Guy de Maupassant

Maupassant and the Creation of the Post-Realist Novel
(Pierre et Jean, Fort comme la mort, Notre Cœur)

Timothy Unwin

In a special issue of Essays in French Literature commemorating the centenary of Maupassant’s death in 1993, Denis Boak argued that it was time to reconsider the last two novels, Fort comme la mort and Notre Cœur, and lay to rest “the myth of the facile Maupassant” (Boak, 1993, 114). These two works had, he pointed out, received relatively short shrift from critics, partly because of their concentration on the upper echelons of society. Following the lead given by Sullivan in a study of Maupassant the novelist, a number of commentators had stressed the autobiographical content at the expense of the literary, arguing moreover that there was a fatal decline in Maupassant’s talent in his closing years. Boak concluded more moderately that, while the careful architecture of Pierre et Jean is not apparent in the two final novels, and while their status as “romans mondains” might well have diminished their interest for the modern reader, they nonetheless have a significant place in the nineteenth-century tradition of the novel of failure, or negative Bildungsroman, and deserve to be read alongside Adolphe, Illusions perdues, Dominique, or L’Education sentimentale. Seen in this context, they point the way forward to the twentieth century, where the tradition of the “raté” was to remain alive with Proust, Martin du Gard and Sartre.
In a volume which celebrates the scholarly achievements of Denis Boak, it is perhaps an appropriate moment to take up the challenge he issued in 1993 and to reconsider the importance of Maupassant’s final novels – the more so since the year 2000 is also a significant one in the Maupassant calendar, marking the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the writer’s birth. This article will, then, seek to take the argument about Maupassant’s later novels a stage further, particularly in the light of Boak’s suggestion that they foreshadow subsequent developments with Proust and other writers. It will contend – in complete contrast to the view put forward by many commentators – that, far from exhibiting a fatal decline, these texts are very much at the leading edge, and that, taken as a whole, the final three novels open up entirely new frontiers for the art of the genre. It will be argued, moreover, that they do this by building a self-reflexive dimension into the narrative, even as they apparently draw upon the conventions and techniques of Balzacian realism in its late-nineteenth-century forms. Whereas the novels may each have their technical lapses (most obviously in the case of Fort comme la mort, the ending of which has been seen as weak) they so clearly indicate new directions that it is surprising, to say the least, that critics have not paid more attention to their groundbreaking role in the development of the genre at the dawn of a new century.
Yet, as Boak tantalisingly points out, the course of the twentieth-century novel might have been somewhat different had Maupassant lived beyond his forty-three years and reached a normal age, for his career would then have overlapped with Proust’s (Boak, 1993, 128). As it was, Maupassant was perhaps on the point of eclipsing Flaubert, who in his last years had run aground with his final novel, Bouvard et Pécuchet, and whose exquisite style and language had already been well matched by his more productive pupil. For this reader at least, Maupassant’s greatest contribution to the evolution of the genre is his last completed novel, Notre Cœur, where finely wrought psychological analyses and considerations about the development of society are dynamically linked to a self-reflexive narrative approach. Taking the art of realism to new levels, Maupassant shows in this text that the reality portrayed in the novel is both a cause and a consequence of the novels which nineteenth-century society produces. As will be argued later in this article, art is seen in that novel both as a reflection of life and a harbinger of new realities. The argument that Maupassant’s novel is of less interest because it deals with a disappearing social group seems largely irrelevant in the light of the experimental character of his writing. Maupassant clearly opens the way to later Proustian experiments with the relationship between social satire and novelistic technique – and nobody denies the interest of Proust’s social setting, even though they may condemn his snobbery. That critics like Sullivan and Lanoux should have dismissed Notre Cœur as an impoverished failure seems like an astounding admission of their own inability to come to terms with the radically new type of text that Maupassant was producing at the end of his life.
