Pierre et Jean is the work of a mature artist at the height of his creative powers. It marked a turning point for Maupassant himself, confirmed in the emphases of his subsequent fiction. But Pierre et Jean also exemplifies a significant development in the French novel as a genre, as contemporary writers renewed the latter by turning away from the nineteenth-century Realist tradition in order to explore, in greater depth and from different perspectives, human psychology. In this respect, they can be seen to anticipate Proust and many of the twentieth century’s other formal experiments to accommodate the complexities of motivation and the dynamics of our emotions. In its own right, however, Pierre et Jean has remained, for generations of readers, what Henry James described as a ‘masterly little novel’, acute in its understanding, brilliantly crafted, and layered enough to sustain repeated interpretative scrutiny which has served to enrich Maupassant’s achievement.
He wrote it at Étretat, in his native Normandy, between June and September 1887, and confided to his mother that while Pierre et Jean might not be a best-seller, its ‘literary success’ was assured. Maupassant’s own declared satisfaction provides a useful corrective to what might be inferred from the apparent effortlessness of a novel composed in barely two and a half months. For this is a book which can be read at many levels. It can be read as simply a study of the fictional Pierre’s progressive discovery, occasioned by a mysterious legacy, of his younger brother’s illegitimacy and his mother’s adultery. But it is also interesting that, as a glance at the Select Bibliography for this edition will suggest, there is a wide measure of disagreement about what Maupassant himself calls the ‘real meaning of the work’ (p. 7). Pierre et Jean needs to be approached in the light of his prefatory invitation to the perceptive reader to discern ‘all the fine, hidden, almost invisible threads used by certain modern artists in place of the single piece of string known as the Plot’ (p. 7).
Pierre et Jean is the product of an intellectual climate marked by wide-ranging theoretical speculation on the ways in which artistic expression might best respond to the realities of human experience. The interest in the properly psychological dimensions of the latter was intensified by advances in medical psychiatry, notably in the research done by J. M. Charcot (1825–93) in the early 1880s. Such discoveries were rapidly popularized in the press, as were the ideas of many others on the workings of the unconscious, substantiating what was felt to be the inadequacy of an exclusively physiological conception of human beings. Pierre et Jean makes its own contribution to this critique of Positivist philosophy’s prioritization of the material determinants of human behaviour. At the same time such a stress on the primacy of the inner life provides a common thread between cultural phenomena as diverse as the vogue for Symbolist poetry, the belated acceptance of Impressionist painting, and French enthusiasm for the novels of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, the contradictions and complexity of whose protagonists were contrasted to the simplistic psychology of characters explained in purely external terms. For both writers and reading-public such comparisons confirmed the emergence of a different conception of the genre, in which the novel would explore the mechanics of the subjective consciousness rather than simply record the details of social contexts. J. K. Huysmans’s A rebours (1884),1 for example, is located in a wholly interior world, and its lack of a traditional plot is characteristic of a tendency in a significant number of novels of the period (including Pierre et Jean) to relegate the elaboration of a ‘story’ in the interests of more closely focused analyses of mental states.
Only with hindsight, it has to be said, can the stages of this evolution be identified and the contribution of successive novelists assessed. One name which needs to be singled out, however, is that of Paul Bourget (1852–1935); and this is not so much because his contemporary reputation as the most brilliant writer of his generation is necessarily deserved, but because, in the critical debates of the 1880s, he was hailed as the leading representative of an aesthetic whose procedures were antithetical to those of Zola’s Naturalism. His Cruelle Énigme (1885) and Un crime d’amour (1886) mark a date widely seen as the moment when the complexity of individual psychology makes its appearance in the French novel. And it encouraged the critics of the day to define the psychological novel as a genre in its own right, and one moreover in the mainstream of a French tradition stretching from Mme de Lafayette to Stendhal. Maupassant’s reference to ‘the kind of psychological study I have undertaken in Pierre et Jean’ (p. 3) can be fully understood only against the background of such an intellectual climate. He was implicated in the discerned evolution of the French novel at this time by virtue of his own development. More astute critics had already detected a change of emphasis between Bel-Ami (1885) and Mont-Oriol (1887), the novel which immediately precedes Pierre et Jean. The former is a roman de mœurs (or ‘novel of manners’) of a Balzacian kind, as indeed Une vie (1883),2 his very first novel, had been; Mont-Oriol, on the other hand, so isolates a group of characters in a provincial spa in order to concentrate on the vicissitudes of their private relationships that it virtually qualified as what was known as a roman d’analyse. More generally, this intensified psychological focus may possibly be related to Maupassant’s contemplation of his own mental deterioration after 1883. It has also been suggested, however, that he was deeply impressed by his friend Bourget’s literary and social success. What is certain is that, at this stage in his career, Maupassant was seen to be moving in the same general direction towards a conception of the novel as a vehicle for psychological investigation.
Pierre et Jean is both part of this evolution and yet deliberately subverts the simplified categories of a critical debate which opposes roman de mœurs and roman d’analyse, observation and psychology. In the preface to Pierre et Jean, written in September 1887 (see below), a clear preference for the ‘objective novel’ does not preclude admiration for ‘the purely psychological novel’ (p. 9) of which ‘works of art that are as beautiful as any other’ (p. 10) are the product. That he is thinking of Bourget here is not in doubt, for this part of the essay is virtually identical to Maupassant’s article on him in June 1884, which also concludes with a qualified sympathy for this alternative to the Flaubertian model. But that absolute (‘purely’) is significant, pointing to the fact that both its preface and Pierre et Jean itself attempt to reconcile antithetical procedures.
The genesis of Pierre et Jean is shrouded in ambiguity, rumour, and speculation. On the one hand there is the testimony of the writer’s neighbour at Étretat, Hermione Lecomte du Noüy, who recorded in her memoirs that the idea came to him as a result of hearing of a friend, with an elderly father and pretty young mother, who had mysteriously inherited a fortune from a friend of his parents. On the other hand Maupassant’s letter of 2 February 1888 to Édouard Estaunié tells another story. Estaunié, then entirely unknown to Maupassant, was working on a first novel (eventually published three years later as Le Simple) whose basic subject seemed so similar to that of Pierre et Jean that he had written expressing his fear that he might be accused of plagiarism. Maupassant sought to reassure the younger writer by explaining that he himself had worked from an item seen in a newspaper which Estaunié could well have spotted on the same day. What has continued to intrigue the historians of Pierre et Jean is that neither version has ever been substantiated. And some of them have suggested that Maupassant’s subsequently authorizing Estaunié to make his reply public should be seen, above all, as part of a wider strategy designed to conceal origins to the novel which are more deeply personal.
Those who subscribe to such a hypothesis are not surprised by the inventive directions of what Mme Lecomte du Noüy described as the ‘inescapable assumption’ by which Maupassant explained a mysterious legacy. Irrespective of whether this has a verifiable source, it does seem almost inevitable that he should imagine its recipient being the illegitimate product of adultery. For the related questions of illegitimacy and doubtful paternity have long been recognized as heading a major section within the subject-classification of Maupassant’s work as a whole, with between thirty and forty of his texts including variations on the theme. Those unconvinced that the banality of a newspaper clipping qualifies as the ‘unnoticed, invisible, and mysterious’ conjunction which Maupassant offered by way of explanation to Estaunié have accordingly tried to determine whether the facts of the novelist’s biography might be more revealing. And one factor invariably cited in such critical perspectives on Pierre et Jean is the mystery surrounding Maupassant’s own birth (5 August 1850). In particular, the considerable evidence that much of his official birth certificate is a fabrication has encouraged scholars to wonder whether his mother’s patently unreliable account of where exactly her son was born may point to a dark family secret. The most sensational ‘version’ of this is the persistent legend that Maupassant’s real father was Gustave Flaubert. It is worth repeating that it has been effectively demolished on many occasions, even if it is not beside the point that this baseless rumour was current during Maupassant’s own lifetime. But all such autobiographical explanations of his recurrent focus on the theme of uncertain paternity need to be qualified in two ways: first, illegitimacy is merely symptomatic of the more far–reaching drama of biological origins; and one thus has to proceed with caution in assessing the ‘fact’3 that Maupassant fathered three children himself out of wedlock, the last of which was born in late July of the summer of Pierre et Jean’s composition; and, secondly, while the Flaubert legend may well have provided a more intimate note to the mystery of his own origins, it is to be seen, above all, as part of the confrontation with the specifically literary originality which Maupassant writes about in the novel’s preface.
The same critical problem emerges if one tries to gauge the extent to which Maupassant modelled his characters, even minor figures, on those he knew. Marowsko, for example, probably owes something to the numerous pharmacists he consulted about his poor health over the years, not least the Polish one at Bezons. Even ‘La Belle Alphonsine’ (p. 83), presiding over the inn at Saint-Jouin, is not simply an invention; the textual parallels point unmistakably to ‘La Belle Ernestine’ recalled in Maupassant’s article in the Gil Blas of 1 August 1882, and reputed to be the author’s first sexual conquest at the age of 18. If this is true it says something about Maupassant’s sense of humour that this lady’s fictional role should be to lend Mme Rosémilly the ‘coquettishly turned up’ skirt (p. 84) instrumental in Jean’s seduction! Of less anecdotal interest is the difficult relationship between Maupassant and his younger brother Hervé (b. 19 May 1856). They certainly appear to have been as different as the two brothers of Pierre et Jean, with Guy superior both in age and intellect and often patronizing about his sibling non-commissioned cavalry officer turned unsuccessful horticulturalist. But the complex tension between them was exacerbated during the period he was engaged on Pierre et Jean. For that summer Hervé became seriously ill and, as well as looking after his brother’s wife and child, Guy found himself responsible for medical arrangements leading to treatment in the asylum to which his brother would in due course return—dying there totally insane on 13 November 1889, at the age of 33, and thus providing the novelist with a horrific presage of the destiny he so rightly feared. It is worth remembering, however, that Maupassant did not need his own experience to provide a model for its fraternal drama. To take a literary example, we know how much he admired Edmond de Goncourt’s intimately nostalgic portrayal of fraternal complementarity in Les Frères Zemganno (1879). And closer models can actually be found in the stories of the Old Testament, notably, of course, in Cain’s destiny to be a ‘vagabond upon the Earth’ in retribution for the jealous violence inflicted on the favoured Abel, his younger brother; or in Jacob cheating Esau, his elder brother, of his birthright. Fraternal enmity has the status of a cultural archetype.
