A Parisian Affair and Other Stories

Guy de Maupassant

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A PARISIAN AFFAIR AND OTHER STORIES

GUY DE MAUPASSANT (1850–1893), internationally acknowledged master of the short story, spent childhood alternately at the homes of his separated parents in Paris and the Normandy coastal resort of Etretat. As an adolescent, he was taken under the wing of Flaubert, a family friend who encouraged him in his efforts to become a writer. After a brief period in the army during the Franco-Prussian war, he became a minor civil servant at various ministries. He developed a variety of sporting skills to a high standard; rowing, sailing, fencing, etc. and became a crack shot. As a result of his many amorous affairs and of an inherited predisposition, he also developed syphilis. After the publication of ‘Boule de Suif’, the story which made his name overnight, he became hugely popular as a writer and his work was translated into many languages. He led a hectic social life, using his observations as copy for the over three hundred short stories and six novels he produced. He refused, however, the accolades which society was anxious to bestow upon him. His physical and mental health deteriorated until in 1891, after an attempted suicide, he was admitted into psychiatric care and died two years later.

SIÂN MILES was born and brought up in the bi-cultural atmosphere of Wales and educated there and in France where she lived for many years. She has taught at a number of universities both at home and abroad, including Tufts University in Massachusetts, Dakar University in Sénégal and York University in Toronto. She now teaches at Warwick University in England. Her publications include: Simone Weil: An Anthology, now in its third edition, George Sand: Marianne, a translation of Violet Trefusis’ Echo and, in collaboration, Paul Valéry’s Cahiers/Notebooks.

GUY DE MAUPASSANT

A Parisian Affair and Other Stories

Translated with an Introduction and Notes by

SIÂN MILES

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First published 2004

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9780141915296

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Introduction

Acknowledgements

I should like to acknowledge with gratitude permission by Editions Gallimard to use their Bibliothèue de la Pléiade edition of Maupassant: Contes et Nouvelles published in 1974.

I am very grateful to both Hilary Laurie, whose idea it was to produce a new selection of Maupassant short stories, and to Mark Treharne whose work is both an example and an inspiration, for guiding me into this hugely enjoyable project.

I have been helped throughout its development by a number of friends and colleagues without whom I would be lost, and who include: Marie-Thérèse and Tony Allen, Cara Chase, Catherine Hoskyns, Elsbeth Lindner, Shirin Rai, Sue Shaw, Helen Siebenmann and Jasper Snyder.

Others who have generously provided both practical and moral support and whom I warmly thank are Kate Astbury, Laura Barber, Paula Bartley, Hilary Bourdillon, Saskia Brown, Charlotte Brunsdon, David Carpanini, Jo Crozier, Jonathan Dudley, Fergus Durant, Janet Goodfellow, Barrie Hinksman, Jill Irving, Maryanne Izzard, Peter Larkin, Pauline Matarasso, Lajpat Rai, Douglas Smith, Jo Smithies, Ann Swarbrick, Alan Teuton and Raya Trofimowa.

Any errors of commission and omission remain my own.

Chronology

1850 Birth of Henry René Albert Guy de Maupassant on 5 August at Fécamp in Normandy.

1851 Coup d’état of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte who proclaims himself Napoléon III the following year. Beginning of Second Empire, background to many of Maupassant’s stories.

1856 Birth of Hervé, Maupassant’s brother.

1857 Publication of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary and Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal, as a result of which each author is subject of prosecution for offences against public morals.

1859–60 Maupassant a pupil at the Lycée Imperial Napoléon in Paris. After effective separation of parents, he moves with mother and brother to Etretat, on the Channel coast.

1863 Legal separation of Maupassant’s parents. Salon des refusés in Paris shows work of Manet, Pisarro, Cézanne, et al. Maupassant attends Yvetot seminary.

1868 Expelled from hated Yvetot seminary. Enters lycée at Rouen. Flaubert and his friend the poet Louis Bouilhet take him under their wing.

1869 Moves to Paris to read law. Lives in same building as father at 2, rue Moncey.

1870 Outbreak of Franco-Prussian war. Called up and posted to Rouen. Defeat of the French at Sedan. Napoléon III taken prisoner. Fall of the Empire and proclamation of the Third Republic.

1871 Bombardment of Paris followed by Franco-Prussian armistice. Popular uprising of Paris Commune repressed with great savagery by Thiers government. Leaves army.