I should further like to contend that it is artificial to separate the final two novels from Pierre et Jean, on the grounds either of their subject matter or of their construction or of their quality. Such a division overlooks Maupassant’s progression towards, and experiment with, self-reflexivity in all three novels. In each of these texts, the processes by which the main character grapples with his dilemma are themselves “novelistic” to the extent that events and circumstances have to be reconstructed into a narrative shape. Yet it should also be stressed that, while Maupassant establishes clear links between the mental processes of his protagonists and the processes of narration itself, it would be limiting and ultimately futile to see the novels as confessions of an artist in decline. Certainly, as we shall see, the theme of artistic sterility is itself of interest in at least one of the novels (Fort comme la mort), and each of the novels brings a figure of broadly artistic temperament centre-stage. But to argue for an autobiographical link between the novelist and his hero on that basis would be about as speculative as to maintain that Shakespeare portrayed himself in King Lear. If Maupassant depicts a figure of “artistic” temperament, struggling to reconstruct his own reality, is it not rather out of a more general wish to explore the links between subjective and emotional dilemmas and the processes of narrative creation? In each case, a character is confronted with realities that he is obliged to interpret and narrate in the light of his own feelings and intuitions. Pierre, Bertin, and Mariolle all struggle to tell their own story, if only to themselves, so that their experience may be given plausible form. But they also have to unravel their own narration of events, treating it at times with extreme scepticism. To that extent, they are all narrators in the widest sense. They are confronted with the dilemma both of constructing their reality into something coherent, and of realising that the “story” that they arrive at may be only one of a number of possible accounts. Pierre’s story is different from his mother’s, or from Jean’s, or his father’s. Bertin’s account of his fascination for Annette is an anguished re-negotiation of the commonplace (mediated powerfully by his mistress, Any) about the older man who falls for a youthful woman. And Mariolle’s tortured analysis of his mistress Michèle engages a range of literary models in an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to separate “art” and “life”.
The three novels ought therefore to be seen as a continuum, most especially in terms of their preoccupation with what we might term “the reconstruction of reality” in the mind of a protagonist. Each of them depicts a character trying to come to terms with an emotional dilemma in which the principal problem is to distinguish what is real from what is imagined. How far will Pierre’s suspicion about his mother be borne out by the facts of his investigation? How will Bertin explain and verbalise (or narrate) his fascination with the daughter of his mistress? And how will Mariolle eventually disentangle his Romantic notions of love from the reality of his mistress’s behaviour? Each novel clearly involves an element of negotiation with its own story. Now, I do not wish to claim that this is the only approach – far from it – for there are many viable ways to look at these multifaceted and exquisitely written texts. However, the advantages of an approach to the novels in terms of their progression towards reflexivity are twofold: first, it enables us to find a positive development in Maupassant’s later output and thus to put that old red herring of “fatal decline” back in its place; second, it allows us to situate Maupassant in the broader context of the development of the novel from Balzac through to Proust and beyond. Whether or not one chooses as well to see the final novels in terms of their fine social or psychological analyses, Maupassant’s preoccupations as a narrator will be taken up by many subsequent writers reared in the realist tradition of the nineteenth century, and for whom the conventions of Balzacian realism are no longer an adequate instrument with which to represent reality.
Central to each of these texts, then, is a concern with the link between some “objective” reality (whose potentially illusory character is recognised) and its reconstruction in thought, images or words. Maupassant’s characters struggle with their own dramatisations (verbal or visual) of the world. Where is the truth? Where the fiction? If the character lapses into pure fiction or invention or even delusion, then why does his imaginative world often seem at times to be endorsed by the narrator? Pierre’s drama is, it seems, more than a mere fiction of his own imagination; Bertin’s fascination with Annette might well be something more complex than an old man’s infatuation; and Mariolle’s despair at his mistress’s absence of love is, despite her final words of consolation, largely justified by the events of the narrative. And yet, it seems, the narrative encourages us to doubt what it nonetheless confirms, for it is the uncertainty of a character’s negotiation of his reality that is the focus of interest. Is the narrator playing a game of hide-and-seek, indulging self-consciously in the art of illusion? Whatever assessment we may reach of the narrator’s stance in these novels, it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that he is often wilfully drawing attention to his own ambivalence. Veering between Balzacian omniscience and Flaubertian imprecision, he often refuses to intervene at those very points when his authority is required to guide our reading. And while the narrative is focalised predominantly through its main character or characters, the structure of the fictional world Maupassant creates seems both to endorse and to undermine the characters’ “reading” of their world. This means that, if it is to be comprehensive, our own reading must at some level attend also to the act of narrating.
