A Life (3 page)

It is true, then, that
A Life
presents the story of a seemingly inevitable process of degradation and disintegration, an 'entropic' vision which combines elements from both of Baguley's 'fundamental types' of naturalist novel. It is also true that this process is very emphatically seen as corresponding to some essential rhythm of nature. Just as the novel replaces the illusions of romance with some of the realities of adult sexuality, so too it substitutes for Rousseauistic idealism (as espoused by the Baron at the beginning of the novel) a view of nature in which the differences between human beings, animals, and plants become imperceptible within the broader context of immutable and irresistible cycles of nature. For one of the most prominent features of
A Life
is the way in which human destiny is interwoven with the pattern of the changing seasons and the vagaries of the weather. The novel opens on 3 May as the budding school-leaver contemplates her future and stands 'ready to reach out for all the good things in life of which she had so long been dreaming' (p. 3). Spring gives way to summer, and her courtship with Julien de Lamare leads to marriageon 15 August, as though the Feast of the Assumption were to mark the miraculous accession of the virginal Jeanne to a heaven of marital bliss. Following her first orgasm under the burning skies of Corsica, the return to Normandy and a drab life of routine is marked by autumnal melancholy; and her youthful dreams of romance and excitement are replaced by a winter of discontent in which the frozen landscape of late January becomes the scene of suicidal despair. But the seed of the future, of her son Paul, is stirring within her, and with pregnancy comes the following spring and a period of parturition prematurely ended in late July. So the cycle continues until the final pages of the novel when, on an evening in spring, 'an infinite peace lay upon the tranquil earth and the seed that lay  germinating within': and as Jeanne cradles her unnamed granddaughter in her lap, 'a feeling of soft, gentle warmth, the warmth of life, touched her legs and entered her flesh' (p. 239).

The relationship between human destiny and the cycles of nature is at the very least symbolic and quite frequently causal. A cold wind is blowing on the day of Jeanne's summer wedding, and there is a smell of autumn in the air. Another cold wind, the Mistral, marks the end of her honeymoon. A violent storm accompanies the tumultuous murder of Julien and Gilberte. Mama dies at haymaking time. But these details seem like mere vestiges of the pathetic fallacy when compared with the occasions on which human beings appear to respond instinctively to the promptings of nature. As the sap rises, the physical relationship between Julien and Gilberte blossoms, and even Jeanne herself feels 'vaguely unsettled by this fermenting of life around her' (p. 139). Later, at the end of the novel, when she spends day after day sitting in front of the fire, the arrival of spring fills her with 'a restless excitement' (p. 233), and soon she is roaming the countryside once more as though filled with the 'unruly joy' of earlier days. The universe is governed by the rhythm of creation, germination, gestation, decay, death, and human beings are no less subject to its irresistible force than animals, or insects, or plants. Such is the view of Creation which, later in the novel, the Baron is said to hold: a
fateful, limitless, all-powerful force . . . simultaneously life, light, earth, thought, plant, rock, man, beast, star, God, insect; which created precisely because it
was
Creation, stronger than any individual will, vaster than any capacity to reason, and productive for no purpose, without cause or temporal limit, in all directions and in all shapes and dimensions, across the infinite reaches of space, as chance and the proximity of world-warming suns dictated. (p. 170)

The passage of the seasons is profoundly sexual and the setting of the sun is a diurnal act of copulation, which Jeanne witnesses during her boat trip at Étretat: 'the sea arched its gleaming, liquid belly beneath the sky and waited, like some monstrous bride, upon the arrival of the fiery lover descending towards her' (p. 35). The Baron is thus perhaps justified in his ambition to let Jeanne learn the facts of life from 'the spectacle of natural love, of the simple courtship of animals' (p. 4). But of course the irony will be that she learns about sexual intercourse at the hands of an animal-like Julien, who 'grabbed her in his arms, rabidly, as though filled with a ravenous hunger for her' (p. 56); and when she does chance to observe two birds mating (p. 141), it serves only to make her realize why Julien and Gilberte are taking so long to return to their horses.