If the relationship between the two Maupassant brothers made a specific contribution to the fictional situation in Pierre et Jean, it must be seen in the context of Guy’s feelings towards his mother. Hervé was a ‘swine’ in his elder brother’s eyes above all because he considered him to be responsible for his mother’s suffering, whether through his financial difficulties or his terminal illness. That is integral to the extent to which Laure de Maupassant, after her separation from Guy’s father when he was 13, absorbed her son’s life into her own. And there is little doubt that, for Maupassant himself, her inordinate centrality left its mark. Even as an adult he was never far from her side, and his savagely utilitarian approach to the opposite sex may well have its origins in the contempt he felt for every woman with the exception of a mother whom he explicitly considered different in her purity. This did not exclude a more ambiguous attitude towards her possessiveness. Such contradictions clearly inform the umbilical drama of Pierre et Jean’s final pages. Similarly, so completely was Maupassant devoted to a woman whose husband’s supportive role he had taken on in the latter’s absence that, inevitably perhaps, his biographers have not found it difficult to talk about the novel being a textual fantasy partially liquidating his own Oedipal complex.
To survey this evidence of the personal origins of Pierre et Jean is both significant and potentially misleading. For while such factors can be related to the novel, they are not, for the most part, reducible to it. Indeed, the fact that they seem wilfully to frustrate this process is itself interesting. Even the banality of the fictional brothers’ names is almost too deliberately removed from the aristocratic ‘Guy’ and ‘Hervé’ which the snobbish Laure de Maupassant invented for her sons. The dim-witted Louise (who also invests her ego in her son’s success) bears as little resemblance to Maupassant’s cultured and intelligent mother as Roland does to his notoriously debonair father. And whereas in the novel the younger brother ‘helpfully’ dispatches Pierre overseas, in real life it was Guy who tried to obtain a posting for Hervé in distant Panama. Rather than accurately transcribing elements of Maupassant’s experience, Pierre et Jean thus reworks these into structures which serve to differentiate the text from its own origins. As he writes in its preface, ‘we . . . always show ourselves’, making the point that while the imagination generates fictional versions of the authorial self, ‘the trick is not to let the reader recognize this self behind all the various masks which serve to hide it’ (p. 10). That imperative is consistent both with aesthetic impersonality and with Maupassant’s abhorrence for narcissistic self-reflection, his well-known refusal to have his photograph taken or his portrait painted. But rather than being simply non-confessional, Pierre et Jean allows us to identify Maupassant at one remove from the textual mirror in which he is reflected.
This problem is acutely located in the autobiographical status of Pierre. When we are told that ‘his mother was all that he loved in this world’ (p. 60), Maupassant does move into the confessional mode. Such a superimposition of voices is partly inevitable, given that Pierre is the privileged observer through whom much of the novel is presented. The affinities are no less clear. Pierre shares with his creator a world-weariness as well as a love of boating as a respite from pain, but also that separation of tenderness and sensuality which colours his misogyny and scorn for marriage. With his heightened sensibility and intellectual gifts, there is general agreement that in Pierre Maupassant reveals much of his true self. Equally important, however, is the fact that the character is differentiated from him in so far as he is viewed in an ironic perspective. There is even a certain amount of specific self-criticism, in Pierre’s disdain for sentences without adjectives and a moralizing pomposity akin to Maupassant’s inability to resist interpolating those maxim-like generalizations which betray his authorial presence. But it is the failure of Pierre’s larger ambitions which is really instructive in this respect, with the correlations in the drama of consciousness underlined by Pierre being a doctor by profession. For the doctor is often the surrogate of the novelist in nineteenth-century French fiction, culminating in Zola’s self-portrait in Le Docteur Pascal (1893).4 It makes his failure doubly illuminating, referring us both to Maupassant’s private fears and to the experimental methodology of which the doctor is representative.
For the limits of Pierre’s understanding can be related to the fallacy of the quest for knowledge which is a recurrent feature of Maupassant’s writing, underlined in microcosm in those optical instruments in the novel subordinate to the physiological make-up of the observer (p. 20). Pierre’s intermittent lucidity is compromised by his distorting subjectivity as his intelligence is negated by intuitive drives. And his being engaged in imaginative reconstruction ‘with the persistence of a hound sniffing out a scent’ (p. 61) points to animal origins to which Maupassant is no exception. The ironic distance from, and the ambivalence of, such a self-portrait thus exemplifies what Maupassant called the writer’s doubtful privilege of watching himself in the very act of observing the world. This kind of ‘autoscopic hallucination’ has been related to the eye-troubles diagnosed by an ophthalmologist in 1883 as well as to Maupassant’s use of narcotics as an antidote throughout the 1880s. He resorted to ether almost continuously while writing Pierre et Jean. Yet however crystalline the vision (or so he claimed), he also admitted that such a disembodied lucidity, whether metaphorical or in literally staring at his own reflection in the mirror, entailed a psychic separation leaving him unsure of his own identity. His experience of a phantom double is authenticated by contemporaries and receives expression in much of his fiction, increasingly in his short stories of 1886–7 and notably in Le Horla, first published in October 1886 and enlarged a year later. Its narrator’s confrontation with an imaginary alter ego is inseparable from Maupassant’s terrified perception, during this period, of an alienation which would make him, like his brother indeed, what the French call an aliéné. Hervé, however, only concretized such a disjunction. For the variants on self-spectacle in Maupassant’s work can be traced at least as far back as 1875. Pierre’s discovery of ‘another independent and violent self’ (p. 36) within him, as well as Pierre et Jean’s doubling strategies, have to be seen in this context. And while Pierre’s failure registers a fear of creative impotence symptomatic of the problematic self, that estrangement simultaneously points to Maupassant’s achievement.
Ever since the original appearance of Pierre et Jean in volume form on 9 January 1888, Maupassant’s essay entitled ‘The Novel’ has invariably prefaced editions of the text. Whether or not it should be considered as a preface, in the strict sense of the word, remains more questionable. Maupassant composed it immediately after finishing work on the novel itself, but arranged that the essay should be published separately. He later explained that it was only printed alongside Pierre et Jean in response to his publisher’s need to fill out what would have made too slim a volume, arguing that there was absolutely no relation between the two. There is, nevertheless, something rather too categorical about Maupassant’s denial of his essay’s prefatory status. The appearance of Pierre et Jean was postponed for a week to enable prior publication of his critical study in the Figaro’s Supplément littéraire on 7 January. Maupassant’s genuine outrage at the unauthorized cuts made to its text5 is clear from the subsequent correspondence with Émile Strauss, instructed to start legal proceedings against the Figaro’s directors who eventually issued a public apology to the author’s satisfaction. But this also served to encourage the very debate that he had always hoped his essay would provoke. Its introductory caveat partly anticipates that debate, in so far as unfavourable private and public reaction to what elsewhere Maupassant does refer to as ‘my preface’ threatened to embrace his achievement in the novel itself. Posterity has been less unkind. Indeed, the modern rehabilitation of Maupassant’s essay has gone so far that it has sometimes been unduly praised. An intelligent text it may be; but many readers will find it dislocated, irritatingly discursive, and uncomfortably self-conscious. Nevertheless, in spite of its deliberately generalized title (‘I want to deal with the Novel in general’, p. 3), Maupassant’s essay does provide valuable insights into his own art; and, in spite of its disclaimers, it also inevitably reflects some of the preoccupations of the particular novel to which it is contemporary.
Most of the preferences expressed in ‘The Novel’ can be traced back to his seven-year literary apprenticeship under Flaubert, whose seminal influence Maupassant explicitly acknowledges here (pp. 11–13) and which by no means came to an end with the former’s sudden death on 8 May 1880. Where the essay strikes a distinctly topical note is in the introductory section devoted to the bewildering multiplicity of the novel form, in which Maupassant challenges the right of any critic to pronounce that ‘the great flaw in this work is that it is not a novel in the proper sense of the word’ (p. 9). He thereby precisely anticipates the vexed question of whether Pierre et Jean should be considered a ‘novel’ at all. And his own hesitations about its exact status—variously termed ‘novel’, ‘short novel’, ‘roman de mœurs’, ‘roman d’analyse’, ‘psychological study’, and even ‘nouvelle’—may well acccount for an argument whose premiss is the impossibility of defining the novel as a genre.
That argument is integrated within the central thrust of Maupassant’s essay, however, by virtue of the fact that the very range of fictional texts he cites is itself testimony to the astonishing diversity of forms in which the individual talent can find expression. For if there is a single idea which informs ‘The Novel’ as a whole, it is undoubtedly the concern for originality. This is highlighted in the singularity of the interpretation of reality which the novelist transcribes, the need for the writer to assert his individual personality (both in his choice of subject and its selective treatment), and the primacy of a necessarily subjective vision. Maupassant’s rejection of artificially novelistic manipulation, as well as his assimilation of the Flaubertian preference for an ‘objective’ mode which excludes the fracturing presence of authorial omniscience, are dictated by the imperative of communicating to the reader the full force of the true artist’s unique apprehension of experience. In arguing that the relativization of perspective makes ‘reality’ and ‘illusion’ synonymous, Maupassant substitutes for the absolute of truth, the notion of sincerity: ‘the writer’s only mission is the faithful reproduction of this illusion using all the known artistic methods at his disposal’ (p. 8). Such artistic licence enables the novelist to present not so much a ‘banal photograph of life, but to provide us with a vision that is at once more complete, more startling, and more convincing than reality itself’ (p. 7). And this distinction between the literally accurate and the fictionally plausible leads Maupassant to the strikingly modern conclusion that ‘gifted Realists should really be called Illusionists’ (p. 8). Pierre et Jean is a novel which can only be understood in the light of these priorities.
Over and above the imminent publication of Pierre et Jean, it was hardly by chance that it should have been precisely in September 1887 that Maupassant felt the need to break a self-imposed critical silence in order to declare his own independence. For, on 18 August, there had appeared in Le Figaro what has been known ever since as Le Manifeste des cinq. In this diatribe, ostensibly provoked by the ‘obscenities’ of Zola’s La Terre, its five signatories (minor writers now largely forgotten), irritated by being considered part of Zola’s ‘school’, denounced Zola himself in a language vitriolic enough to ensure that for the next few weeks both the Parisian and provincial press avidly reported the polemical fury which now characterized the debate about the future of the French novel. Maupassant’s own immediate approach to Le Figaro, with a view to clarifying his aesthetic allegiance, may have been motivated by intentions not altogether different from those of the authors of Le Manifeste des cinq; for as he later explained to his lawyer, his essay was a summary of ‘my ideas on my art’ (a phrase which belies its professed neutrality) ‘in order to put an end to opportunities to make false and misleading statements about where I stand’, the most prevalent of which was, and indeed still is, that he should be grouped as one of the exponents of Zola’s Naturalism. What Maupassant thought of Le Manifeste des cinq itself is not on record; but in so far as this was only the most sensational manifestation of a literary quarrel that had raged since the serial-publication of Zola’s L’Assommoir in 1876, the contempt for such partisan exchanges which Maupassant displays in ‘The Novel’ could hardly have endeared him to those engaged in exacerbating the tone of the debate. And a number of the covert references within it (see Explanatory Notes) are less opaque if its polemical context is borne in mind.
