Our Reading Journey
In our Fall 2026 session, we walked the boulevards of 1880s Paris beside Georges Duroy, a former cavalryman back from Algeria with a handsome mustache, a few coins in his pocket, and no visible talent. Week after week, we watched him rise through newsrooms, salons, and bedrooms, and we kept asking the question Maupassant refuses to answer for us: is Duroy a calculating strategist, or a man carried upward by a world as cynical as he is?
The difficulty, we discovered, comes from the way the novel is written. Maupassant took Flaubert's lesson of an invisible narrator and pushed it further, and his handling of free indirect discourse made for some of our liveliest sessions. Duroy's thoughts slip into the narration without quotation marks, in the narrator's own syntax, so that we often cannot tell whether an ironic phrase belongs to the author or to his hero. The result is an extraordinary ambiguity. The book never condemns Duroy outright, and never quite lets him off. It leaves the verdict to us, and in doing so makes us slightly complicit in every step of his ascent.
Around him, the whole of society turns out to be for sale: a press that invents the news it prints, colonial ventures run as stock-market speculation, politicians who are also shareholders. We spent a long time on the women of the novel, who hold no official power and yet know more than anyone else in it. Excluded from the newsroom and the Chamber, they work through salons, marriages, information, and sometimes the pen, and Maupassant gives some of them a lucidity that Duroy never reaches. And then there is the sheer sensuality of the writing: the scents that cling to a room, the rustle and weight of fabrics, the shifting lights of gas lamps and cafés at dusk. Maupassant records desire through the senses before any thought arrives, and the pleasure of reading him is inseparable from the unease of what he shows.
About the Author
Guy de Maupassant (1850–1893) entered literature as the protégé of Gustave Flaubert, a friend of his mother's family, and became famous overnight with Boule de suif (1880), his contribution to the naturalist collection Les Soirées de Médan. Over the next decade, he wrote some three hundred short stories and six novels, ranging from social satire to the fantastic tales of Le Horla. He had worked as a ministry clerk and wrote regularly for the Paris papers, and that experience gives Bel-Ami (1885), first serialized in Gil Blas, its sharp knowledge of the press. The novel has been adapted for the screen many times.