This equation between human beings, animals, insects, and inanimate objects is constantly demonstrated. The equivalence is no longer one of straightforward and comfortable allegory, as in the La Fontaine fables of which Jeanne is so fond ('the fox and the stork, the fox and the crow, the cicada and the ant, and the melancholy heron': p. 210), but rather an implicit devaluation of human dignity. Aunt Lison's attempted suicide is an 'episode' on a par with the death of Coco the horse, and Lison herself is of so little human consequence that mention of her name inspires no more affection than the words 'sugar-bowl' or 'coffee-pot' (p. 44). For Jeanne, newly married, two ladybirds sheltering under a leaf provide an image of domestic harmony (p. 49), while on her way to Corsica her heart leaps with the dolphins (p. 60). Slaughter the dog, for the novel is the story of his life too, is born during a murderous assault by the Abbé Tolbiac (which prefigures the Comte de Fourville's destruction of the 'love nest' shared by Julien and Gilberte), is given a 'wet-nurse' (a cat: even the boundaries of species disintegrate), lives most of his life alone and chained to a barrel, and dies after a period of howling agitation which Jeanne later sees as analogous with her own restless anguish (p. 234).

In the end, human activity has as little importance as the ceaseless flitting of the pendulum bee in Jeanne's clock, itself a beehive in which the only honey is life's monotony. This timepiece (like Mama's watch, still ticking after her death) comes to symbolize the patterns of repetition and circularity which characterize our clockwork existence, and with which Maupassant has shaped the 'subject' of his novel. For 'a life' is, if nothing else, a passage  of time, at once a journey into the unknown and a round-trip from infancy to dotage. Hence the emblematic importance of the calendar which Jeanne packs into her travelling-bag on the first page, and of the calendars which, in the final chapter, she salvages from the attic and pins onto the tapestries downstairs before circling the sitting-room 'as though it had been hung with prints depicting the Stations of the Cross' (p. 232). For Jeanne, life, all life, is much less a 'progress', more a circuit, a reliving of other people's lives, of her own past life. The young girl who started out with such hopes for the future and convinced of her own unique individuality (for all the stereotypical character of her romantic ambitions) turns out to be no more than a sad amalgam of her mother and aunt. Already, as she listens to Mama's reminiscences during their first days together at Les Peuples, Jeanne 'could see herself in these stories of former days, and was startled by the similarity of their thoughts, by the kinship of their desires; for every heart imagines itself the first to thrill to a myriad sensations which once stirred the hearts of the earliest creatures and which will again stir the hearts of the last men and women to walk the earth' (p. 23). But by the end of the novel she has still failed to realize how much life has repeated itself. Just as her own mother inhabits a world of romantic fantasy (p. 22) and lives in the past, periodically consulting her 'relics' (p. 22; p. 145), so Jeanne has her own repertoire of fantasies (pp. 934) and comes to live almost exclusively in the past (through her calendars). While she escapes her mother's 'hypertrophy', Jeanne nonetheless ends up 'frail and dragging her feet now, as Mama used to' (p. 206), feeling 'as though she were no longer able to breathe properly' (p. 216), and obliged like her mother to take exercise with the aid of the ever-mobile Rosalie (p. 230). Just as Mama had wept when Jeanne was sent away to school (p. 4), so Jeanne weeps when the time comes to send her son to college in Le Havre (pp. 18990). For mother as for daughter, endless walks up and down the avenue at Les Peuples are the symbol of a monotonous and repetitive existence (pp. 21, 76, 118, 1445). Yet at least her mother knew the thrill of true love in her adulterous affair with Paul d'Ennemare, whereas Jeanne's response to Julien's treacheries is not to repeat the betrayal of her friend Gilberte and seek consolation in the arms of the Comte de Fourville, but rather to become 'dead to all carnal need' (p. 143) in the manner of her maiden aunt. For both women compulsive embroidery provides a channel for displaced desire; each attempts or at least contemplates suicide; and, like Lison, Jeanne eventually comes to feel all alone in the world, at her small house at Batteville, where 'no one paid her any attention' (p. 218). The metamorphosis is complete when, during Jeanne's trip to Paris, the 'rapid, timorous steps' (p. 226) with which she walks up and down the gardens of the Palais-Royal recall the 'short, rapid, silent steps' (p. 44) with which Lison flits unremarked hither and thither at Les Peuples.