Let us move to an example, taken from the first of the three novels, of the ambivalent narrative stance which draws attention to itself through its very imprecision. In Pierre et Jean, the notion of jealousy is persistently used as a key to explain the conduct of Pierre. Jealousy operates, of course, at two levels: there is, one the one hand, the Oedipal jealousy of the son who suspects his mother’s adulterous liaison, and, more obviously and more simply, the jealousy of sibling rivalry. Pierre himself, quite early in the narrative, decides that his conduct must be explained in terms of this second form of jealousy, and his inner monologues are punctuated with self-accusations that attempt to pin down his condition with this simple label (“Donc, j’ai été jaloux”; “C’est donc de la jalousie gratuite” etc. [Romans, 736-37]). The words “jaloux” and “jalousie”, which return rhythmically through these pages, seem to have both a destructive and a consoling effect for him – destructive, because he is thereby compelled to confront an apparent defect in his own character; consoling, because he at least finds an explanation (or even just a word) which seems plausible and which captures the state of his emotions. Now, it is important to bear in mind that these monologues are clearly internal, and not shared with other characters or taken over by the narrator himself. And yet, at some point there appears to be an assumption that the contents of Pierre’s inner monologue have spilled over into the external narrative, for their contents reappear in the thoughts of other characters and in the judgments which the narrator implicitly passes on to the reader. The private scenario of jealousy – coherent enough as an explanation, despite its limitations – becomes a shared, public scenario, as in the following passage when Pierre catches the eye of Mme Rosémilly:
Pierre, soudain, rencontra l’œil de Mme Rosémilly; il était fixé sur lui limpide et bleu, clairvoyant et dur. Et il sentit, il pénétra, il devina la pensée nette qui animait ce regard, la pensée irritée de cette petite femme à l’esprit simple et droit, car ce regard disait : “Tu es jaloux, toi, C’est honteux, cela.” (Romans, 754)

Now is this merely paranoia on the part of Pierre, or evidence of his percipience as he picks up the hint from Mme Rosémilly? Who is telling whose “story” here? And what is the narrator telling us, if anything? All that is certain is that the narrative is focalised through Pierre. He is the one who reconstructs what he believes to be the thoughts of the other character about him, and these thoughts echo the vocabulary of his own earlier self-accusations. What is also striking is that there is no explicit intervention by an external narrator to guide us in our reading of the passage. As readers, we are therefore obliged by the nature of the narrative to operate at a double remove, re-reading and reconstructing Pierre’s own “reading” of events. At the same time, we inevitably find ourselves guessing at the narrator’s position. Is he endorsing Pierre’s account by his silence – and thus passing over the strange symmetries between Pierre’s self-accusations and the imagined accusations expressed by Mme Rosémilly – or is he encouraging us to believe that Pierre’s thoughts are entirely subjective? Should we, in other words, read this passage as an objective representation of the truth – ignoring our concerns about the coincidental echoes of vocabulary – or see in it a mere fiction in the mind of the protagonist, a fiction within the fiction, shared neither by the narrator nor by any of the other characters? In “realistic” terms, both explanations might seem plausible: Mme Rosémilly could be entirely indifferent to the plight of Pierre and not be privy to any of the thoughts he attributes to her; or she could be making her displeasure so evident that, even without words, her version of the story now becomes impossible for Pierre to ignore. But the fact that we have, as readers, to ask such questions focuses us on the problem – shared by both the protagonist and the narrator – of constructing a coherent narrative explanation of events. Where, indeed, is the real “story,” and whose story is it? The narrator remains highly conspicuous by his absence, which allows narrative to focus on itself, turning in on its own processes. At the same time, the psychological dimension of the novel is enriched by our knowledge that part of the emotional complexity of Pierre’s story resides in the difficulty of deciding on what precisely that story is. The story and the telling of the story become indistinguishable, part of the same claustrophobic drama that is unfolding. And the reader, trying to reconstruct the narrative into a coherent whole, ends up in exactly the same position as the character – an interesting variation on the mirror theme which has so exercised critics of Maupassant.
Mary Donaldson-Evans points out that Pierre’s reconstruction of events is itself novelistic in character, and that the careful patterning, artifices and word-play of Pierre et Jean “establish a secret communication between author and reader, become metaphoric clins d’œil, amusing, revealing, impossible to ignore” (Donaldson-Evans, 1981, 212). The quest for truth by the character is, indeed, in many senses a correlative to the novelist’s own quest to construct (or reconstruct) a story. Throughout, the character’s confusion about the lines of demarcation between what is imagined and what is real raise implicit questions about the very nature of fiction. On the one hand lies the question: what happened? On the other hand: how does the telling of the past occlude or distort it? And yet when Pierre does, like the hero of a detective novel, unearth and reconstruct the truth, he is faced with the appalling paradox that there may be “as many versions of the truth as there are witnesses to it” (Lethbridge, 1984, 92). His story, certainly, has the power to unleash tragic possibilities, and it is, as Denis Boak has argued, a powerful application of the tragic principle within the banal and commonplace setting of provincial realism (Boak, 1978). Yet – and this is a further puzzle in this most puzzling of texts – the tragedy that befalls Pierre and his mother is simply not experienced by either his father or his brother. The first does not begin to imagine that a reconstruction of the past is necessary, for he is living out another story altogether, and the second is content with a simplistic version which explains away the difficulties and protects his own interests (Romans, 810-11). In the proliferation of possible explanations, can there be any hierarchy, or even any truth? While Maupassant seems in some way to justify his hero’s assessment – Mme Roland does after all acknowledge that Pierre’s suspicions about her past are founded – he also blurs the boundaries between truth and imagination, or fact and fiction. Thus, he returns us repeatedly to the paradoxes and the complexities of storytelling.