1872 Begins career as a clerk in various government ministries, beginning in Naval Administration.

1873 Appointed to Ministère de la Marine or French Admiralty. Acquires boat and sleeps at room near Argenteuil, on the river, twice a week. Becomes part of roistering river set. Develops fencing and shooting skills.

1874–5 First Impressionists exhibition chez the photographer Nadar. Meets influential Edmond de Goncourt at Flaubert’s apartment in the rue Murillo. Also meets his polar opposite in character, the poet Mallarmé, and is invited to join the latter’s select Thursday gatherings. Regular meetings with Huysmans, Zola and other writers. Spends Sundays with Flaubert. Confides to friend he has contracted the pox from which François I died, i.e. syphilis. Begins to place the articles and short stories he has begun to write. His first conte, ‘La main d’écorché’ (‘The Shrivelled Hand’) is published under the pseudonym Joseph Prunier in L’Almanach lorrain de Pont-à-Mousson in February 1875.

1878 Zola effects a meeting between Sarah Bernhardt and Maupassant to discuss a play he is writing. Works on his first novel. Through Flaubert, is appointed to Ministry of Education and resigns from Naval Administration.

1880 Publication in April of the short story ‘Boule de Suif’ which is to make his name. Heart trouble begins. Suffers from alopecia and increasingly poor vision. Throughout his life from now on his health is in constant decline. Death of Flaubert on 8 May and Maupassant becomes his literary executor. Begins to ease out of Ministry work, securing a succession of variously paid leaves of absence. Attempts to get Hervé a position with newly formed Panama Company. Begins affair with Gisèle d’Estoc.

1883 Publication of his first novel Une Vie, at first usefully banned from the Hachette chain of station bookshops. There now follows a ceaseless flow of short stories as Maupassant’s name becomes well known and his writing is much in demand.

1884 Begins relationship with the comtesse Potocka as well as a correspondence with Marie Bashkirtseff. Has house built on mother’s land at Etretat and rents suite of rooms with cousin at a Paris hotel. Spends much time from now on in the south of France.

1885 Publication of his best-known novel, Bel-Ami, in serial form. With the proceeds buys a higher tonnage boat at Antibes to replace his Louisette. Helps Hervé set up horticultural business.

1886 Last exhibition of Impressionists in Paris. Narrowly misses having to fight a duel. Honour satisfied in time. Ever more prolific output of stories.

1887 Publication of Mont-Oriol, set in the Auvergne and reflecting life at a spa town. Signs petition protesting against construction of the Eiffel Tower. Work on La Guillette, his Normandy house. Balloon trip to Belgium generates publicity. Further travels in Italy and North Africa. Hervé begins to show signs of mental instability. Mother’s chronic ill-health begins to deteriorate still further.

1888 Publication of Pierre et Jean, a study of jealousy, accounted by some to be his finest novel. Purchase of new boat, the Zingara, which becomes Bel-Ami II. Publication of a series of travel sketches, Sur l’Eau.

1889 Begins to oversee anthologizing and translation (into English, Russian, Spanish, German, etc.) of his now large number of short stories. Arranges with Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de L’Ouest for Zola to travel on engine of locomotive to research material for the latter’s La Bête humaine. Opening of the International Exhibition in Paris. Publication of novel Fort comme la mort. Hervé sectioned at Lyon and dies on 13 November.

1890 Next collection of travel sketches, La Vie errante, published in serial form. Maupassant spends increasingly more time in south of France. Purchases bachelor flat in Paris. Publication of his last novel, Notre Coeur. Makes friends with Dr Henry Cazalis who, with colleague Dr Blanche, will attend him to the end of his life. Guy’s illness reaches its apotheosis. The number of short stories he is able to write decreases.

1891 Maupassant’s intellectual powers are now seriously on the wane and he suffers from loss of memory and confusion. General paralysis of body begins to affect his mind.

1892 Attempts to slit his throat. Is admitted to clinic of Dr Blanche at Passy.

1893 Dies on 6 July.

Introduction

The circumstances surrounding the birth on 5 August 1850 of Guy de Maupassant are prophetically tinged with the fiction for which he was later to become so widely renowned. Although reliable evidence suggests he was born in the modest summer apartment of his grandmother in Fécamp, on the Normandy coast, his birth certificate gives as place of birth the imposing eighteenth-century Château de Miromesnil some ten miles inland and rented shortly before by his parents to ensure that their first-born should enter the world from as good an address as they could possibly afford.

