A Life (4 page)

As to moral universe, is this the story of a free agent or of a series of events passively undergone? On the one hand, this is assuredly the story of a life, of Jeanne de Lamare, who leaves school, falls in love, marries, is deceived by her husband, has a son who abandons her, and is finally saddled, and blessed, with a grandchild to raise. But, as we have seen, this seeming onward march of events is characterized by repetition and circularity. Such alterations as occur in Jeanne's circumstances constitute an unrelenting series of dispossessions, both of her property and of the persons she loves or cares for: her husband, her parents, her only woman friend, her son. Jeanne begins the novel as a stereotype and ends it as a nonentity. By the same token, while the novel abounds symbolically in journeys and excursions, these changes  of location prove most usually to be mere forays into sameness. The first journey of all apparently represents a liberation (from convent education) and a new beginning; but this new beginning takes place in an old chateau that has been restored (some critics have seen it as symbolizing the Restoration of the French Monarchy in 1815, shortly before the period in which the opening of the novel is set), and the liberation proves to be merely the substitution of one form of incarceration for another (a loveless marriage and 'a quotidian reality', in which there is 'nothing left to do, today, tomorrow, ever again': p. 75). Certainly the honeymoon in Corsica provides a different landscape, and serves to recall the Napoleonic excitement and 'liberation' which preceded the Restoration, but the statutory account of the maquis and the depredations of Corsican jealousy (in the story related by Paoli Palabretti) will prove to be no more 'exotic' than the Comte de Fourville's violent murder of his wife and Julien de Lamare upon the cliffs of Normandy. The various calls paid on fellow aristocrats are but pointless journeys into the mothballed irrelevance of the
ancien régime
, while Jeanne's final expedition to Paris brings her not a reunion with her son but the most desolate sense of isolation: 'And she felt more entirely alone in this bustling crowd, more wretched and lost, than if she had been standing in the middle of an empty field' (p. 227). For these reasons, Mama's daily exercise up and down her avenue epitomizes the novels' presentation of time and place: ever on the move, departing and returning, desperately trying to breathe yet dead to any enthusiasm other than her genealogical and amatory past, this Baroness who had 'waltzed in the arms of every man in uniform under the Empire' (p. 22) is always going nowhere. Like the long, straight wake behind the steamer taking the newlyweds to Corsica, or the long, straight railway line stretching to the horizon in the final chapter, the trail of grassless dust left by Mama's dragging foot symbolizes the unswerving rut of purposeless time.

Towards a Conclusion

For Jeanne herself life is not an active journey into the future but a passive disintegration beneath the weight of a cruel destiny. Already we have seen how at the end of the novel 'she believed herself to be so directly the target of unrelenting misfortune that she became as fatalistic as an Oriental' (p. 231); and part of this passivity derives from her role as a subordinated woman. Having been told by her father on her wedding-night to 'remember this, and only this, that you belong totally to your husband' (p. 52), she becomes the victim of her husband's despotism. Physically his slave and economically his dependant, she is powerless to protest at his infidelity as the Abbé Picot forces a conjugal reconciliation on her in the name of Christian forgiveness, and her husband and father leave her bedroom to patch up their quarrel over a manly cigar. And whereas on this occasion she wants to leave Julien but is prevented by the Church, later the fanatical Abbé Tolbiac calls on her to reject her adulterous husband when she is financially and legally unable to do so (p. 172). But from Julien's sexual oppression she learns what Maupassant believes to be a universal lesson: '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' (p. 64). Likewise later in the novel, when Jeanne is returning from Yport with her father and observes the lights in the scattered farmhouses, she is filled with 'an acute sense of the isolation in which all creatures live, of how everything conspires to separate them and keep them apart, to remove them far away from that which otherwise they might love' (p. 91).