At the same time, Maupassant’s essay of September 1887 can be approached from an angle which relates it to the novel he had just completed in a rather different way. For to read the two texts side by side is to be struck by a number of significant preoccupations which they share. Indeed, if one restores them to their true chronological sequence, it could be argued that Maupassant’s essay simply rationalizes some of the intuitive insights of the fictional text. For example, the former’s emphasis on the subjectivity of perception is not merely the philosophical underpinning of a technical device; the equation of ‘illusion’ and a private ‘reality’ is clearly central to a novel which dramatizes the processes of imaginative construction. So too, the problematic nature of observation and truth is a concern which we find in Pierre et Jean at the level of both character and plot. Maupassant’s discourse on the limits of understanding (using the example of two very different kinds of men, p. 10) can also be read as an oblique commentary on Pierre Roland’s predicament, whose faith in ‘hard work and science’ (p. 58) is insufficient to allow him ‘to imagine how it would feel to be’ (p. 34) his brother, to ‘get inside’ (p. 60) Maréchal, or to come to terms with his own or his mother’s emotional life.
Above all, however, it is the essay’s dominant preoccupation with originality itself which points back to the novel. To be sure, this is the legitimate priority of any artist and one which is evident in Maupassant’s writing throughout his career; and the autumn of 1887 was undoubtedly a propitious moment for him to reassert his independence. But there is in the preface to Pierre et Jean so compelling a concern for differentiation that it alerts us to implications beyond the specific aesthetic position the essay elaborates. Apart from the explicit references to originality, variations on the theme are to be found in the stress on the innovatory, on the personally unique, and on difference and diversity. And such an ideal is balanced by the underlying threat of creative impotence located in the semantic configuration of repetition, imitation, and conformity.
This same quest for originality is encoded in Pierre et Jean. The very concept is obviously exemplified by the relationship between individual and crowd, in both the literal and figurative sense. In Maupassant’s case, as the biographical evidence of his almost pathological discomfort in a theatre audience is consistent with his horror of crowds, so his aversion to literary groupings cannot be explained simply in terms of the Flaubertian legacy or contemporary critical polemics. For, as he wrote in 1882, the individual’s free will and intellectual initiative are constantly under threat from the instinctual dynamics of collective structures; once integrated within them and subject to such deterministic forces, the rational being is submerged; and Maupassant goes on to say that the crowd’s analogy with ‘society as a whole’ necessitates the artist remaining independent of the social nexus, in the anguished solitude which is equated with intelligence. It is hardly by chance that this is also the drama played out in Pierre et Jean.
That is not to suggest, of course, that this thematic continuity between the novel and its preface is intentional. But to relate (to take another example) the latter’s call for a critical methodology ‘without . . . ties with any family of artists’ (p. 3) to the fictional Pierre’s progressive alienation from those who circumscribe his individuality is to highlight the associative interplay of common ideas. Such parallels can also be taken rather further. For, in his essay, Maupassant cites Flaubert’s ‘truth’ that only by distinguishing the apparently similar ‘from any other being or any other objects of the same race or kind’ (p. 13) can artistic originality be achieved. And yet, in the novel, Pierre discovers that differentiation is an illusion in so far as his originality is compromised by the reality of his origins. Maupassant’s achievement in Pierre et Jean is ultimately to be situated in the ironic space between those two versions of the ‘truth’.
In the contemporary literary debates outlined above, those critics who welcomed Maupassant’s defection from the Naturalist ‘camp’ by praising the psychological dimension of Pierre et Jean were only partly right. The rather different emphasis in Anatole France’s review of the novel is closer to the mark: ‘This is not a pure Naturalist novel. The author is well aware of it. He knows exactly what he’s doing.’ For what distinguishes Pierre et Jean is the hybrid nature of a novel working between two existing modes, both of which are evident in its narrative strategies.
As one of those ‘Illusionists’ he defines in its preface, Maupassant organizes his text in such a way as to persuade the reader to subscribe to the illusion that his fiction has the status of fact. Pierre et Jean is a Realist novel in the sense that it takes place in a world which is recognizably real. Assembled in the great French port of Le Havre, its characters move through streets and locations which Maupassant visited to ensure that the allusive setting to the novel is a broadly accurate one. The same applies to a familiar Normandy coastline, with its distinctive topography, its network of lighthouses and its well-known villages and ports. The occasional invented name or substitution do not alter the text’s realistic status, which is a function not of its literal accuracy but of the linguistic authority of the references which punctuate the text. Whether in the shape of geographical allusions or the specialized vocabulary of maritime activities, these further the process of immersing the reader in a milieu which undoubtedly exists.
That milieu is ‘filled out’ by a number of textual details which make of Pierre et Jean a roman de mœurs in its own right. For the first and only time in Maupassant’s work as a novelist, we are offered a study of the commercial ‘petite bourgeoisie’. Far from having created an abstract space in which to stage a psychological drama, Maupassant presents us with a social class for which money is a dominant preoccupation but which is also seen, more generally, to be a major determinant on the behaviour of individuals. The Roland family are representative of the city in which they live, with the appropriately named ‘Place de la Bourse’ and the ‘bassin du Commerce’ at its centre. M. Roland’s ritual contemplation of the port’s raison d’être reflects his own, even transferring such values to his idle pastimes, surveying his catch ‘with the trembling pleasure of a miser’ (p. 19). Likewise, his wife Louise is portrayed as having a soul ‘as orderly as an account book’ (p. 20), astutely beating down the rent on the apartment she will obtain and lovingly furnish for Jean. The pleasure she too gains from the latter’s new-found wealth is simply more discreet than Roland’s unconcealed glee, while Jean himself undergoes a transformation with ‘the self-assurance that money brings’ (p. 48). Conversely, Pierre nurtures an unfulfilled hope of enrichment, feverishly calculates how much he might earn as a doctor on land and sea, and finds both his exotic dreams and professional career blocked by his impoverishment.
More significantly, money also shapes all the novel’s personal relationships. Marriage, for example, is seen as a commercial arrangement. For both his mother and Jean, Mme Rosémilly is a financial investment as a future wife; and Jean’s assessment of what she is literally worth equates her with a happiness he is not prepared to forgo. In every sense, money opens the door; as his mother instructs Jean to lead Mme Rosémilly in to the celebratory dinner, in a scene which anticipates the entry into his equally magnificent residence with its ‘bridal chamber’ and ‘a real double bed’ (p. 94). Sex too can only be purchased, exemplified by the waitress who offers Pierre physical closeness ‘with the easy intimacy of a woman for sale’ (p. 45), thereby linked to the women at Trouville ‘setting a price on their favours’ (p. 73). And he himself recalls past liaisons ‘broken off once that month’s money had run out’ (p. 44), which are the vulgar substitute for erotic fantasies accessible only to the rich. Even Louise Roland’s love-affair with Maréchal is conceived by Pierre in these terms. The lover becomes synonymous with the fortune he leaves, is posthumously inscribed in the ‘gilt frame’ (p. 77) of his portrait, and reincarnated in Jean whose similar blond hair and beard ‘made a golden stain on the white linen’ (p. 69) of the bed. For Louise, the legacy is tangible proof of Maréchal’s love. But all forms of affection in Pierre et Jean are measured in monetary terms. When Maréchal’s name is first mentioned, Roland immediately remembers him as ‘chief clerk in the Ministry of Finance’ (p. 27) when asked whether he was ‘a friend of yours’. Friendship is equated with business, loans, and complimentary theatre-tickets. Marowsko’s relationship with Pierre is one of financial dependency too, the pharmacist having only come to Le Havre in the hope that the doctor’s fortune will be responsible for his own; and, as he greets Pierre ‘with outstretched hands’ (p. 37), so his bitterness at the latter’s departure reveals the true nature of his attachment.
In a moment of lucidity, Pierre reflects on the absurdity whereby ‘we get all worked up about paltry sums of money’ (p. 35). Yet money is seen to be more important than honour, sympathy, and bereavement; it fuels fraternal jealousy and influences sexual and maternal predilection. For what we find in Maupassant’s novel is a world in which money not only defines the structure of human relationships, but also determines the individual’s destiny. It allows Roland to leave Paris; it provides Jean with a future; and its absence prevents Pierre from cutting himself off from his mother’s purse-strings and fulfilling his ambitions. Thus Marowsko’s shop is dimly lit ‘in order to save money’ (p. 37) and the Rolands’ ‘narrow house’ (p. 25) with its ‘tea napkins which are never washed in thrifty households’ (p. 30) is contrasted with Jean’s spacious residence and its cupboards full of clean linen. The same stark opposition is repeated in the lower decks and the first-class sections of Pierre’s ship. Such environments, however, not only reflect their inhabitants; they too are determinants. For whereas a ‘luxurious opulence’ (p. 124) enables the wealthy passengers of the Lorraine to rest, the steerage likened to a mine-shaft merely adds to the suffering of the crushed masses below.
These social determinants are appropriately brought together in the novel’s repeated scenes of material consumption in the shape of food and drink. This is also a technical device which enables Maupassant to assemble his characters to voice preoccupations which revolve around finance and furnishings. Yet the function of such scenes is not limited to the evidence of banality they provide. In one sense, food and money have an obvious correlation: one class of passenger makes for the ship’s dining room while destitute fellowtravellers ‘hoped, perhaps, not to die of hunger’ (p. 125); Roland has expectations of ‘some extra special dinners’ (p. 77) as a result of the Maréchal legacy; and ‘the accession of Jean the Rich’ (p. 49) is the occasion of a feast of monumental proportions. More significant is the role of food and drink in a common system of exchange. Between Pierre and the waitress, for example, ‘his buying her this drink’ (p. 45) is the ‘tacit permission’ for sexual intimacy. Lecanu, on the other hand, invites the Roland family to digest his news of the inheritance before he feels able to accept their hospitality in return. The precise parallels between the food on display in Jean’s palatial residence and at the earlier dinner are equally suggestive, pointing to a substitution of desires, and underlined by the fact that the satisfied audience at Jean’s apotheosis have no further need to eat. Such a system of exchange binds its participants together into a cohesive group to which the individual is subordinate. Potentially disruptive outsiders like Mme Rosémilly are invited to partake of meals and marriages which integrate them within the social structure. Those unable, or unwilling, to conform to its timetable and values are left with a ‘cold and dried up’ cutlet (p. 41) and forced from the collective table to look for sustenance. In the midst of private gluttony, Pierre is an uncomfortable presence at odds with a family whose members determine his expulsion. He can thus no longer have a civic place, eating ‘at a cheap inn where the countryside began’ (p. 74), while Jean is cooked for in a ‘stage-set’ (p. 93). So too, while ‘the wealthy of every continent would dine together’ inside a structure whose interior resembles ‘that of grand hotels, theatres, and public places’ (p. 124), the displaced poor will wander ‘an unknown country’ (p. 125) in search of food.
