Fort Comme La Mort or, The Ruling Passion by Guy de Maupassant (1889)

The tussle in my mind about Maupassant streams between two main impressions: a usually splendid style, even in translation, and dubiety of subject matter, or 'attitude'. Here, the balance lies in favour of his style. There are quiet thrills in beautifully modulated moments rippling through this. And the subject matter is not his worst, but it's still where the problem ultimately lies. Olivier Bertin and Any de Guilleroy, an artist and a society countess, have been in love for years. Her husband doesn't know how far their relationship has gone, though he's aware of their intense friendship. They are both beginning to age and wear down, but they have a remarkably youthful connection still, often swinging time together alone in the afternoons, or at night when her husband is out pursuing his political life. Any's daughter, Annette, comes back home to Paris, having been away at a convent school, in order to come out and hopefully catch a husband. Olivier is shocked by the change in her when he sees her again. She's extraordinarily beautiful in a way which almost carbon copies her mother's beauty when he first knew her all those years ago. As she stands under her mother's famous early portrait in their home, Olivier cannot divide them. From this moment things begin to change, and the key failings of both Olivier's and Any's personality come home to roost. Olivier is an artist, a slave to beauty, but he is convinced that that's all it is. Any sees the writing on the wall much earlier, and starts to feel profound jealousy of her daughter and terrible slow panic about her ageing. By the time that Olivier finally comes to realise that he feels something more for Annette she is engaged to be married. Any, while she stoically sympathises with her lover's anguish, doesn't want Annette's chances disturbed, so she tells Olivier straight out that he must make himself scarce until her marriage has occurred. Knocked weak by the realisation of his feelings for Annette, his letdown of Any, and his jealousy of Annette's betrothed, Olivier can't sleep and walks the Paris streets. He steps off a curb without proper attention and is run down by a passing cab. Maupassant figures his subsequent death in Any's arms as a merciful release from torment. It's not a huge objection, but I do have a feeling that Olivier and Any are almost too childlike in their egotism and immaturity. The key in which those failings play changes over time I think. But I guess that there is also a large range of response in matters of jealousy - and they are pampered types, quite clearly. This edition also includes two stories, Duchoux about a wealthy father of an illegitimate boy who meets his son for the first time in middle age and is deeply disappointed by his vulgarity, and Old Amable, a fine moral tale of a cranky peasant who, as he ages, finds it very hard to relinquish control over first his son and then his widowed daughter-in-law.

Commonplace Book

'The world would be appreciably less unbearable if men and women could travel abroad without describing their travels on their return.'

from Sonia by Stephen McKenna (Chapter III, Part II)

Commonplace Book

'"...The enormous majority of M.P.s go into politics for what they can get out of them - legal jobs, office, local honour and glory - and it gets worse every time another poor man is elected. They can't afford to wait, these poor men; therefore they can hold no independent view; therefore they'll accept any dam', dirty, dishonest, shift their leaders may suggest. And so public life gets more sordid every day."'

from Sonia by Stephen McKenna (Chapter III, Part I)

Commonplace Book

'...A commonplace mind and life are the lot of the conventional, and conventionality is the atmosphere in which alone the timid can exist. To defy a convention may not gain a man the whole world, but it not infrequently saves his soul.'

from Sonia by Stephen McKenna (Chapter II, Part V)