Such a reading of Pierre et Jean would lead us to conclude that there is also something unsatisfactory about the explanation of Pierre’s conduct as jealousy, for jealousy is shown up as an artificial narrative “label” which puts a term to a problem. On the contrary, Pierre’s belief that he is motivated by jealousy might well be seen as something of a capitulation – because he cannot find a more adequate explanation, and because it at least gives him the relief of being able to put a word to his behaviour. Such an argument could also conclude that the narrator’s apparent endorsement of the jealousy theme is in its turn a ploy – a false commitment to a particular story line – that exposes the fundamental absurdity of storytelling. And by reducing Pierre’s behaviour to a conspicuously simplistic explanation, Maupassant seems to be acknowledging that his narrative – like all narrative, perhaps – is unable to tell the full story. Thus his “flawed narrative” exposes the problematic nature of the relationship between words and reality – a point which, as we shall see, might also apply to Fort comme la mort. Certainly, in Pierre et Jean, the possibility of a flawed narrative line is present throughout, and never more so than in the scene of violent confrontation between the two brothers which marks the climax of this novel. There, the notion of jealousy is reduced to a word, constantly reiterated, around which the story structures itself. Jean aggressively repeats the words “jaloux” and “jalousie” as he accuses his brother (Romans, 800), but in a way which seems to indicate that he too has almost ceased to believe in the viability of this explanation. The word has become detached from its meaning, assuming a life of its own and an ability to wreak havoc merely by its being pronounced. The “telling” of the story is now focused on a single word, a false and simplistic one – but, oddly, that single word is so powerful that it takes over and replaces the reality that it purports to describe. Yet Maupassant’s narrative creates the sense that there is more to be told, and by doing so seems to step outside itself. Gide’s would-be novelist in Les Faux-Monnayeurs will envisage the same effect when he imagines a story that would end with the words: “Pourrait être continué.”
Now, this question mark over the narrative’s claims to be either truthful, objective or complete, will reappear in Fort comme la mort. Here, the notion of “jealousy” will be replaced by the equally simplistic and reductive one of “love,” leading us to ask whether the author has not self-consciously simplified matters. But the idea that Bertin’s condition cannot adequately be described by the term “love” does not seem to have troubled many commentators of this novel. What is striking, to anyone who reads the critical material on it, is how often Bertin’s fascination with his mistress’s daughter is taken more or less at face value as a story about an older man’s somewhat pathetic infatuation with a younger woman. Marie-Claire Bancquart’s assessment is typical, in a reading of the novel which emphasises the theme of “vieillissement” and sees Bertin’s interest in Annette as a desire for younger flesh (Bancquart, 1989, see especially pp. 36-38). Such a reading seems to trivialise the story and to justify those critics of Maupassant who saw in his later work the signs of a snob who wrote about high society as a means of gaining entry into it. It completely overlooks the fact that Maupassant presents us with a series of puzzles and riddles which leave us pondering as to the “truth” of this fiction. Trevor Le V. Harris at least provides a welcome corrective to such a simplistic view when he points out that “ce n’est pas […] la beauté d’Annette per se qui tient Bertin prisonnier: c’est le souvenir du visage de la jeune Any” (Harris, 1991, 71-72), thus stressing the essential reversibility of the character’s attitude towards these two women. And this, surely, is the point. Annette does not replace Any, rather she reminds Bertin of her. The mother is not eclipsed by the daughter so much as reincarnated through her. The curious parallel of names reinforces the mirroring of the two characters. Annette seems like a diminutive of the mother’s name, Anne – but since Anne is most often referred to as Any, her own name appears in its turn to become a diminutive of her daughter’s. Sameness and difference mingle enigmatically, and just as the mother finds herself shadowed by her own daughter, so too the daughter, as perceived by Bertin, cannot hold her fascination for him without the memory and the image of the mother. The whole drama, for Bertin, is about how to negotiate this paradox and find an explanation for that in-between space in which he finds himself psychologically and epistemologically. It is, clearly, yet another example of the theme of the double in Maupassant, and just as the characters are doubles of each other, so too they present us with two alternative stories. Bertin’s attempt to steer his way through these two stories will put the question of narrative and its processes centre-stage once again, for in the end the novelist in turn is in the position of having to choose between alternatives. Crucial to our reading of Bertin’s negotiation of two women and two stories will be our assessment of the narrator’s position.