She who had looked forward to a perfect union with 'Him' comes to have a deeply pessimistic outlook on the world which owes much to her creator's nihilism and the philosophy of Schopenhauer (17881860), whose recently translated writings had struck such a chord in him. Keeping vigil over her mother's corpse, Jeanne reflects on the meaning of life and the conundrum that is death:

So there was nothing, then, but sorrow, grief, misfortune, and death. It was all just deceit and lies, things to make one suffer and weep. Where was there a little respite and joy to be found? In another life no doubt! When the soul had been delivered from its ordeal upon earth! The soul! She began to reflect on this unfathomable mystery . . . Where, then, was her mother's soul at this precise moment . . . ? Far, far away, perhaps. Somewhere in space? But where? . . . Recalled to God? Or scattered, randomly assumed into the process of new creation, mingling with the seeds that were about to spring into life? (p. 152)

Compare Maupassant's remarks in a letter to Flaubert on 5 July 1878: 'From time to time I have such a clear perception of the pointlessness of everything, of the unthinking malice of creation, of the emptiness that lies ahead (whatever form the future may take) that I am filled with a sad indifference towards all things and I just want to sit in a corner and stay there, devoid of hope and free from all vexation.'

Some such thoughts appear to be going through Jeanne's mind at the end of the novel, as she remains for days on end seated by the fire in her sitting-room, 'not moving, her eyes fixed on the flames, letting her sorry thoughts wander where they pleased and observing the sad procession of her miseries' (p. 229). Desperately she tries to make sense of what has gone before, and her obsessive attempts to spell the name of her son in the air suggest that writing may be the means to such an understanding, as if she were anticipating the task of Maupassant himself. For as she wanders down the
via dolorosa
that is memory lane, circling round the calendars in her living-room as if they were prints representing the (fourteen) Stations of the Cross, so here, in the fourteenth and final chapter, the novelist brings his story full circle and may seem to offer both hope and meaning in his ending. Jeanne has reached her Calvary in the house at Batteville, forsaken not by God but by the son whose birth had been her heart's salvation ('she realized that she had been saved, secured against all despair, that she now held in her arms something she could love to the ultimate exclusion of all else': p. 123). But Rosalie departs for Paris and returns, on the third day (p. 238)with the means of her heart's resurrection, the unnamed baby girl  whose warmth penetrates her flesh. For
A Life
is thus entitled not so much because it recounts the life of Jeanne de Lamare (since her life, far from ending with the novel, is seen to begin anew), but because the one ray of hope in the midst of despair is provided by 'a life', that simple, biological cog in the great wheel of Creation, to which human beings may respond with a sense of purpose and the instinct to protect. A life becomes a reason for living.

The banality of Rosalie's closing remark: 'You see, life's never as good or as bad as we think', which is no less banal for having been proclaimed to Maupassant by Flaubert in a letter at the end of December 1878recalls the banality of the exchange between Jeanne and her father as they return home from Yport: '''Life is not all fun" [Jeanne observes.] The Baron sighed: "I'm afraid not, my child, and there's nothing we can do about it"' (p. 92). In a novel which claims in its subtitle to be presenting 'the humble truth', the homespun character of these observations is perhaps appropriate; and of course in the case of Rosalie the comment is entirely in keeping with her resilient practicality, which has seen her through a life of wildly fluctuating fortunes. But does her remark constitute a 'message'? Is this Maupassant's final word?