The society portrayed in Pierre et Jean is one which testifies to the survival of the fittest. It is hardly by chance that Mme Rosémilly, who exemplifies the successful adaptation to environment, should put captured shrimps in her basket ‘along with some seaweed to keep them alive’ (p. 88). The biological parallels are themselves illuminating, for the specifically social milieu is by no means the only environmental determinant in the novel. For Maupassant presents human beings as a species subject to natural laws too, with Nature itself as a force over which individuals have no control. The weather, for example, determines the timing and the course of excursions; the fog puts a stop to sailing expeditions made possible by the wind; and as ships have to wait for the tide, so this drives people off the beach at Trouville and forces the family to beat a hasty retreat at Saint-Jouin. And in their interaction with the world around them apprehended by the senses, the novel’s characters are also influenced in more insidious ways. Mme Roland succumbs to the physical well-being induced by the waves, while both she and Mme Rosémilly feel the ‘weight’ of ‘the vast horizon of sea and sky’ (p. 24); and nature is responsible for Jean’s sexual arousal: ‘the scent of the hills, gorse, clover, and grasses mingling in the warm air with the salty odour of the exposed rocks excited him further, causing a mildly intoxicating effect’ (p. 85).
Such a stress on the physiological, in the shape of heredity, is clearly central to the novel’s plot. Equally obviously, sinew determines the outcome of rowing competitions, gender the nature of emotional response, and physical attributes the force of erotic attraction. The recurrent references to disease, however, underline the real implications of this particular emphasis. Pierre’s warning to his father speaks of an inexorable logic: a glass of champagne, he says, ‘burns right through the gut, upsets the nervous system, slows down the circulation, and brings on the apoplexy which all men of your constitution are prone to’ (p. 50); though the guests do not think so, it is an entirely appropriate commentary on an event which represents the triumph of materiality and the unwitting celebration of the fact that Maréchal is no more than ‘decomposed’ flesh (p. 63). Only the reader will notice the link between ‘icing-sugar bells, like a sponge-cake cathedral’ (p. 49) to be consumed and Pierre’s impression that a ‘small timepiece had swallowed a cathedral bell’ (p. 70) as he listens to its deafening chimes. Yet striking clocks, whitening hair, ageing parents, and decayed windmills all point to the same temporal flow of physical disintegration and mortality.
These biological determinants ultimately reduce men and women to the level of animals, as Maupassant’s analogies suggest. Pierre, as a child, greets ‘with all the hostility of a small spoiled animal’ the newly born ‘other little creature’ (p. 17) who is his brother. His father displays ‘the suspicion of a fox who comes across a dead chicken and suspects a trap’ (p. 51), as well he might given the encouragement to toast the family’s deceased benefactor. His sententious ‘we’re not beasts of burden, we’re men’ (p. 42) is acutely ironic; for only his social class separates him from the ‘herd’ of humanity in the ship, with its ‘stench of bare flesh more sickening than that of the pelt or wool of animals’ (p. 125). In the Trouville episode, the females are seen as ‘agile and elusive prey’ (p. 73) in a mating ritual. The force of all these analogies is to define human motivation in terms of bestial appetites, whether those of lust or greed. The same is true of other emotions: Pierre’s secret rage makes him as dangerous as a ‘rabid dog’ (p. 82); Marowsko’s affection for him is likened to ‘the love of a fawning dog’ (p. 59) and his mother’s suffering to that of ‘a poor beaten mutt begging for mercy’ (p. 123). The characterization of Mme Rosémilly ‘who lived life instinctively, like a free animal’ (p. 17) is merely representative. What is stressed throughout the novel is the primacy of those instincts, clearly informed as it is by that pervasive materialism evident in Maupassant’s work as a whole. He deserves a place among the Naturalists by virtue of, in his own words (in Le Gaulois of 17 April 1880), ‘a similar philosophical tendency’, and Pierre et Jean is no exception to this self-confessed affinity. Its characters are subject not only to the pressures of economic circumstance and social class, but also to their chemistry. To read it is to enter a fictional world elaborated in structures of causality which make of individuals impotent victims of such fatalities.
The novel’s impact, however, also derives from the particular narrative arrangement which accounts for its status as a psychological study. For what Maupassant has done is to displace its central focus: away from the forces which shape behaviour, and towards the individual’s apprehension of these social and biological determinants. The subordination of rationality to the instinctual, for example, is not just recounted by the novelist, but also experienced by a narrator-figure confronting the contradictions of his mind. The same applies to the relationship between self and social structure. In other words, those features which can be related to a Naturalist tradition are integrated within a perspective designed (in both senses) to reinforce verisimilitude by eliminating authorial omniscience. In practice, this displacement of narrative focus is not so radical as to offer the reader unmediated access to the workings of the subjective consciousness. Whether inscribed in the impersonal distance of a third-person narration or within the indirect discourse of a character’s point of view, there are in fact constant reminders of Maupassant’s presence, not least in those authorial generalizations which sometimes give Pierre et Jean an aphoristic texture theoretically precluded by an ‘objective’ portrayal.
It remains true that the foregrounding of the psychological study has far-reaching consequences for the whole shape of the novel which is, in several important respects, very different from a conventional roman de mœurs. It is devoid of historical specificity; that it ‘takes place’ in about 1885 can be inferred only from an exchange between the Rolands halfway through the text (p. 58). It also has a severely shortened time-scale: the first five chapters extend over a mere four days; Chapters 6–8 cover forty-eight hours ‘a week or two’ (p. 80) later, and include the notation that the Lorraine will leave ‘next month’ (p. 111); and this leaves an indeterminate number of days (only two of which are detailed) for Pierre to make arrangements for his departure on 7 October. Both this rigorous concentration and the generalized historical vacuum are designed to facilitate Maupassant’s psychological analysis in a text whose ‘events’ are reduced to minimal importance. With the exception of the news of the legacy, which indirectly inspires Jean’s active courtship of Mme Rosémilly and Pierre’s decision to leave, Pierre et Jean could almost be described as a novel in which nothing happens. The only ‘event’ as such occurs a quarter of a century before it begins, with Mme Roland’s adulterous liaison. This enables Maupassant to chart mental developments for which external events are merely the catalyst. There is no attempt at the kind of biographical comprehensiveness we find in the appropriately entitled Une vie. We learn no more about the past of Pierre et Jean’s characters than is strictly necessary; their futures are simply indicated by extension. Both are beyond the scope of a novel whose dramatic interest is deliberately limited to the reflective space where past and future intersect.
This also accounts for Maupassant’s choice of characters. His small cast accommodates the technical imperatives of a limited dramatic focus, to the extent that even the episodic figures are a function of the psychologies of the family members. Though the Rolands may be representative of a certain class, Maupassant is not concerned to situate them within a panoramic view of contemporary society. And he overcomes the potential problems posed by their banality and limited introspective facilities by making Pierre a doctor. For, justified by a medical training, his capacity for diagnosis allows Maupassant to integrate psychological analysis within a fictional subjectivity. Pierre’s suffering is charted in the appropriately clinical terminology of the character’s self-diagnosis, from initial debilitating and ‘niggling’ physiological symptom to a cancerous growth which reaches a climax in his outburst to Jean in Chapter 7; and only in its properly terminal phase is there some abatement: ‘and of his wound, so raw up until then, all he was left with was the tingling of a healing scar’ (p. 124).
Such a progression alerts us to the fact that the novel’s structure is also a function of its psychological focus, determined less by its chapter-divisions than by the shift of point of view which highlights the stages of Pierre’s mental anguish. That structure also reflects Jean’s progressive appropriation of his brother’s place in his mother’s affections, underlined by the contrastive parallels between the opening and closing family excursions in La Perle. The novel’s dramatic tension is sustained by intensifying Pierre’s anguish through the temporal continuity of Chapters 2–5, in alternating rhythms of momentary respite and increasing despair, but delaying its climactic outburst until Chapter 7—which is not yet the denouement. And a key feature of this arrangement, testifying to Pierre et Jean’s status as a psychological novel of the kind pioneered by Bourget, is its similar reliance on a movement by association. Such workings of the unconscious are used by Maupassant to justify the order of narrative sequences. This is noticeable in Chapter 3, for example, where Pierre’s ‘to talk intimately with a woman is itself a balm to suffering’ (p. 44), followed by Maupassant’s ‘he began to think about women’, eventually leads to a recollection of the waitress Pierre then proceeds to visit; similarly, in Chapter 9, his comparison between his distress and that of ‘a poor man about to hold out a begging hand’ (p. 120) brings to mind Marowsko and the decision to bid him farewell, while his conjuring up ‘a mental list of everyone he knew or had known’ (p. 121) immediately inspires his second visit to the waitress. Such an associative mechanism, often sparked by involuntary memory, can thus be considered a technical device. The economy of Maupassant’s text lies in the synthesizing of this structural principle and a crucial element of the psychological drama located in Pierre.
That drama takes the form of a quest to assert his individual identity in the face of the social and biological fatalities which threaten his originality. That the reader may perceive Pierre as being different is a result of both narrative design and characterization. For if Pierre qualifies as the ‘hero’ of the story, it is not only because it is the workings of his mind which provide the main interest of Pierre et Jean as a ‘psychological novel’, but also because his very capacity for reflection differentiates him from the unthinking mediocrity and placid contentment of his blood-relations. He is, by temperament, unable to subscribe to an ideology of conformity attested to by his parents’ instigation that he should be like Jean; and it is significant, of course, that in his inability to row like his brother, the family boat veers off course. As ‘Pierre’s opinion was bound to be different’ (p. 18), so too his hesitations about a choice of career bear witness to the difficulty of integrating himself within the social structure; and, as his father’s habitual addressing him as ‘doctor’ (p. 16) suggests, even Pierre’s finally opting for medicine simply reinforces his status as a déclassé.
The idealist continually ‘throwing himself into new projects’ (p. 16), seeking expression in ‘a new career’ as ‘a new track’ (p. 40), differentiates him from those satisfied with repetition who find their jovial spokesman in Beausire: ‘bis repetita placent’ (p. 48). Pierre’s exchange with Marowsko defines the nature of his quest exactly: greeted by the question ‘So what’s new, my dear doctor?’, he replies, ‘Nothing. Everything’s the same as usual’ (p. 38), which explains his despair. For Pierre’s quest for originality is always doomed to fail, whether sought for in others or in himself. One of the reasons why the suspicion of his mother’s adultery is so distressing to him is that she is thereby divested of her exceptional qualities: ‘his mother had simply done the same as the others!’ (p. 73). Even his escapist fantasies are subverted by remorseless patterns of repetition. The maiden voyage of a new ship to the New World may seem like a fresh start; but, rather than being the exotic destination of his dreams, it is clear that New York will be another version of Le Havre; and as his father notes, Pierre’s departure is in fact only the first leg of a return journey.