The twenty-eight-year-old couple were an ill-assorted pair. Gustave de Maupassant, Guy’s father, who on the same document describes his occupation as ‘living on a private income’, came from an upper-bourgeois, not to say aristocratic family and spent his time as a dandy and man about town. His wife Laure, née Le Poittevin, was the daughter of a traditional and prosperous Rouen businessman, owner of two important spinning-mills and with roots deep in the city’s ship-building industry. Her family was linked through friendship with another eminent Rouennais family, that of Dr Flaubert, father of a very different Gustave, the future author of Madame Bovary. Laure’s brother Alfred was, until his sudden and early death, one of the young Flaubert’s closest friends and admirers. Each young man was a strong and formative influence upon the other, and the atmosphere prevailing throughout Laure’s childhood and youth was conspicuously bookish. Given that Laure’s grandmother was a highly witty eighteenth-century woman of letters and that Laure’s own ambitions as a writer were thwarted, it is unsurprising that those she harboured for her elder son should also come to privilege the literary over all else.

The Maupassants spent just over three years at Miromesnil after Guy’s birth, and when he was four, they moved out to less grand accommodation near Le Havre where, in 1856, his brother Hervé was born. The delights and freedoms associated with childhood spent at the seaside were tempered by less than idyllic scenes at home. The frequent fierce disagreements, quarrels and physical fights between their parents were a heavy and lasting influence upon the boys’ future views of love and marriage and upon Guy’s basic understanding of the relation between the two sexes.

When Guy was thirteen, Gustave and Laure de Maupassant drew up a private formal contract of separation, there being no legal divorce in France. Under its terms, Gustave was bound to support his family, which he did with a relatively generous allowance of 1,600 francs a year, at today’s equivalent some £6,000. It also stipulated that both parents should be responsible for the care and education of the children. In this matter, the father was less scrupulous. He quickly withdrew to Paris, seeing his sons on occasional visits only while Laure set up a home for them at Etretat and brought them up there alone.

Etretat was a small fishing village with a large beach surrounded by spectacular cliffs. Already a popular bathing spot, when Laure and the boys settled there it was becoming an increasingly fashionable resort, with a casino frequented by the many artists and celebrities now beginning to buy or rent summer cottages and elegant villas in its vicinity. The composer Offenbach was one such, and Monet, Courbet and Corot used the many local beauty spots as the subjects of their land- and seascapes.

For the next twelve years, apart from some brief spells visiting his father in Paris, and two terms at school in the capital, Guy and his brother were brought up by Laure with what has been described as a surfeit of maternal affection, pride and hope. Many years later, after his son had achieved widespread recognition, Maupassant père joked, ‘Guy owes to me his sexual potency. To his mother he owes what is worst in him, that is to say, all his other so-called development.’ The tensions between the two parents had clearly not diminished with the passage of time, but it is equally clear from Guy’s own accounts that these years were for him some of the happiest of his entire existence.

It was here that he became familiar with the Norman peasant life so often portrayed in his short stories and here that he began to develop the passion for boats and the water which was to become such an important part of his own life. He mixed easily with the local fishermen and their sons as well as with the sons of the farms and smallholdings surrounding the town. He also mixed with the smart summer set of Etretat and came to know the characteristics of both populations, moving without difficulty from one to the other and developing both the social and the physical skills associated with each.

If his practical education en plein air was wide and comprehensive, his intellectual and literary development under the supervision of his mother was no less rigorous. After a brief, unhappy spell at the Lycée Impérial Napoléon in Paris, he returned to Normandy where a local priest taught him his catechism, his mother read him Shakespeare and another cleric gave him instruction in French grammar, maths and Latin.

Laure was by all accounts a neurotic and controlling mother to whom Guy was always closely, some would say unhealthily attached. Under the circumstances, his sexual development might have been for those days problematic. In the event, it was both rapid and precocious. At the age of thirteen, his first sexual experience – with a country girl one year his senior – was the prelude to an adolescence and manhood in which love affairs would feature prominently, both in his life and his work. His own sexual appetite, athleticism and stamina became his trademark as a young man. In combination with an inherited susceptibility, these led him to contract the venereal disease which was ultimately to be the cause of his death.

