something about Guy de Maupassant's "A Life"

A Life (Une Vie), French author Guy de Maupassant’s (1850-1893) first novel, tells of a life that falls well short of the protagonist’s hopes and expectations. The story begins when Jeanne de Lamare, a young woman and only daughter of wealthy Norman aristocrats, finishes her schooling at the convent. Her parents have set her up at a picturesque family property on a secluded bit of coast. Jeanne, who has enjoyed a sheltered upbringing, imagines falling in love and living a peaceful life of happiness and romance on her family property. Soon Jeanne pairs up with a young man who, though not wealthy, is attractive and has enough social capitol. They marry and enjoy a romantic honeymoon. But things go downhill after that. In time, Jeanne is disappointed by almost every person and with almost every facet of her life.

Jeanne is a victim of the dishonesty and treachery of others; but she is also a fool. She suffers from completely unrealistic expectations. She also demonstrates a very fragile and easily disturbed emotional state, often experiencing wild emotional swings. These flaws make each disappointment hurt twice as much.

Here are some of my favorite passages:

In her heart she felt resentful towards Julien for not understanding as much, for lacking this finer sense of modesty, this instinctive delicacy of feeling; and she felt as though there were a veil between them, a barrier, and realized for the first time that two people are never completely one in their heart of hearts, in their deepest thoughts, that they walk side by side, entwined sometimes but never completely united, and that in our moral being we each of us remain forever alone throughout our lives.

Suddenly she caught sight of a seagull being carried across the sky by a gust of wind; and she recalled the eagle that she had seen, back there, in Corsica, in the darkness of the Val d'Ota. Her heart registered the sharp pang which comes with the memory of something good that is now over; and all at once she saw again the radiant island with its wild perfume, its sun that can ripen orange and citron, its mountains with their rosy peaks, its blue bays, in ravines where torrents race.

 

So they began their excursions. They always rode in pairs, the Comtesse and Julien in front, the Comte and Jeanne a hundred paces behind. The latter chatted away quietly, like old friends, for friends they had become, brought together by integrity and simplicity of heart. The former were often whispering together, occasionally bursting into storms of laughter, or suddenly looking at each other as if their eyes had things to tell of which their mouths could never breathe a word; and all of a sudden they would go galloping off, prompted by an urge to flee, to ride further and further away.

 

She would spend whole days sitting there, not moving, her eyes fixed on the flames, letting her sorry thoughts wander where they pleased and observing the sad procession of her miseries. Darkness would gradually descend on the little room, and still she would not have moved, except to put more logs on the fire. 

A Life (Une vie, L'Humble Vérité) was published in 1883. I enjoyed it very much. Its theme of life diverging from expectations reminds me of Richard Yates.

 

Notes:

• Gustave Flaubert mentored Maupassant.
• I also enjoyed Maupassant’s Bel-Ami (1885) and many of his short stories, including "Boule de Suif."
• De Maupassant is said to have written his own epitaph, something to the effect of, "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing."

P.S. When I finished A Life, I read some more Maupassant short stories in a very nice hardcover book—Stories, a Franklin Library limited edition book illustrated in some expressive watercolors by Lily Harmon and dated 1977.

 

about sightseeing

Stars go silent but live on in the light waves that travel through time and space. When we’re lucky, their light enters through our cornea, which bends light toward the pupil, which controls the amount of light that hits the lens, which then focuses the light on a layer of nerves called the retina. Is that how it works? Then, after the nerve impulses are processed, we see it. Those waves reach us, reach into us and find something like it, and we seek them out.

 

about travel

I felt I owned the area around my front door. I wanted to control who parks where, who loiters there, what grows where. 

I used to look out and see conjoined buildings. When I moved in, some ivy had grown all over an outside wall, and I liked that. But a wood-stemmed scrub tree started to grow near the same crack where the ivy grew. I tried to poison the tree but poisoned the ivy, too. It died. The wind started to take away the dead leaves, but I still knew I made a mistake.

In time—a year or more—the ivy grew back. It started to wrap around to the conjoined building—a restaurant. Someone there—a manager, not the owner—must have thought it unbecoming, so he showed the dishwasher where to cut the ivy, to cut it where it grew. So the dishwasher returned with a big knife and cut the ivy. I watched the leaves wilt again, and a week or two later, it was all dead.

I used to drive about 10 miles to work and 10 miles back. I had to learn the inclines and the declines, the potholes, the best lanes to be in and when. I earned that knowledge, so I owned that experience and in an abstract way even a percentage of that land. But I am a slave to what I own and get frustrated when I cannot control everything about it.

You must be somewhere else when you commute. Driving the same path every day, seeing the same things, and going through the same gates of this circular dimension, pretending to be the same person every day. No, you must put yourself somewhere else.

But you travel and go to a place for the first time, you are up against the world and it’s new again.

Note: Who was only a stranger at home?

about one early October commute through the Reagan Metro stop

My helium heart jumped out the window of the railcar as it slid across the bridge over light airport traffic—the cars of flattened cares circling in to pick up or drop off.