Such circularity is a feature of all Pierre’s literal and figurative ventures.6 Each excursion not only brings him back to his point of departure, but also intensifies the suffering he had tried to escape. His wanderings in Le Havre take him to Jean, met on the water’s edge and then evoked in the conversations with both Marowsko and the waitress which have the opposite effect to the solace Pierre seeks. The momentary release afforded by taking out La Perle is cut short by the mist which drives him back and then invades the city, plunging Pierre into renewed introspection. So too his outing to Trouville merely provides him with further evidence for the suspicions he attempts to banish from his mind. The novel is structured by expeditions which delineate Pierre as a figure of search and quest; but as he physically has to return each time to the increasingly intolerable paternal home, so his search for the truth is inscribed in an analogous pattern, moving back to its own origin: ‘so he tried to discover what was gnawing at him, this need for movement but desire for nothing’ (pp. 33–4).
As well as making Beausire’s Latin motto doubly ironic, these failures are suggestive in themselves. For Pierre’s circular movements point to the problematic nature of the independence he seeks to assert. On the one hand this is motivated by a profound disgust for the conformity of collective structures; on the other, the solitude Pierre chooses is equally destructive: ‘he needed company, and yet didn’t want to meet anyone’ (p. 33). In that remark, in which Pierre’s introspection and Maupassant’s commentary elide, we find a concise formulation of the problem. For both disgust and need inform a dialectic which structures Pierre’s exits from—and return to—those relationships which circumscribe his individuality. These are suffocating, degrading, and anathema to the intelligence; but nonintegration is equated not simply with loneliness, but with the exile of the dead.
Pierre et Jean explores the ramifications of that problem in both private and social terms by integrating Pierre’s relationship with his mother within the drama of the family itself. As far as the former is concerned, the text provides ample evidence to justify describing Pierre’s obsessive love as Oedipal.7 The tension between incestuous feeling and innocent adoration is unmistakable. It is already suggested in the scene in Chapter 5 where Pierre knocks at his mother’s bedroom door, with his hand ‘limp and trembling on the door handle, almost incapable of the minimal effort needed to turn it to go in’ (p. 70). He is here, in the most literal sense, on the threshold of that ‘primal’ discovery that the object of his infantile desire sleeps in his father’s bed. The immediate consequence of such a revelation is that Pierre suddenly sees his mother as a sexual being in her own right. Though this explains his incredulous rage towards (as the French text has it) père Roland, the latter’s dormant carcass provides a less unequivocal statement of his mother’s sexuality than her relationship with Maréchal, both symptom and synonym of ‘this horrible thing he had discovered’ (p. 70). It is this radical redefinition of perspective which undermines the certainties of Pierre’s own identity.
Because Pierre himself, however, is not fully aware of the true feelings for his mother, the presentation of that relationship is marked by the text’s pervasive irony. The latter is, for the most part, consistent with the principle of ‘impersonality’; but by pointing to a complexity beyond the character’s understanding, Maupassant simply underlines the reasons for Pierre’s failure which he also makes explicit: ‘he had both an excitable and cautious side to him; . . . But ultimately his first instincts outweighed the others and heart always triumphed over mind’ (p. 33). Even in subsequently bringing this authorial commentary within Pierre’s own reflections, Maupassant reinforces the pre-emptive ‘always’ which speaks of the inherent failure of the analytical intelligence. For in the very process of trying to come to terms with the workings of the subsconscious, Pierre’s rational self is subverted by them. His every attempt to master his jealousy is frustrated, as is escape from it; for the associative movements of his mind are beyond the control of the intellect. And Maupassant alerts us to the ways in which, while trying to understand himself, Pierre so rationalizes his feelings that it leads to a misapprehension of his suffering. He mistakes symptom for cause: the legacy and Mme Rosémilly for a jealousy that is instinctual. As in the diagnosis of his mother’s ills, Pierre’s merciless analysis ultimately exacerbates his own condition.
The depth of the psychological focus of Pierre et Jean is thus enlarged in so far as point of view is not just a spatial principle of narrative procedure, but is itself the object of investigation. This drama of perception is exemplified by the Trouville episode in Chapter 5; seen from afar, the beach with its decked-out figures is beautiful; and yet its subsequent demystification, its degraded ‘reality’, is itself a construction of Pierre’s tortured mind, within whose distorting subjectivity the (possibly) innocent trippers on the sands are transformed into the inhabitants of a gigantic brothel. This is only one, however, of numerous instances of modulation of point of view which illustrate Maupassant’s remarks in the novel’s preface about the relativization of perspective and a consciousness limited by those ‘bodily organs’ (p. 8) of which it is a function. Pierre’s mother, too, is a beautiful Madonna-figure, ‘so good, so simple, so respectable’ (p. 54), seen from afar by the worshipping child himself capable, in retrospect (though without being able to act upon it), of more objective self-appraisal: ‘his quasi-religious love for his mother had made his scruples more acute, scruples which were pious and admirable, but exaggerated’ (p. 55).
Any assessment of Pierre’s apparent moral superiority has to take account of such ambiguities. On the one hand, he can contrast his own implicit integrity and Jean’s planned exploitation of his clientele only hours after calculating in even greater detail precisely the same strategy of enrichment; on the other, a puritanical contempt for the waitress’s calumny of ‘decent women’ as characteristic of ‘her filthy prostitute’s mind’ (p. 54) is inverted in his own vision of every woman on the beach selling herself. It is not the least of the text’s ironies that Pierre is unable to reconcile his scientific knowledge that ‘a whole race can originate from a single embrace’ (p. 69) with the emotional reality that ‘his mother had surrendered to the caresses of some man’ (p. 120) for reasons akin to his own need for a woman’s ‘caress’ (p. 45). In underlining for the reader how Pierre’s jealousy makes him an unreliable narrator, Maupassant leaves us with the paradox that the character most obsessed by the truth is himself most prey to his illusions.
In his prefatory essay, Maupassant refers to those apparently insignificant textual details in which the ‘true meaning’ of a work is to be found. In Pierre et Jean, these patterns are always suggestive. Its setting, for example, clearly has a symbolic value and is used to throw light on the psychological study. The sexual drama is elaborated along a coastline notable for its indentations and orifices, with its equally figurative ports hidden from view, and concealing rivers emerging from the splayed northern and southern flanks of Normandy; and between its awesome cliff-faces there are mysteriously fertile inlets which Jean and Mme Rosémilly circumnavigate during their courtship; after dallying ‘on the very edge of the precipice’ (p. 85), growing desire brings them to ‘a much deeper crevice where long weeds, peculiarly coloured and swaying like wisps of pink and green hair, flowed beneath the rippled surface of the water that flowed towards the distant sea along an invisible fissure’ (p. 87). Pierre, on the other hand, identifies with the anthropomorphized ships hooting in distress in the dark as they seek access to the harbour; and that the latter is not innocently picturesque is confirmed in Chapter 9 where the Lorraine’s departure is likened to a birth. The fishing smack stealthily making its way into ‘the wide and dark open channel between the jetties’ (p. 35) tells us as much about his feelings (‘if only one could live aboard such a boat’) as the promiscuous succession of ships, invited in by ‘a retired sea-captain’, which intensify Pierre’s jealousy as he watches over the entrance to (to restore both the homophonic pairing of the original French and the traditional maternal associations of the sea) la mer/mère. So too, when he takes out his father’s boat with his permission, the text goes much further than simply the pathetic fallacy whereby Pierre’s emotions correspond to the weather; for this compensatory moment has much in common with the erotic fantasies generated by the earlier invisible entry, with the bow of La Perle opening up the sea ‘like the blade of a runaway plough’ (p. 56); bathed by the ‘caress’ of the stiffening breeze, Pierre can at last experience the illusion of frustrations overcome: ‘feeling peaceful and contented . . . guiding this wooden and canvas object like a swift, docile winged beast, its every movement responding to his desire, obeying the pressure of his fingers’ (p. 56). The same connotations mark the splendid arrival of the Prince Albert ‘in a great hurry, like a mail boat making a deadline, and her upright bows sliced through the sea, churning up two trails of thin transparent waves which ran along the length of her hull’ (p. 22); to which Roland (that other ‘retired sea-captain’) doffs his hat as generously as he had welcomed Maréchal, and which leaves behind it ‘on the calm, glinting surface’ a barely discernible but nonetheless perceptible trace.
In a novel informed by fraternal rivalry for a mother’s affection, Pierre’s irritation ‘at having being denied the pleasure of the sea by his brother’s presence’ (p. 37), or, to take yet another example, the Seine being compared to ‘a wide arm of sea separating two neighbouring territories’ (p. 72), all such quotations in the original French play on the mer/mère pairing, illustrating its preface’s remarks about the choice of le mot juste. In other cases Maupassant’s metaphors may testify to that creative process which enables a writer’s language to be deciphered beyond his conscious intentions. The implications of such recurrent symbolism are certainly not exclusive to the novel’s Oedipal drama. When Pierre’s mother’s ‘how lovely the sea is’ is qualified by Mme Rosémilly’s ‘but sometimes it can cause a lot of harm’ (p. 23), this exchange appositely reflects an ambivalence which makes of the protective harbour a castrating ‘devouring ogre’ (p. 23); but it also has a more general significance. The ‘rippling water’ (p. 56) over which Pierre exerts a mere semblance of control is an image exactly repeated in that of the rock-pools which excites Jean’s lust for Mme Rosémilly, ‘more cautious’ but ‘equally determined to go into the water in due course’ (p. 87).
The sea itself is thus only the most prevalent of those fatalities of nature to which all the characters are ultimately subordinate. Pierre’s outing in La Perle is a defeat for his rational self which submits to a ‘mysterious force’ (p. 56); in a space resonant in its appeal only to the senses, with his ‘eyes half closed against the dazzling rays of sunlight’, he abandons his lucidity, ‘dreaming, as you do on horseback or on the deck of a ship’ (p. 56). The meaning of this episode is confirmed by its parallels with two other scenes it prefigures: first, Pierre’s trip to Trouville where the movement of the boat over the water ‘dissipated his thoughts’ (p. 72); and secondly, the novel’s closing scene in which he envisages his destiny on the Lorraine at the mercy of the ocean into which the ship appears to sink as it goes over the horizon. The differences between these three scenes are to be found in the tonality of Pierre’s perspective (optimistic, obsessed, resigned). Only in the last is the blending with nothingness consistently explored in images of death; but between Pierre’s directionless wanderings in La Perle and the anticipated existence on the Lorraine there is a continuity of withdrawal from the structures of the rational world.