The early part of the narrative is taken up with the story of Bertin’s relationship with the mother, Any de Guilleroy, in a retrospective account of their liaison. In due course, Any’s daughter, Annette, occupies and fascinates the painter. As he did for the mother, so too Bertin wishes to paint a portrait of the daughter, and his story (whatever his “story” is) increasingly becomes a repetition and an echo of the past. This is no simple process of transfer or replacement of affections. The obsession with Annette is constantly nourished by the memory and presence of the mother. In the daughter he finds the mother, just as through the mother he finds the daughter. It is, in fact, the resemblance that guarantees Bertin against loving the daughter. And yet, in a narrative development that is typical of Maupassant, the characters will nonetheless come to settle collectively on an explanation of Bertin’s conduct as “love.” How this happens is central to our reading of the novel and must therefore be the focus of our attention here.
First it is Bertin’s mistress who spells out the possibility of “love” to him, although she seems ironically unaware that her diagnosis rests on a view of her daughter as a copy of herself: “Ma fille me ressemble trop, elle est trop tout ce que j’étais autrefois quand vous avez commencé à m’aimer, pour que vous ne vous mettiez pas à l’aimer aussi.” Bertin at this stage refutes the suggestion, with an argument that has some force because it exposes the flaw of Any’s reasoning: “Alors, s’écria-t-il, vous osez me jeter une chose pareille à la face sur cette simple supposition et ce ridicule raisonnement: il m’aime, ma fille me ressemble – donc il l’aimera” (Romans, 964). In the subsequent pages, he continues to hold this point of view as he reflects on the discussion that has taken place. “Certes, il ne se croyait pas amoureux d’Annette!” we read (Romans, 965). Now, our reading of Bertin’s inner monologue that takes place on this and the following two pages of the novel can follow one of two courses: either we interpret his reflections as an attempt to deny and repress the truth of his feelings for Annette; or we see them as a genuine attempt to define what his feelings for the daughter are, an interrogation carried out in good faith with the analytical skills he has at his disposal. Alongside his feeling of being “troublé comme s’il venait d’apprendre un honteux secret de famille” (a phrase highly reminiscent of the tone of Pierre’s reflections in the earlier novel), is a desire to weigh up and assess the nature of his attraction to the daughter, and a recognition that the daughter is a copy of the original – that is, of the mother:
Il n’y avait donc rien d’étonnant à ce que son cœur d’homme se laissât un peu surprendre, sans se laisser entraîner. Il avait adoré une femme! Une autre femme naissait d’elle, presque pareille. Il ne pouvait vraiment se défendre de reporter sur la seconde un léger reste affectueux de l’attachement passionné qu’il avait eu pour la première. Il n’y avait là rien de mal; il n’y avait là aucun danger. Son regard et son souvenir se laissaient seuls illusionner par cette apparence de résurrection; mais son instinct ne s’égarait pas, car il n’avait jamais éprouvé pour la jeune fille le moindre trouble de désir. (Romans, 967)

Now, what is striking in the course of this passage of free indirect discourse is that there is no obvious intervention or guidance by a narrator, nor any open indication as to how we should in our turn read the thoughts of the protagonist. Certainly, it is possible to read the passage as an attempt by Bertin to flee from the truth, and we might find in it occasional traces of special pleading (“il n’y avait là rien de mal”, etc.) On the other hand, there is nothing to indicate that Bertin’s final reflection – that he has never experienced desire for the daughter – may not also be the observation of a narrator. Indeed, unless we assume on the basis of subsequent developments in the story that Bertin is deceiving himself, there is no clear authority to believe he is doing so here. On the contrary, it seems that his thought processes are clearer at this stage than are those of his mistress, who has confronted him with the commonplace story of the man falling for a younger woman. That the commonplace does not fit seems to be repeatedly underlined in Bertin’s reflections.
And yet, as was also the case in Pierre et Jean, the commonplace narrative is like the genie in the lamp. When it escapes, even those who refused it seem to succumb to its power. Just as Pierre relays the diagnosis of his conduct as “jealousy,” so too Bertin, having shown quite convincingly that his attitude to Annette should not be labelled “love,” subsequently accepts that simplistic explanation. This flies in the face of his earlier assertions, and is one of the most puzzling aspects of the novel. Is it simply because, sentimental old fool that he is, he alone misses what is blindingly obvious? There are a number of reasons why the text ought not to be read in such a reductive manner. Most importantly, Bertin’s changed point of view seems to come about as a result of his mistress’s own fear of, and fascination with, the words “amour” and “aimer.” Oddly, she seems to want him to admit he is in love with her daughter: “Olivier, mon ami, mon seul ami, je vous en prie, dites-moi que vous l’aimez. Je le sais, je le sens à tout ce que vous faites, je n’en puis douter, j’en meurs, mais je veux le savoir de votre bouche” (Romans, 984). In the course of this discussion Bertin assures Any several times over that she is the one he loves. Yet his affirmations simply do not satisfy her – despite her appearing to take consolation from his words, in a scene that sees a clear reaffirmation of their love – for she continues in her attempts to extract an admission from him that he “loves” Annette. Bertin articulately, and repeatedly, refuses the diagnosis – and yet, no sooner has Any departed than he does a volte-face, reflecting: “Donc il aimait cette petite fille! Il comprenait maintenant tout ce qu’il avait éprouvé près d’elle…” (Romans, 986). For this reader at least, such a narrative progression must be viewed with extreme scepticism.