For all its mediocrity it does underscore the suggestion of a 'resurrection' at the end of the novel, and yet perhaps it is only Jeanne and Rosalie who see things in such a light. A more sceptical reader might interpret this moment (and several critics have) as merely the first stage in a further cycle of failure and disillusionment. On the other hand, the generality of the remark may remind us that while Jeanne's life has been almost unrelievedly grim, hers has not been the only life on display; and thus it may encourage us to look back on the narrative and realize that the almost exclusive focus on Jeanne's point of view may have obscured the degree to which fortunes have indeed been mixed. For this is a novel which opens with a picture of joy marred by rain and ends with a portrait of despair illuminated by sunshine and hope (represented not only by the baby but by the possibility that Paul, despite all previous evidence to the contrary, might actually arrive by the same train on the following day). Through-  out the novel we see that sexual desire, while it may be an instinctive urge which makes human beings no different from dolphins or ladybirds, is indeed
natural
. Chastity is a perversion and breeds prurience (the Abbé Picot), pathological violence and fanaticism (the Abbé Tolbiac), or lonely misery (Lison). The sexual appetites of the young men and women of Normandy are part of life; and the sexual act, like nature, can be variously good or bad, both a source of joy, to Jeanne (briefly), to her parents (whether maritally or extra-maritally), to Julien and Gilberte, and yet also a brutal act of rape. Love does exist: Mama has known it, perhaps her husband too, Jeanne knows it (briefly), the Comte de Fourville knows it (illusorily and unrequitedly), Paul and his mistress know it (unto death). But hatred too exists, and the hurt that comes with betrayal. For all 'the sad procession of her miseries' (p. 229) Jeanne should at least count herself fortunate to have known the joy of parenthood when she can see how both her aunt and the Comte de Fourville are conscious of having missed out. They have been prevented from engendering and nurturing a life.

As one who learned many lessons from Flaubert, Maupassant will not have failed to be aware of the Master's favourite dictum: 'Human stupidity lies in wanting to conclude'; and the author of
A Life
would seem to have concluded his first novel with the most ambivalent and inconclusive of aphorisms. Yet if there is one unambiguous villain in Maupassant's first novel, it must surely be the Abbé Tolbiac, because people of his sort, as the Baron puts it, 'hate the physical': 'Such people must be resisted, it is our right and duty to do so. They're inhuman' (p. 170). Life is for living; Jeanne needs something to live for; the warm, living flesh of a baby brings her back to life. What a terrible and poignant irony it must, therefore, have been for Maupassant himself that his first (and illegitimate) child should have been born on the very day that the first instalment of his first novel was published, and that midway through its publication he should have been told by an eye specialist, Dr Landolt, what he had already suspected: that he had syphilis, a disease contracted, and passed on, in the very act of creating a life. Or perhaps it was not an irony. He first mentions his syphilis (in the letter to Pinchon) nine months  before he tells Flaubert of his plans for his first novel. Was it perhaps the prospect of his own mortality that made him start
A Life
? And was it the prospect of his first-born that made him end the novel as he did? 'In the midst of life we are in death,' and
vice versa
; or as Norbert de Varenne, the nihilistic poet in Maupassant's second novel
Bel-Ami
, puts it: 'to live is to die': 'Life is a hill. For as long as we're climbing, we have our eyes on the summit and we feel happy; but as soon as we arrive at the top, we suddenly see the way down and the end, which is death. It's slow going on the way up, but fast on the way down.'
7
In
A Life
the ascent is brief the descent protracted and unflinchingly, compellingly, told.

7
Romans
, ed. Louis Forestier (Paris, 1987), 299.

NOTE ON THE TRANSLATION

This translation is based on the text of
Une vie
edited by Louis Forestier in the Pléiade edition of the
Romans
(Paris, 1987). First published in 1883,
Une vie
was published in a revised edition by Ollendorff in 1893. Forestier follows the latter text in the belief that Maupassant himself made the corrections to his 1883 text; Antonia Fonyi (GF-Flammarion, 1993) argues that Maupassant was too ill by this time to do so, and that even when he was well, he was not much given to the revision of his previously published work. While Fonyi's arguments have some force, the matter remains uncertain; and it has seemed best to follow what is still regarded as the standard edition. The variants between the 1883 and 1893 editions are in any case not of major consequence.

Une vie
was first published in English (in an anonymous translation) by Henry Vizetelly in 1888 as no. 8 in his series of 'Boulevard Novels', and bore the title
A Woman's Life
. A subsequent (bowdlerized) translation, by Henry Blanchamp, preferred
A Woman's Soul
(London, 1907), but thereafter
A Woman's Life
was thought to be the appropriate title by Bree Narran (London, 1920) and Antonia White (London, 1949). Katharine Vivian's translation for the Folio Society in 1981 retains the French title. To date there have been thirteen translations of the novel into English, of which only one (by Marjorie Laurie in the 1920s) has been entitled
A Life
.