The sea is thus a matrix for numerous patterns of images which articulate this process of dissolution. The intermittent fog, for example, is to be considered in this wider thematic context. The equally symbolic lighthouses, fitfully illuminating the darkness, can obviously be related to the drama of perception, as can details like Pierre’s lighting a match on the jetty to read the names of the incoming ships, and the spy-glass mentioned in the first chapter and the last; but so too can Louise Roland’s distorted impression of her son’s departure. Misted-over eyes subvert clarity of mind as much as the literal and figurative mists which envelop Pierre. Such evidence of fluid materiality can be linked not only to the fatally disintegrating effects of wine, but also to other textual details which speak of loss of outline: the tea in which biscuits dissolve, evanescent champagne bubbles, the evaporating froth on glasses of beer, the Lorraine ‘melting’ (p. 128) into the ocean, ‘fermenting’ (p. 54) jealousy. Repeated images of this kind set up a pattern of analogies, between the physical world and emotional states. A common fluidity erodes resolve, will-power, and lucidity, working against the consciousness. Another recurrent and related feature of the text is therefore the somnolence which is equated with non-thinking. Between this and interpolated awakening, the novel’s central drama can be traced in explicit ways. For Pierre et Jean is structured not only by outings and meals, but also by the long siestas subsequent to them. Mme Roland is lulled by the water; her husband enjoys an ‘invincible slumber’ (p. 71); Jean is ‘in a deep, animal-like sleep’ (p. 69); Marowsko, the waitress, and Papagris all doze. Only Pierre struggles to keep awake, and yet as he avoids alcohol when he needs to reflect, he also goes from café to café to alleviate his suffering. It seems hardly by chance that he so often drinks a glass of water before lapsing—at the end of so many chapters—into the soothing comfort of non-consciousness. To juxtapose his ‘slumber bathed in champagne’ (p. 54) and an irrational ‘dormant’ (p. 17) jealousy is thus to illustrate once again how Maupassant’s choice of metaphors brings together disparate elements in a coherent thematic design.
The fact that this infrastructure embraces all the characters of Pierre et Jean is itself partly responsible for the parallels that can be established between them. For it needs to be stressed that Pierre’s quest is reflected in all the other literal and figurative quests of the book which further illuminate his own. Fishing, for example, is an activity of not merely anecdotal interest. The comparisons between fish and human beings go beyond the mention that the former too are asleep; at the dinner, Beausire can exactly imitate a tropical species which look ‘as funny as the inhabitants’ (p. 49), while Roland’s cursing makes no distinction, ‘addressed as much to the indifferent widow as to the uncatchable creatures’ (p. 19). Parallel quests have a characteristic rhythm: ‘they had fished until midday, then dozed, then fished again without having caught a thing’ (p. 19). And what both Pierre and his father survey in the basket is more sinister than they realize, for in its maternal ‘belly’ (p. 15)—which is like the seething ‘flat belly of the Ocean’ (p. 23), the ‘bellies’ (p. 59) of the stinking houses, the ‘immense belly’ (p. 126) crawling with humanity—is evidence of carnality and putrefaction, that stench of death at the centre of Pierre et Jean, reaching from Maréchal’s demise to Pierre’s eventual resignation to a resting-place likened to a coffin.
With their ‘final fatal gasps of air’ (p. 15) the trapped creatures of the novel’s exposition refer us to its fictional characters. The fish make ‘useless, limp efforts’ (p. 15) which correspond to Pierre’s ‘useless’ (p. 17) efforts to escape from the stultifying network of relationships in which he is enmeshed. Entrapment is a theme in its own right. Mme Roland is ‘shut in the prison’ (p. 65) of her shop. Pierre ends up in ‘a little floating cabin which, from now on, would be the confines of his life’ (p. 123). Jean is ‘hooked’ and ‘tied’ (p. 89) by Mme Rosémilly during the later fishing expedition to Saint-Jouin which also invites a metaphorical reading; he is so like those ‘creatures caught unawares by her subtly slow technique’ (p. 88) that when she gingerly lifts the shrimps from the net, ‘squeezing the tips of their whiskers between two fingers’ (translating barbe here), we are reminded of Jean taking his ‘fair beard in his hand’ and ‘smoothing it down to the tips of the hairs, as if trying to make it longer and thinner’ (p. 29) upon hearing of his enrichment. Even apparent success, in other words, is ironically revealed as failure. For rather than being given his freedom by the will, Jean is thereby subject to Maréchal’s will and volition, and consequently integrated into a banal domesticity which is savagely taken apart in the rest of the novel.
Between fishing, courtship, marriage, love-affairs, and careers, there is a uniformity of pattern which ultimately equates one quest with another to provide the dominant tonality of the novel. Louise has the same aspirations as Pierre to escape its horizons of mediocrity. With her sentimentality born of books, ‘applauding actresses swooning on stage’, and dreaming of ‘moonlight, travel, kisses in the evening shadows’ (p. 65), there are precise echoes of Emma Bovary’s gullibility, not least in her lament to Jean: ‘Ah, how happy I could have been if I’d married another man’ (p. 113). But she lacks the tragic status of Flaubert’s heroine, to the extent that she in fact reduplicates in her love-affair with Maréchal both the financial self-interest and the structure of bourgeois order by transforming him, in her imagination, into her ‘real’ husband (p. 104), and projecting an everlasting aura over a romance whose ending she had accepted with characteristic reasonableness. One of the functions of such parallels is to suggest the general failure which Pierre’s destiny, far from being original, simply repeats. He has enough in common with both his parents to mock the arrogance of his ‘you and I differ’ (p. 42). Roland too has dreams of setting sail for Senegal, thereby trivializing Pierre’s own exotic ambitions. They have the same distrust of women, while the father suffers from a malaise as inexplicable as his son’s. As far as Pierre and his mother are concerned, a mutual longing to escape is complemented by the fact that they both look to the sea in search of disembodied peace; but a similar passivity is suggested by their invariable positions at the rear of their respective boats. The debased currency of their common Romantic idealism can purchase only cliché and contradiction. For while Pierre imagines his mother making Maréchal into a hero, entering her life ‘as lovers do in books’ (p. 65), he struggles to retain an image of her as fairy princess he no longer believes in, and himself subscribes to those ‘legends’ (p. 37) which transform Marowsko into a figure of epic proportions.
Patterns of this kind are inadequately accounted for by mere heredity. Those that derive from this grouping cut across such explanations altogether. Pierre’s comparison between himself and a pauper like Marowsko is not simply an associative device. The latter being described as having the ‘intonations of an infant learning to speak’ (p. 38) is related to Pierre’s traumatic assimilation of adult codes. They have both come to Le Havre to find a place in the social structure, and when Pierre is forced into exile too, Marowsko feels as betrayed by his provider as Pierre himself. Their destinies run so close that even the medical cupboard in Pierre’s cabin exactly resembles the one in Marowsko’s equally narrow shop; though it is only a bitterly ironic twist that Maréchal’s kind recourse to a Parisian chemist when Pierre was ill as a child should have caused his later suffering, to which Marowsko is blind. That Mme Roland, ‘a somewhat sentimental but thrifty’ (p. 17) woman, should be like Maréchal, a ‘sentimental man’ (p. 63) with money, is less surprising. What is more curious is that her husband has something in common with the episodic Joséphine, the maid too stupid to be party to family secrets. Joséphine, however, is also like Mme Roland: both are unconcerned by the father’s tantrums and treat him with similar scorn. For Roland, indeed, his wife is simply another servant, a role which she contentedly adopts in substituting herself for Jean’s own maid. Linked by a common activity of serving food and drink, this pattern comes full circle in the parallels between Mme Roland and the café waitress; and as Pierre is called upon to diagnose his mother’s suffering, the waitress tells him that, had she known he was a doctor, she would have come to him when she was ‘ill’ (translating the more mirroring French of souffrante) (p. 45). Nevertheless, the most explicit such analogy is that between Mme Roland and Mme Rosémilly. That they should sew and travel side by side may be fortuitous; that they see themselves reflected in the grieving figures in the prints on Mme Rosémilly’s wall is not, ‘so similar that they could have been sisters’ (p. 114). For it is made clear that Jean’s future wife will re-enact Mme Roland’s marital destiny. Mme Rosémilly is as charmed by Beausire’s sophistication, ‘almost forgetting her promise and Jean who followed her in a daze’ (p. 90), as she is as irritated by the latter’s clumsiness. To Pierre’s ‘I’m learning how a man prepares himself to become a cuckold’ (p. 91), his mother objects that Mme Rosémilly is ‘as honourable as they come’, thus echoing his misconception of herself.
Even more significant, though at first sight possibly unsuspected, are the parallels between Pierre and Jean. At one level they display oppositions almost mathematical in their inverted symmetry; at another the text assimilates them. Maupassant portrays Pierre in Jean’s legal role, both in appearance and temperament, assembling a ‘case’ (p. 66) against his mother, and finally resembling ‘a judge satisfied with his work’ (p. 82). Conversely Jean’s attitude to Mme Roland, particularly in Chapter 7, is that of a caring physician. Pierre’s rationalization of his self-interest is reflected in Jean’s, subsequent to the latter himself experiencing ‘the sharp stab of emotion provoked in us by a terrible thought’ (p. 107); and the feeling of being ‘like a man who has fallen into the water without ever having learned to swim’ (p. 99) recalls Pierre’s of having ‘been thrown from the deck of a ship a hundred leagues out to sea’ (p. 73). Both brothers need to go outside the family in order to think, but in wandering off to the harbour, having ‘opted for solitude’ (p. 33), Pierre finds another ‘loner’ (solitaire, p. 36) in Jean; just as, at the end of the novel, he is briefed by a ship’s doctor described as ‘a young man with a fair beard who looked like his brother’ (p. 119).
These substitutions assimilating the two brothers underpin the novel’s psychological study. Jean’s taking Pierre’s place in the Oedipal drama of his mother’s affections is substantiated by symbolic details as well as being charted by the shift in narrative perspective which gradually displaces Pierre’s point of view. Both returning home to ‘share their father’s pleasure’ (p. 16), it is Jean who finally assumes the status of the ‘thief’ (p. 69, p. 108). What is more, the characters thus function within the related drama of identity. For as the revelation of his mother’s sexual self is inseparable from Pierre’s discovery of ‘the other self which is to be found in each of us’ (p. 34), Jean’s role is that of this alter ego. Pierre’s pent-up ‘self-loathing’ (p. 98) reaches its climax in the confrontation between them. But this disjunction is registered most clearly in the earlier scene in which they lie side by side, only divided by a partition-wall, the one conscious in his suffering, the other contentedly unconscious in his ‘animal-like sleep’ (p. 69). As Pierre struggles throughout against an ultimately triumphant irrational self, so, by the end of the novel, this symmetry has been reversed: Jean rationalizes his future during a sleepless night while it is now Pierre who gives in to ‘an animal-like sleep’ (p. 122). The perception of a different ‘other half’, in fracturing the illusion of unity, also alienates private and public selves. Jean is the latter: integrated into the social world, enjoying its material benefits, setting up his legal practice at the address Pierre had chosen for a surgery, and secure in the preferences of the triadic surrogate of his mother, the waitress, and Mme Rosémilly. As its very title suggests, Pierre et Jean is structured in terms of the two brothers’ antithetical yet complementary selves, alternately rivals and fellow-sufferers (like the twin beacons and sirens), divided against, and at one with, each other.