From this point on, Bertin apparently ceases to question his “love” for Annette, even though she has been paradoxically dismissed during his volte-face as a mere “petite fille,” a slip of a thing not worthy of an adult description. In a later conversation which seems a complete contradiction of what we had earlier read, he admits to Any that he does indeed love her daughter:
“Dieu ! comme vous l’aimez!”
Il avoua encore une fois :
“Ah! oui, je l’aime!”
Elle songea quelques instants, et reprit :
“Vous ne m’avez jamais aimée ainsi, moi?”
Il ne nia point, car il traversait une de ces heures où on dit toute la vérité, et il murmura :
“Non, j’étais trop jeune alors!” (Romans, 1012)

What are we to make of this, apart from reflecting that such comments to a long-standing mistress can hardly be considered gentlemanly? On the one hand, we could take this conversation at face value – but that seems deeply unsatisfactory in view of all that has preceded. On the other hand, we might also decide that Bertin’s motive for admitting he “loves” Any’s daughter is to please Any herself – because he has sensed that his mistress wants him to do just that. Yet a third possibility remains – and it does not exclude the second – namely, that Maupassant is self-consciously manipulating his reader into accepting a line of narrative that is blatantly implausible. But why should he do such a thing? Perhaps to show that conventional realist narrative is, as much as the characters it portrays, flawed, reductive and simplistic. The realist novelist has in turn to choose between different explanations of his character’s conduct, for the construction of narrative is also about the exclusion of other possible stories. That Maupassant should follow Bertin’s mistress and opt for the “love” explanation seems to be a deliberate espousal of an unsatisfactory but straightforward narrative line, and it certainly explains why critics have seen this novel as weak and unconvincing. Yet it also puts reflection about narrative at the centre of the text once again, for it flaunts the novelist’s own choice of a particular story (we are not yet at the stage where a novelist can offer two different endings, as John Fowles was later to do with The French Lieutenant’s Woman). Yet the possibility that the self-reflexive dimension is itself what accounts for the “weak” conclusion of Fort comme la mort does not appear to have been considered by critics. Is it too far-fetched to argue that Maupassant had to take a gamble with his story precisely because he had thematised within it the question of fiction and its construction? If all fiction is a lie, all narratives a simplification, then the logic of the position is that even the story which tells of that fact must lapse into simplification. There may ultimately be something daring and unusual – despite the fact that the experiment can be said to fail – about Maupassant’s technique in this novel, which takes the “roman de l’échec” to new outposts.
In this discussion of Fort comme la mort, we have scarcely touched upon the question of Bertin as an artist, but this is perhaps because, in a sense, his status as artist is incidental. As many critics have pointed out, Maupassant does not engage with aesthetic questions in the same manner as predecessors and contemporaries such as Balzac, Champfleury, the Goncourt brothers, or Zola. Forestier writes: “S’il est question de peinture dans notre roman, c’est comme d’un art qui ne suscite pas le débat, qui va de soi dans un monde qui l’accepte” (Romans, 1564). Clearly, there is no discussion in Maupassant’s novel of complex questions of aesthetics and method, though the fact that Bertin is an artist (albeit a mediocre one), who deals in his working life with the problem of how to represent what he perceives and feels, is a metaphoric parallel to the theme of narrative and its construction.