In this same fourteenth year, an equally important event took place. He was sent off to board at the seminary of Yvetot, which he hated. Particularly loathsome to him were the discipline and bigotry of the establishment and the curtailment of the freedom he had by now come to take for granted. He rebelled, misbehaved and, finally, was expelled when an allegedly obscene poem, written on the occasion of a pretty girl cousin’s marriage, was discovered by the authorities.

It was during the hiatus between his ignominious but welcome dismissal from the seminary and his enrolment at the Lycée of Rouen that his first and unexpected meeting with a literary figure took place. One morning, on the beach at Etretat, he heard cries for help coming from the direction of the Petite Porte, one of the rocky points off the coast. Guy quickly became involved in the rescue of the stranger who was then pulled from the water to safety on board one of the local fishing boats. Grateful and touched by the boy’s gesture, the swimmer, one Charles Algernon Swinburne, invited him to lunch the next day. Also resident at the remote little cottage the homosexual Swinburne had rented was an intimate of his, a Welshman by the name of Powell, as well as a somewhat anti-social pet monkey called Nip. The place, which Swinburne had named Chaumière Dolmancé after the protagonist of de Sade’s La philosophie dans le boudoir, was unusually furnished and decorated. The boy was shown grotesque objects as well as male nude photographs and various bones or ossements scattered about. The wraith-like Swinburne reminded Guy of Edgar Allan Poe who, since the time of Baudelaire, had been regarded by the French literary world as the embodiment of Anglo-Saxon sophistication. On a subsequent visit he was given a shrivelled hand as a souvenir and based several of his more macabre stories on this grisly relic of an encounter he was never to forget. The monkey later came to a bad end at the hands of a valet and was buried under a tombstone marked, with gallows humour, NIP.

During the time Maupassant spent as a boarder at the Lycée in Rouen, he was fortunate enough to be taken under the wing of two very different men of letters. One was Louis Bouilhet, a well-established poet, and the other, after a series of carefully worded letters from his mother, the great Flaubert himself. Maupassant was schooled rigorously by them in the art of writing. Masters of their respective crafts, they were also sympathetic and friendly towards the boy’s development as a poet and encouraged him in his efforts. The two bachelor artists’ mixture of serious arguments about literary matters and bawdy humour over sexual affairs was an irresistible one to the fatherless young man and their influence upon him was both incalculable and enduring.

Bouilhet died the year Maupassant passed his baccalauréat and from then on it was Flaubert who became his permanent mentor. After being cleared of the charges of offending public morals with the publication of Madame Bovary in 1857, Flaubert became a well-established literary figure. Laure had taken care to remind him, in the unlikely event he should have forgotten it, of the great friendship which had existed between him and her late brother and played mercilessly on his feelings, suggesting he might take some responsibility for the fate of their dear Alfred’s nephew. In particular, she was anxious to secure his support in continuing to instruct and encourage her son in his literary ambition. Flaubert responded with generosity and managed to instil into his protégé, whose initial efforts were clumsy and banal, the belief that the most important aspect of writing was to learn to see with his own eyes. The images produced must be those of his own vision and based on careful, attentive, idiosyncratic and possibly unique observation of the particular.

This precept, as well as many others, he carried with him to Paris where he was now to join his father and read law. His life as a student, however, was neither an exciting nor a long one. He did not experience the bohemian existence for which university life in Paris is well known, but at his father’s side saw rather more of the sophisticated social life of the capital. His stay there was cut short in any case by political events and his student days abruptly curtailed by the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.

On 19 July 1870, France declared war on Prussia and Maupassant joined the army. Once enlisted, he was posted to the second division of the commissariat at Le Havre from where he was sent as a messenger to Rouen. He spent the short-lived but disastrous war going between that city and Paris where, after the terrible siege and weeks of suffering and starvation, the equally traumatic and brutal suppression of the Commune took place. The war had a profound effect on him, as it did on the whole of France, which was obliged to acknowledge a crushing defeat and endure occupation. Many of his most successful stories, including his best-known work, the nouvelle or long short story ‘Boule de Suif’, are based on his experience of that period and its effect upon ordinary people of both sides. The complacency and petty-mindedness of the bourgeoisie, who were more interested in the continued running of their businesses than in the defence of their country, is a theme to which he often returns in his writing.

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A Parisian Affair and Other Stories

Cover

A PARISIAN AFFAIR AND OTHER STORIES

A Parisian Affair and Other Stories

Contents

Acknowledgements

Chronology

Introduction

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