A number of critics have played with that title as ‘Pierre e(s)t Jean’, such punning thereby catching the spirit of this text. At one level, many of its character-patterns, justified by family links and affinities, are perfectly consistent with verisimilitude. Yet, at another, this patterning is taken to lengths which are not, underlining the artifice of Pierre et Jean and the extent to which Maupassant is, in effect, playing with his characters and, ultimately, his reader.8 Wordplay, in the shape of puns and double entendres, is certainly in evidence within the text. The authorial humour is sometimes wry and often savage, if not always amenable to translation into English. When his parents are asked whether they were ‘on very intimate terms with’ Maréchal, Pierre listens to his unfaithful mother describe him as ‘a faithful friend’ (p. 53); he unwittingly recalls her lover as ‘a man who had known their mother’ (p. 67, with the original French here, connu, having the biblical sense of ‘carnal knowledge’), while Jean’s reproach is truer than he knows, accusing Pierre of ‘torturing Mother as if it’s her fault’ (p. 97, faute also meaning ‘carnal sin’). At the same time, this is also a feature of the text which, rather than simply pointing to their blindness, bypasses the characters altogether while alerting us to Maupassant’s presence as storyteller; and it is significant that the effectiveness of this kind of punning often depends on the text being read aloud, in keeping with Maupassant’s formidable reputation as a raconteur.
This is particularly the case in his exploitation of the myriad possibilities of onomastic word-play. Pont-Audemer (p. 35) is a variation on a homophonic theme (eau de mer) as is Pierre’s evocation of Castellamare (p. 66) (château de la mer). More mischievous is Trouville as the site of sexual availability. Saint-Jouin is where decisions are reached to join in holy matrimony, and where the alliance between Jean and his mother is forged at Pierre’s expense. It is as appropriate that the Prince Albert should be named after a deceased husband who was not the official king, as it is for Pierre to leave on the Lorraine—that province of so much strife, and in exile after 1870—rather than the Normandie (which was substituted in the manuscript for L’Amérique), the ship of his motherland. Nor are the names of the characters innocently invented. In Mme Rosémilly, rose-et-mille (flowers and money) suggests a woman both sentimental and pragmatic, that pious and skilful strategist living on the Route de Saint-Adresse (adresse also meaning ‘skill’). Léon Maréchal is linked to that most un-leonine of lovers, the Léon of Madame Bovary whose heroine, as has been suggested, has much in common with his mistress; and the martial grandeur of his name is subverted by all the ‘captains’ who parade their inanity through the novel, not least Roland himself as ‘captain of the Perle’ (p. 52). The former dealer in precious stones who gives this name to his boat and calls his son Pierre (the French for ‘stone’) is, of course, the last person to discover any secret at the heart of his oyster! Dr Pirette (p. 119) is Pierre in another form, as ‘Pierrot’ (translated as ‘little Pierre’, p. 55) suggests how he is diminished when he clowns for the family’s pleasure. The names of Pierre’s professors have animal connotations, while verbal associations may partly explain the comparison between Marat and Marowsko. More curious is the phonemic interechoing between these, the episodic figures of Marchand, Mas-Roussel, and Marival, and Maréchal himself. It is possible that this prefix is another variant on the punning of mer and mère. But they can also be seen as a kind of audible joke, a studied tease which highlights the very act of naming.
As such, these choices establish between author and reader a knowing relationship informed by nods and winks. They are part of the process whereby the work plants its clues, in a novel which has much in common with a detective story—Pierre being the sleuth engaged in a search for motive, opportunity, and proof which is not merely circumstantial, in order to arrive (if necessary through securing a confession) at the truth. That structure sustains the dramatic interest of the novel. Yet there is no mystery not easily resolved. Right from the start, we are told that Roland is not a ladies’ man and adores being taken in by lies. His wife’s reactions to the memory of Maréchal are plain to see. We learn that it was he who rushed off to get a doctor at Jean’s birth, while his imagined words ‘I helped bring this boy into the world’ (p. 31) tell it all. We also chuckle when Roland recalls that Maréchal ‘came in to order something, and then he came back often’ (p. 58). And how this story will end is equally obvious. As early as Chapter 3 Pierre is left alone while the family make arrangements for Jean’s new life; and it is saturated in prefigurations of death, in motifs and metaphors of solitude and exile. Inscribed in Maréchal’s will, for example, is the clause that the legacy will go by default to ‘abandoned children’ (p. 28). Even the biscuits offered to M. Lecanu are sealed in coffin-like ‘metal containers for trips around the world’ (p. 30). Many of these presages, of course, the reader tends not to see, integrating such details only in retrospect. Indeed, Maupassant encourages the reader to adopt Pierre’s point of view, and to follow his investigations via the clues he finds (like matching hair and dates). But the authorial irony is aimed both at Pierre—who is largely blind to the structure of signposts and never has the truth revealed directly to him—and at the reader. In the reader’s case, this irony is more complex. For while the truth seems apparent, the reader tends to ignore the extent to which, in the suspension of disbelief, the ‘Illusionist’s artifice has been taken at face value—at the level of appearance in spite of its thematic subversion—in spite of the novel’s quite extraordinarily contrived patterns and its incredibly schematic arrangement.
This is further illustrated by the book’s triangles, extending from all the threesomes of the drama to those incidental triads like the house on three floors, Lecanu’s clerk having been three times, José-phine’s three entries with tea-things, and the thrice-striking clock. Pierre makes three visits to Marowsko and to the harbour, and three boat trips, including the three hours he spends sailing La Perle. We are told that he was 3 years old when his parents met Maréchal, and he needs to find an annual rent of 3,000 francs. And all this in a novel of nine chapters and six principal characters, with its three old sailors (Roland, Papagris, and Beausire) and its triple surrogate of Louise, Mme Rosémilly, and the waitress. Nor do these few examples exhaust a phenomenon discernible even in the organization of its narrative sequences. When one adds to this the symmetries generated by its doubling procedures, Pierre et Jean does indeed appear artificial in the extreme, as contrived as those two pairs of prints working by analogy in Mme Rosémilly’s drawing room, which their spectators take as real reproductions of genuine scenes and admire with the required gravity of emotion.
In the final analysis the patterns of Pierre et Jean both contribute to its aesthetic unity and function within the same self-conscious perspective as its preface. For if the latter provides Maupassant with a mirror in which he can rationalize his artistic strategies, the novel itself encodes that awareness of his imaginative playing with words. This very activity is dramatized in the scene in Chapter 2 in which Pierre helps Marowsko find a name, precisely, for his latest liqueur. In their own search for le mot juste, ‘Lovely Ruby’ (p. 39) is rejected as being too metaphorically precious and pretentiously symbolic; on the other hand, the name finally agreed upon, ‘Currantina’, is the nearest to the raw material from which Marowsko’s invention has been distilled, without, of course, being quite the same thing. As has been suggested, Marowsko is another of Pierre’s subject-doubles, exiled from his mother-country, not fitting (even into his clothes!), not integrated into the marriages and meals of materialist bourgeois France. Above all, however, he is like Pierre because he too is engaged in a quest for originality; and in this scene he thinks that, at last, after two months’ work, he has wrought from an ordinary fruit ‘a new concoction’, as Pierre acknowledges: ‘Very, very good, and quite a new flavour. A real find, my friend!’ (p. 38). Yet this drama of expression is circumscribed by what habitually happens to Marowsko’s discoveries: they are not recognized unless they are bought by café-owners as a result of being advertised in newspapers in exchange for bribes. His creative inventions, in other words, have to be retailed so that he can survive and labelled so that they can sell, assimilated into, and degraded by, those public values for which ‘a real find’ is a luxurious apartment (p. 57). In the parallel failures of both the alchemist and Pierre, one can discern Maupassant’s own quest for originality, fearing that his novel’s quality would preclude it from a being a commercial success. As his preface makes explicit, he too is searching for a language in which his inventions allow the reader to recognize the raw material from which it is created, but which is manifestly not synonymous with that reality.
Assessed against the criteria set out in ‘The Novel’, the measure of the originality of Maupassant’s recognizably Realist text is therefore the extent to which it is not simply a copy of the particular reality it seems to transcribe. That achievement rests on the overlaid paradox that this construction of the ‘Illusionist’ demystifies what its preface calls ‘an illusion of the world’ (p. 8). His conception of experience is properly theatrical. For if Maupassant shows human beings subject to fatalities beyond their control, by the same token their attempts to shape their own destinies are illusory, like Jean’s ‘decision’ to get married or Pierre’s ‘determination’ to leave. So too, differentiation from biological origins is merely an illusion of the ego which seeks social or intellectual forms as a means of asserting its reality. The remorseless analogies of Pierre et Jean equate all such forms of behaviour with a transparent masquerade. As suggested by its interdependent scenarios of a ‘romantic comedy . . . played out throughout the fishing trip’ (p. 89) of Chapter 6, the trivial games that people play (fishing, rowing, sailing) are ultimately no different from apparently more serious activities. Human dramas are played out against the backdrop of the cycle of the seasons, the sea, and the stars, reducing their protagonists to the status of insects. What they achieve is purely by chance, and as fragile as the sand-castles trampled on by the children in the park. That Pierre’s final departure should be likened to both a birth and a death is consistent with a pattern of images in which, for Maupassant, life and mortality are synonymous.
The consequences of so pessimistic a vision of experience are potentially far-reaching in so far as the particular construction unmasked in Pierre et Jean is that of the family itself, with its values designed to guarantee that structure against the disorder of instinctual drives. The chaos of natural forces perceived by Jean and Mme Rosémilly on the edge of the (sexual) abyss exactly parallels Pierre’s discovery in the bowels of the Lorraine; for as the rocks piled on top of each other (p. 85) resemble the ruins of a city divested of its civilization, so, not far below the veneer of the upper decks, the creatures ‘stretched out on shelves one above the other or in teeming piles all over the floor’ (p. 125) have returned to their animal origins. The family, in Maupassant’s novel, is seen disguising these by providing the natural self with a social role, transforming the biological female into wife and mother and differentiating father and son in her affections. Only the waitress retains a sexual freedom outside the family network, but she is without a name, as stateless as the exiles on the ship. The repressive codes which enable the family to maintain a semblance of order are not limited to such expulsions. It does so too, for example, by averting its eyes from the bed, by not soliciting intimacy, and by burning the evidence of passion. Pierre et Jean simultaneously reveals that order to be an arbitrary one and questions the very basis of those absolute judgements which make it against the law to commit incest and adultery.