If the question of art is of predominantly symbolic status in Fort comme la mort, the same cannot be said of Maupassant’s last novel. Notre Cœur contains one important figure – the novelist Lamarthe – who reflects simultaneously on what he himself writes, on the changing literary climate, and on the evolution of fin de siècle society. His reflections, expressed on one occasion in the course of a conversation with Mariolle, the hero of the story, show that this final text is deeply concerned with the relationship between its own portrayal of love in the late nineteenth century and the evolving literary and social fashions of the day. Speaking of the female sex, Lamarthe opines:
Au temps où les romanciers et les poètes les exaltaient et les faisaient rêver … elles cherchaient et croyaient trouver dans la vie l’équivalent de ce que leur cœur avait pressenti dans leurs lectures. Aujourd’hui, vous vous obstinez à supprimer toutes les apparences poétiques et séduisantes, pour ne montrer que les réalités désillusionnantes. Or, mon cher, plus d’amour dans les livres, plus d’amour dans la vie. Vous étiez des inventeurs d’idéal, elles croyaient à vos inventions. Vous n’êtes maintenant que des évocateurs de réalités précises, et derrière vous elles se sont mises à croire à la vulgarité de tout. (Romans, 1105)

This provides a direct link from the story being recounted to the contemporary context. In his attempt to come to terms with the failure of his relationship with Michèle de Burne, Mariolle is led to question the assumptions upon which he bases his perception of her. But at the same time as he is required, by the logic of his position, to deconstruct his own notion of love, he realises that modern texts – somewhat cynically described by his friend Lamarthe – have in their turn “produced” a new type of woman, and that Michèle de Burne, far from remaining outside the purview of literature, is herself partly a literary production. And, to reinforce the point, we also learn that Lamarthe, as a writer, has used Michèle de Burne as the model for one of his books: “[Lamarthe] prétendait connaître et analyser les femmes avec une pénétration infaillible et unique. Il classait Mme de Burne parmi les détraquées contemporaines dont il avait tracé le type dans son intéressant roman Une d’elles. Le premier, il avait tracé cette race nouvelle de femmes…” (Romans, 1036). While Mariolle is trying to understand Michèle in terms of a broadly Romantic literature, Lamarthe’s portrayal of her in his own novel sees her as the source and the product of a new kind of literature. Inevitably this raises parallels with the novel that we are reading, situating it within this vogue of the “essai de psychologie contemporaine,” and yet distancing it from such models by its rather over-conspicuous self-designation. For what Maupassant is doing is reflecting, in the course of his fiction, about literary tradition and convention. His text asks questions about the effects of such traditions and conventions on the writing of the text, and in turn about how the writing of the text will impact on traditions and conventions. Is his own portrayal of the “new woman” a mere product of literary fashion, or a trail-blazing creation which will produce not only a new kind of text, but a new social “type”? The mise en abyme of the novelist within the novel engages Maupassant’s text in a dynamic relationship with its subject, and sets it somewhat apart from the psychological novels to which it refers. It also raises a very Flaubertian question: is the text we are reading a mere imitation, a slave to fashion, a repetition of what has gone before, or is it undermining the prevailing trends by a careful and subtle deconstruction of them? The fact that such a question needs to be asked, however implicitly, shifts the text into highly self-conscious mode.
This view of the text might seem, at first sight, to fly in the face of the realist approach to Notre Cœur which sees it predominantly as a text about a new type of woman in fashionable fin de siècle Paris. But this is not the case, and it is important to see that the realist content of the story is absolutely compatible with a view of it as a self-reflexive text. Certainly, as Forestier and others have stressed, the notion of a case-study is all-important here (Romans, 1610-11), and one cannot simply dismiss the milieu in which Maupassant sets his story. But this is precisely the point. Maupassant is commenting on the interrelatedness of literary and social fashions. Just as the milieu produces certain types of text, so too the text has an impact on the milieu, on its values, on its very psychology. It is in many ways a text about how the milieu “tells” itself, or narrates its own story. Mariolle, in his increasingly desperate relationship with Michèle de Burne, finds himself continuously confronted with the difficulty of adjusting his private account of that relationship – based on outdated literary and social models – to the circumstances of a modern society which produces modern women. His own story takes on a character of surprise and dismay, for even as he reflects on Michèle de Burne, analyses her and puts her into words, he realises that his narrative is running away with him, that it is out of control, that it is indeed telling him things he did not wish to know. As was the case with the two previous novels, the process of putting experience into narrative shape assumes its own power, so that the “teller” of the story is obliged to submit to the momentum of his own account. The inner monologues that Mariolle pursues are reminiscent, by their tone of distress and anxiety, of the inner monologues of Pierre in the earlier novel, as he realises that the “story” that he wants is clearly not the one that is emerging. Mariolle’s “text” is intimately related to the milieu in which he moves, and which he ultimately finds so incomprehensible even as he narrates it.