Not only does Jeanne's life repeat that of others, it repeats itself. Sometimes she intends the repetition, as when she revisits the wood near Étretat, only to find that the place of her first sexual stirrings has now become the scene of a double treachery (p. 141). At other times the parallels are implicit. Thus her oblivious rapture at the lunch party following the 'baptism' of the new boat ('She saw nothing, thought nothing, said nothing, as her head swam with joy': p. 40) finds a tragic echo in her crazed absence of mind during the lunch following her final visit to Les Peuples and the mad vision of her deceased parents sitting by the fireside ('She ate what was put in front of her, she heard people talking but had no idea what they were talking about': p. 237). 'I'm going to die . . . I
am
dying' (p. 102), she thinks to herself, one bitterly cold night before discovering Julien in bed with Rosalie; 'I'm going to die. I
am
dying', she thinks, in the midst of her labour pains before giving birth to her son (p. 122).

And if the climactic moments in her life can be so repetitious, what of the long days, and months, and years which elapse between 3 May 1819 and the end of the novel, nearly twenty-nine years later in the spring of 1848? As monotonous, presumably, as the cold, autumnal days that follow her return from honeymoon: 'And the remaining days in the week were like the first two; and every week in the month was like the first' (p. 79). Part of Maupassant's intention here is no doubt to achieve 'the effect of dreariness' which Henry James considered to be the essential

'subject' of the novel.
6
But there are more surreptitious patterns of repetition, which suggest that the author of
A Life
wished to instil a strong sense of cyclicity in his reader. Our final view of Jeanne at the end of the novel is of her being driven off to a new life, cradling a baby in her arms; and we may be reminded of the first journey in the novel when, as the Le Perthuis des Vauds set off for their new life at Les Peuples, 'Jeanne felt as though she were coming back to life', while beside her sits Rosalie, 'nursing a parcel on her knees' (p. 7). The conveyance has changed from an expensive private carriage to a peasant's cart, and the identity of the person in the driving seat has changed (with the sociological significance noted above), but the message remains the same: 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.' Superficial mutations serve to throw into relief the fundamental constants of universal experience.

Narrative and the Novel

This tension between sameness and difference, between stasis and change, is central to
A Life
, and not least because this is the first novel of a writer whose narrative skills were particularly suited to the form of the short story. It has traditionally been held that the distinguishing feature of a novel is its capacity to follow the evolution of an individual, or a group of individuals, or even a society, through time: to account for change, to chart a sequence of cause and effect, whether psychological or socio-historical, to document a process. In the short story, on the other hand, the focus is more usually, for reasons of brevity, on a single event, on some unique moment upon which a human destiny may depend (which is why the genre of the short story has sometimes been compared to drama). The difference in length can therefore be seen to entail two potentially quite different moral universes: briefly stated, in the novel people do things, in the short story things happen to people. In these terms one might argue that while
A Life
has the appearance of being a novel, both its

6
Henry James, 'Guy de Maupassant' (1888), in
Selected Literary Criticism
, ed. Morris Shapira (London, 1963), 106.
narrative structure and its moral universe owe more to the short story.

As regards narrative structure, it is plain that the novel is constructed predominantly as a series of quasi-theatrical scenes interspersed with succinctly summarized and for the most part indeterminate blanks of time. Homecoming, visit to Yport, boat-trip, 'baptism' of new boat, wedding-night, honeymoon in Corsica, Rosalie in childbirth, Jeanne's discovery of Julien and Rosalie, suicidal dash through the snow, fishing by torchlight, death of Mama, slaughter of litter, slaughter of Julien and Gilberte, return of Rosalie, moving house, trip to Paris, last visit to Les Peuples . . . Each episode is narrated with a minimum of secondary detail and a maximum of dialogue and 'visual aids', permitting the reader to experience each 'hammer-blow' of fate with the immediacy of Jeanne herself. Indeed, such is the discrete status of each episode that several had already served, or were later reworked, as short stories in their own right (
An Evening in Spring, The Bed, The Vigil, Old Things, A Tale of Corsica, Shepherd's Leap, A Meeting, A Humble Drama
). Time slows or accelerates as the subject demands: moments of high drama occupy several pages while for the transformation of Paul from infant into ungrateful son (so that the hammer-blows can continue) over some twenty-two years are covered in a single chapter (Ch. XI).