Marriage and adultery are subjects to which Maupassant frequently returned in his journalism of 1881–4, presaging their treatment in Pierre et Jean. His invariable conclusion is that marriage is an ‘anti-natural’ state, admitting that his sympathy for infidelity was deeply subversive. It is incest, however, which represents the definitive negation of family rules, the ultimate interdit (the ‘non-sayable’) in a novel whose tranquil conversations assure the Rolands’ material future and only become disruptive when emotions break through. Pierre et Jean is not overtly, of course, a novel about this taboo. But its patterns provocatively assimilate incest and adultery by revealing the ‘lie’ (p. 68) of paternal rights at the family’s centre. Though Roland surveys la mer(e) ‘like a self-satisfied proprietor’ (p. 16), the paternal home is not inviolable. His potency is a sham; his wishes and advice are ignored, and he is progressively divested of his authority. Not only is he not consulted about Jean’s marriage, but the novel’s closing scene shows the former ‘captain’ reduced to a superfluous passenger in the family boat, while Beausire (that other ‘intimate friend’ (p. 18) whose very name aligns him with Maréchal), ‘sitting between the two women’ (p. 127), is at the helm. As Mme Roland blushingly admits, ‘we do everything without telling him’ (p. 116). No wonder that her bovine husband can appreciate the difficulties encountered by the ‘pilots of Quillebœuf ‘unless they negotiate the channel every day’ (p. 23). In the French text he is always père Roland, thereby divested of his sexuality; and as we are alerted to this when told that Louise ‘always called her husband Father at home, and sometimes Monsieur Roland in front of strangers’ (p. 25), so this is deliberately repeated at the very moment Jean takes his father’s place at the head of the family table. He also takes from him Mme Rosémilly’s arm, thus prefiguring the exceptional entwinement with his mother only possible after Chapter 7. For that chapter sees the consummation of this Oedipal drama in the scene between these two which has earned enough critical admiration to repay the amount of work, judging by its extensive rewriting, which Maupassant devoted to it. The substitution, in the manuscript, of ‘kissed her dress’ (p. 100) for the original ‘kissing her neck, her shoulder, and her bosom’ does not alter the fact that this is a seduction scene. And its ‘hidden meaning’ (p. 6) is illuminated not only by the equations between Roland and Pierre, and between Jean and Maréchal (remembered by the father as being ‘a brother’ (p. 53)), but also by Mme Roland wanting to stay the night and returning to her husband’s bed ‘feeling once again the familiar excitement of past adulteries’ (p. 105).
By relating explicit and covert discourses in this way, Maupassant seeks to demystify the fictions which assure a society of its differentiation from the bestial. That the family functions as a microcosm of the larger collective organization is confirmed by the fact that the novel’s private Oedipal drama too is linked to the economic codes of the bourgeois world. The impoverished Pierre is kept at the door of transgression while Jean is powerful enough to make his way through that door to his mother on the bed. But the bourgeois characters are only distinguished from the suffering poor on the Lorraine by their confidence in the illusions they elaborate. And that confidence itself serves to explain Pierre et Jean’s textual strategies. Maupassant is perfectly aware that, in a society ‘where good taste is hard to come by’ (p. 75), books are read ‘not for their artistic value but for the melancholic and gentle daydreams they awakened in’ (p. 20) a Mme Roland whose vulgar literary tastes correspond exactly to those decried in his preface. What has been called Maupassant’s ‘ludic cynicism’ is responsible for his refusal to cater for the expectations of such a readership. This ‘Roman de(s) Roland’ is cast in an ambiguous mode. Far from offering the reader what its preface terms a ‘dramatic catastrophe’ (p. 7), the novel closes with the family order reimposed. And that Mme Roland should be instrumental in this accounts for the ambivalence with which we are encouraged to view her. For while she goes beyond the structure of legimitate emotions, she is also, and above all, ‘an orderly woman’ (p. 17). While her preoccupation with harmony is not limited to interior decoration, the design she chooses for Jean’s bedroom (invested with ‘all of a mother’s love’) is grotesquely inappropriate; for, even on the curtains around a conjugal bed she had so detested herself, there is an emblematic ‘shepherdess in a medallion framed by the joined beaks of two doves’ (p. 94). Such is the depth of complacency confronted by Maupassant that he inverts the conventions of the family’s vicarious experience by ending his own novel of adultery, not with a murder or a suicide, but with a marriage.
At the same time, his self-awareness extends to doubts about his entire project. By taking the narrative beyond Pierre’s point of view, Maupassant seems to be distinguished from the character’s failure to have the truth confirmed. What Pierre does surmise simply condemns him to a futile suffering. More problematic is the recognition that the ‘truth’ discerned in Pierre et Jean is no more valid than the ‘lie’ it uncovers. Pierre’s reconstruction of events is properly novelistic. But, for that very reason, it may be no more than another subjective illusion. His version of his mother’s love-affair is neither identical to, nor any less distorted than, her own confession. That same ‘vivid and wild imagination’, we are told in an authorial aside, has been ‘captured’ (p. 37) by the myths surrounding Marowsko. And it also generates a tragic vision of his own destiny. Set alongside this, however, there is a more prosaic account. Rather than being tossed about on the roaring ocean, the Lorraine sets sail on a sea as smooth as polished steel; and, instead of being subject to the unleashed forces of the natural world, Pierre (as both the meeting with Dr Pirette and the architectural analogies suggest) is as integrated as Jean, if less securely, within a social structure. The final family conversation includes the promise to ensure that Pierre is present at the wedding which will consecrate the triumph of order. In such resigned compromises we find the most bitterly ironic of Maupassant’s self-reflections. Not only is Pierre locked in egoism at the sight of the fellow-sufferers with whom he cannot communicate, but there is an acknowledgement that his revelations function primarily as a personal catharsis, ‘as if emptying his sorrow into the invisible, deaf winds that carried his words away’ (p. 98).
The fear of ‘a lie impossible to reveal’ (pp. 68–9) is confirmed by the text’s images of itself, the most important of which is Maréchal’s portrait. This is Maupassant’s clearest borrowing from Bourget’s André Cornélis (1887), in which the handling of such a self-conscious device is in keeping with Hamlet’s famous ‘the play’s the thing | Wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king’. Pierre similarly tries to prove his mother’s guilt by gauging her reactions to a representation of her past. It is ‘read’ by all the members of the family, provoking their contributions to the novel’s own reconstruction of events. Because it is open to different interpretations, however, the lifelike but cryptic ‘portrait of a friend, portrait of a lover’ (p. 72) offers Pierre no certainty. It also mirrors the reader’s deciphering activities. And it is significant that, having been briefly on display, by the time the novel is over, the portrait is locked away and hidden once again. But the effectiveness of Maupassant’s ‘disturbing little painting’ (p. 72) can perhaps be judged by comparing Pierre et Jean to Mme Rosémilly’s ‘sentimental maritime scenes’ (p. 114). Inspiring ‘decorum and a sense of order’ (p. 115), the latter are consistent with a room whose symmetrically aligned chairs are only momentarily displaced by the ritual of legitimizing Jean and Mme Rosémilly’s sexual dalliance in the midst of nature. They exert a ‘fascination’ on those ‘moved and captivated by the banal poignancy of these unambiguous, poetic subjects’; and, like Mme Roland’s reading, they engender ‘reverie’. Their stylized representations of suffering in no way disturb the ordered space they decorate. Maupassant’s text tries to do something else. For, as he puts it in his preface, the novelist’s aim ‘is not to tell us a story, to entertain us, or to appeal to our emotions, but rather to force us to think’ (p. 6). And this requires both involvement in, and abstraction from, a recognizably fictional reality neither exclusively symbolic, like the pictures on the wall, nor simply anecdotal, like the story of a crime in the newspaper—which also caters for an unthinking ‘fascination’ (p. 42). The reader is thus invited to see illustrated in Pierre et Jean what is considered to be the most succinct statement of his aesthetic: ‘a work of art is only distinguished if it is at the same time both symbolic and exactly representative of reality’ (La Vie errante, 1890). But unlike the gallery of mirrors in the Lorraine, it should also trouble his sleep.
Pierre et Jean is very different from those pictures on Mme Rosémilly’s wall ‘instantly understood, requiring neither mental effort nor prolonged scrutiny’ (p. 114). Yet it is not certain that readers will discern its ‘hidden meaning’ as well as believe in its ‘events’. Such doubts in the novel’s preface echo Maupassant’s nostalgic evocation, three years earlier, of an eighteenth-century reading-public’s appreciation of a writer’s secretive procedures: ‘It sought the underlying and inner meaning of words, delved into what the author was trying to do, read slowly so as not to miss a detail, and then, having understood a sentence, went back to discover whether there was more to it than might appear. For intelligent minds, carefully prepared for literary effects, were subject to that mysterious power which subtly brings a work of art to life.’ In Pierre et Jean, by contrast, that other ‘cashier . . . reading a novel’ (in the café) illustrates a mindless boredom (p. 45). For another way in which Maupassant’s text is a product of the post-Naturalist crisis of the French novel is that it dramatizes the contemporary artist’s lost belief in that imaginative ‘power’. In L’Inutile Beauté (1890), art is conceived as both the free play of the imagination momentarily transcending deterministic forces, and yet ultimately as insubstantial as other human activities. Such an ambivalence towards his own writing, alternately asserted as a raison d’être and cynically dismissed as a way of earning a living, informs the very texture of Pierre et Jean. While a language both natural and deliberate gives him enormous freedom, Maupassant simultaneously watches himself playing with words. The patterns of his artefact can be equated with those of Mme Roland’s tapestry, ‘a difficult and intricate piece of work’ (p. 78), with her eyes moving between the portrait and counting stitches. Maupassant’s impish delight in his inventions may seem to coexist uneasily with a terrible despair. It is also consistent, however, with a critical questioning of the genre in which, alongside the superior truth of ‘lies’, the novel parades its own artifice and signals its author’s awareness of being engaged in a fictional sport. The novel’s identity too becomes problematic in illuminating its own origins. In the ways in which it anticipates that modern concern whereby the text is given to observing itself in the process of its own making, not the least original dimension of Pierre et Jean is the extent to which it encodes the drama of originality itself.