And what of the relationship between character and narrator in this novel? Is there evidence at any stage of that “narrative capitulation” that we saw in Fort comme la mort, where the narrator in his turn seems to assume and accept the simplistic explanation that his characters have arrived at? As in the previous novels, the narrative is predominantly focalised through its main characters, though an omniscient narrator does also have his say, particularly in those scenes where an initial portrait of a character is presented. Yet one of the strengths of this novel is that the main character does not reduce his experience to a simplistic narrative line, still less to a single word, but sticks with the full complexity of it. This gives the story both emotional intensity and narrative power. The narrator remains consistently in the background while Mariolle’s complex feelings for Michèle de Burne, and his complex attempt to understand and “narrate” her, are viewed from within. The character struggles to tell himself a story which, precisely, he does not understand – just as, to an extent, Pierre had done in the earlier novel. Throughout, we see him engaging with his own representations, wrestling with them, trying to get at the truth beyond the words. Yet, words are themselves the locus of truth, as Mariolle discovers when he reflects on his correspondence with his mistress and sees writing – the narration of self – as a key to the revelation of intimate emotions. And when, at the end of the story, he takes flight to Fontainebleau and finds a new mistress, in an action which seems at last to offer the possibility of clarity and closure, he discovers that his story refuses any simple dénouement. For at this point, with the construction of a profoundly enigmatic ending, the narrator too seems to collude with the character’s confusion and to draw attention to the artificiality of his own storytelling. Let us look briefly at what happens.
When Mariolle arrives in Fontainebleau, he befriends a waitress, Elisabeth, who soon becomes his mistress. There are parallels here with the waitress of Pierre et Jean, who provides sexual consolation for Pierre, except that in this novel the figure of consolation at least has a name and a character which evolves. Indeed, Elisabeth evolves significantly from her initial identity as a simple and naive peasant-girl, and she assumes a sophistication which is a reminder to Mariolle of his Parisian mistress. She becomes the educated coquette, reading passages to him from Manon Lescaut, and putting on make-up and seductive clothes. A chiasmic effect is established between the two women, especially since Michèle, the Parisian mistress, will now make a journey to Fontainebleau to retrieve her lover, and Elisabeth, the country girl, will at the end of the story plan to go to Paris with Mariolle when he returns. This chiasmic effect recalls the confusion of roles in Pierre et Jean, where the brothers, contrasted carefully at the beginning of the story, in a sense end up assuming each other’s role (Pierre, despite his training as a doctor, becomes the “judge,” and Jean, despite his training as a lawyer, is the one who ministers to the mother in her hour of need). In both cases, it is as though Maupassant is drawing attention, through the artifices of his storytelling, to the fact that we are dealing with a mere text, a narrative which must be constructed in accordance with certain conventions. The ending of Notre Cœur returns us to this artificial quality of narrative, and underlines the point that the telling of the story – be it by the character or by the author – is no more than a convention, that the complete truth can never be arrived at, that there is always a sense in which the narrative “pourrait être continué.” Denis Boak wryly remarks that “Notre Cœur ends just where it might start to be more interesting” (Boak, 1993, 125). But is that not the point? At the very moment when we look for closure and coherence, Maupassant denies it to us, reminding us – as his character Mariolle has already discovered – that we are dealing with a story, and that verbal representations of reality will always dissolve into incompletion and uncertainty. To have continued the story at this stage, and to have shown Mariolle struggling to reconcile his relationships with two increasingly similar women, would have been a capitulation – and in any case, that experiment had been tried earlier in Fort comme la mort. The open and indeterminate ending of Notre Cœur is one of its many strengths.
And it is at this point that we might, finally, return to thoughts about the links between Maupassant and Proust, for we have seen Maupassant moving beyond realism and feeling his way, tentatively perhaps, towards the post-realist novel. Just as the narrator of A la recherche du temps perdu works towards the construction of a story which will never be complete – because it must always return to its own beginning – so too Maupassant’s last finished novel reveals that the act of writing is, in a sense, a quest to rediscover its own premises and to lay bare the basis on which narrative is constructed. And like Proust, Maupassant weaves into his reflections on narrative a sharp and highly perceptive portrayal of the society of his day, showing how the fictional realities he portrays are not only an instrument with which to view that society, but also a product of it. It would be wrong, naturally, to stress these parallels too much, for Maupassant is not Proust, and he still writes partly in the shadow of Flaubert. Most obviously, Maupassant does not have the formidable power of generalisation that will be one of the hallmarks of A la recherche du temps perdu – for Proust stamps a philosophical and reflective layer onto the detailed narration of events and demonstrates masterfully that reflection on or about a story’s contents is itself a fundamental part of the story. Nor does Maupassant quite foresee the potential of the theme of time and the remembrance of the past, though Fort comme la mort shows him using the notion of memory to some effect. However, what this analysis of Maupassant’s last three novels has shown is that there is, despite the framework of nineteenth-century realism, a clear move towards a self-reflexive form of fiction, and an experimental treatment of the theme of narrative within the texts themselves. Where Flaubert had, with Bouvard et Pécuchet, come to a dead end, Maupassant now creates new pathways for the post-realist novel, and opens up the way for a self-conscious strand of fiction which will culminate in the late 1950s and 1960s with the nouveau roman.

The University of Liverpool

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NOTES