“Sometimes it is as bitter to see an illusion destroyed as to witness the death of a friend.“
Will Maupassant get canceled? Why, you will ask astonished. Well, after all, this is a book about a woman’s life written by a man. But it is done so exquisitely and so accurately that one hopes the modern moral inquisitors will show mercy.
Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant did spend a lot of time with women, mostly prostitutes, and his powers of observation must have been tremendous. He lived his short life intensely and without regrets, shunning traditional ways of living, avoiding the nightmares of society in the 19th century (which he often criticised in his books), only to die at 42 ravaged by syphilis, not before taking time to write his own epitaph: “I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing.”
Une Vie (A Life) was his first novel and literary success in 1883. First serialised in Gil Blas, a Parisian literary periodical, It was soon published in book form and became a phenomenon. Tolstoy called it the best French novel since Hugo’s Les Misérables.
There is really nothing much to say about the plot as there isn’t any. The book simply tells the life of Jeanne, a young aristocrat from Normandy. We follow her as she gets out of a convent she was sent to at the age of 12, returns to her beloved family home in the countryside, dreams and plans out her life she thinks promising and full of happiness, gets married to Julien, Count de Lamare, and settles down to a traditional way of life appropriate to her class.
What makes the story are the disillusions of Jeanne and the realism with which Maupassant depicts her life. It is not a simple coming-of-age tale. There is a whole indictment here: of a class, its educational methods, its traditions, its surprising naiveté. Jeanne, as many aristocrats then and now, is sheltered too efficiently from the realities of life and, thus, not prepared for tragedies and betrayals.
The shock of it all is so crude and overwhelming that she soon falls into a sort of depression she will carry around most of her life. Maupassant makes us witnesses and intimate spectators. It feels awkward at times, but the writing is so beautiful that we feel everything with her, we identify with many situations, we root for her (even if she is sometimes exasperating in her ways). What is most striking is how she perpetuates that condition by bringing up her son in the same manner, unaware that she is creating even more hardships. She can be cunning, but for all the wrong reasons.
Maupassant is keen to point out how the lower classes are more economically savvy and practical, how life teaches them. He also touches on religious matters in a very French way as when the beloved priest of the county teaches Jeanne how to revive her husband’s passion for her. The depictions of the Normandy region are mesmerising, it almost feels like being there in the flesh.
It is not a happy book, but it is not Zola either. The title suggest an epic narrative. It is really the story of a life not lived. There is a shadow of hope at the end, but will Jeanne finally decide on another path? She is a coward in many ways, but aren’t we all…
A life (Une Vie) by Guy de Maupassant
Oxford World’s Classics, UK, 2009
288 pages
Bookish Felix 