns a few years in the life of a pretty unpleasant and rather vacuous young man called Georges Duroy, an army veteran who becomes a journalist and steadily climbs his way up the social ladder. He does this largely by seducing and having affairs with a series of useful or influential women. It is all very French and intended, I guess, to portray Paris society during the era of the Third Republic in an unflattering light. A non-entity who is good looking, selfish and amoral is able pretty effortlessly to make himself into a wealthy, influential and much admired figure. He is not an evil man, nor especially ruthless, just self-centered, manipulative and completely second rate. The world is full of such people. Always was and always will be. I have worked among them for years, and they are not all men.

The novel, like many in those days, was written for publication in a magazine in monthly instalments, and reads in some ways like a succession of the shorter stories that Maupassant was so adept at writing. Some passages are really compelling and original. About half way through there is a significant death, and this is described really superbly, particularly the honest reactions and behaviours of those close to the person who dies. Two characters also end up fighting a duel at one point and there are scenes set in the Folies Bergères which were interesting.

The most memorable aspect of Bel Ami for me was the way that Maupassant portrays the women in his story. Duroy ends up having relationships of some sort with five during its course, two of whom he ends up marrying. Each is completely different in terms of how she responds to him and what she is able to do for him as he builds his career and climbs his social ladder. All are very unlike one another, but each shares a love of sorts for him.

The problem with this novel is that because Duroy’s behaviour towards the women - as it is towards everyone - is utterly selfish, cold and unfeeling, as a reader you never really sympathise with the central protagonist at all. He has no redeeming features. No back story sets out to explain why he is like he is, beyond the fact that he is from a very ordinary, rural provincial background that he is keen to leave behind.

There is thus no heart to ‘Bel Ami’. I am sure this is deliberate, Maupassant’s primary aim being to indict the society he lived in, but it does make the reading experience a touch flat in all honesty. It is a novel without heroes or heroines, villains or villainesses. Of interest historically. Realistic, but not hugely engaging - at least for me.