same critics: barely disguised reference to the leading critic of the day, Ferdinand Brunetière (1849–1906), who had made precisely such a remark about both Bel-Ami (1885) and Mont-Oriol (1887).
after Manon Lescaut. . . Sapho, etc.: i.e. Prévost’s Manon Lescaut (1731), Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1787), Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), Choderlos de Laclos’s Les Liaisons dangereuses (1782), Goethe’s Werther (1774) and Elective Affinities (1809), Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1747–8), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Émile (1762), Voltaire’s Candide (1759), Alfred de Vigny’s Cinq-Mars (1826), François-René de Chateaubriand’s René (1805), Alexandre Dumas père’s Les Trois Mousquetaires (1844), George Sand’s Mauprat (1837), Balzac’s Le Père Goriot (1834) and La Cousine Bette (1846), Prosper Mérimée’s Colomba (1840), Stendhal’s Le Rouge et le noir (1831), Théophile Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin (1835), Victor Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831), Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862) and Madame Bovary (1857), Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816), Octave Feuillet’s M. de Camors (1867), Zola’s L’Assommoir (1877), and Alphonse Daudet’s Sapho (1884).
Monte-Cristo: i.e. Dumas père’s Le Comte de Monte Cristo (1841–5).
Zola’s Germinal: published in 1885.
Victor Hugo as much as M. Zola: representing here opposing Romantic and Naturalist aesthetics, the former most famously articulated in the Préface de ‘Cromwell’ (1827), the latter in Le Roman expérimental (1880).
verisimilitude: cited from Boileau’s Art poétique (1674), III, v. 48, famous poetic statement of the criteria governing each literary genre in the period of French Classicism.
‘faits divers’: section of miscellaneous news items in French newspapers.
objective novel: see Introduction, p. xvi.
The artist who paints our portrait: Maupassant notoriously refused to have his portrait painted; this may be a reference to the only one in existence, by Henri Gervex (1852–1929), painted the year before, in 1886.
Symbolists today: i.e. writers such as Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Jules Laforgue (1860–86), Villiers de l’Isle-Adam (1838–89), and Jean Moréas (1856–1910), whose Symbolist manifesto had been published in Le Figaro on 18 September 1886. This may also be a more topical reference to Les Demoiselles Goubert (1887) by Moréas and Paul Adam (1862–1920), transferring to the novel aesthetic priorities usually associated with Symbolist poetry.
Louis Bouilhet: Bouilhet (1822–69) had been a friend of Maupassant’s since his schooldays in Rouen; he was a fine dramatist and poet in his own right, much admired by Flaubert himself. On Maupassant and Flaubert, see Introduction, p. xvi.
Chateaubriand: in fact, a misquotation; the aphorism is ascribed to Buffon (1707–88), as Maupassant’s readers were quick to point out, leading him the next day to ask the editor of Le Gaulois to publish a correction on his behalf.
elsewhere: notably in the preface Maupassant wrote to an 1884 edition of Flaubert’s letters to George Sand (1804–76).
line by Boileau: Art poétique, I, v. 133 (cf. note to p. 7).
artistic style: in the original French, l’écriture artiste immediately designated a style associated with Edmond de Goncourt (1822–96), characterized by verbal dexterity to the point of virtuoso literary effects. Goncourt was widely assumed to be behind the Manifeste des cinq; see Introduction, p. xvii.
simplicity, which does not: i.e. is an abstraction.
La Guillette: the name of the villa Maupassant had had constructed at Étretat in 1883, and where he spent the summers for most of the rest of his life.
Jean-Bart: famous corsair and naval captain (1650–1702), who distinguished himself in the wars of Louis XIV, the French king between 1643 and 1715.
the Normandie: one of the (real) 67 steamships of the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique.
the Prince Albert’s catching us up: one of the Cunard liners plying between Le Havre and Southampton or Liverpool; significantly chosen by Maupassant because of its name commemorating Queen Victoria’s deceased husband, Prince Albert (d. 1861).
Trouville: very fashionable resort since the 1830s, also much frequented by writers and artists (and forever associated with the paintings of Eugène-Louis Boudin (1824–98)).
the Caen river: i.e. the Orme.
bay of Calvados: i.e. between Deauville and Port-en-Bessin, the Calvados itself being the area of Lower Normandy around Caen.
Quillebœuf: small port on the Seine (20 km due west of Honfleur), famous at the time for its pilots.
Le Tréport, Dieppe, and so on: the geographical sequence here should have ended with Le Tréport, some 25 km north-east of Dieppe.
Rue de Paris: the finest street in Le Havre since the eighteenth century, now fronted by arcades.
the Place de la Bourse: the local name for the Place Carnot, the Stock Exchange having been built there in 1784. Roland is standing on what is now the Quai George-V.
the Rue Belle-Normande: Maupassant’s invention, identifiable as the Rue de Normandie, since renamed the Rue Maréchal-Foch.
American uncles: allusion to the fairy tale, subscribed to in Europe at one time, that every relative who emigrated to America soon became a millionaire.
the Place du Théâtre: now the Place Gambetta.
Café Tortoni: located at nos. 1–5 Place du Théâtre and as famous in Le Havre as its namesake in Paris, on the Boulevard des Italiens; established in 1868, it was a favourite meeting-place for local businessmen for whom it catered at relatively modest prices (dinner at 4 fr., including wine).
La Plata: in Argentina.
schooner: the original French term here, a ‘goélette’, specifically designates a fast twin-masted ship.
electric beacons: the first in France, in fact, to be electrified.
the Pont-Audemer river: i.e. the Risle.
Étouville’s lighthouse: it has been pointed out that there is no such place as Étouville, and assumed that Maupassant meant Fatouville, a beacon on the other side of the Seine from Le Havre, high on a hill between the mouth of the Risle and Honfleur.
the White Cat: fairy tale by the local (born near Honfleur) Mme d’Aulnoy (1650–1705), in which a young prince meets a beautiful white cat which is, of course, a princess in disguise; by magical means, he enables her to assume her natural form and marries her.
Sleeping Beauty: by Charles Perrault (1628–1703).
old Marowsko: reputedly based on a Polish chemist at Bezons (in the Seine-et-Oise) frequented by Maupassant. Many Poles had fled to France after unsuccessful rebellions, the latest in 1863, against Russian, Prussian, and Austrian domination and partition of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century.
Marat: Jean-Paul Marat (1743–93), one of the leaders of the French Revolution during the Reign of the Terror (1793–4). He had been a physician at court until 1786, his political enemies subsequently exploiting this to accuse him of being a purveyor of quack medicines.
Le Figaro: right-wing daily, founded in 1854, with a considerable (for its time) circulation of over 100,000.
Senegal: at that time a French colony on the west coast of Africa.
Bolbec-Nointot: the railway stop some 4 km outside Bolbec, itself 24 km west of Le Havre.
Latin Quarter: i.e. while he was a student in Paris, the École de Médecine being situated in this area straddling the fifth and sixth arrondissements.
Bis repetita placent: literally, ‘things repeated twice are pleasant’; a distortion of Horace’s Haec decies repetita placebit (Ars poetica 365).
Santo Domingo: the old name for what is now Haiti, in the West Indies.
Saint-Jouin: seaside hamlet some 18 km outside Le Havre and famous at the time for its Auberge de Paris.
Gabon: part of French Equatorial Africa.
Sainte-Marie in Madagascar: reference either to Cape Sainte-Marie at its southern tip or the tiny island of the same name just off its north-east coast, a French colony long before France annexed Madagascar itself in 1896.
Gascons: the inhabitants of Gascony (in south-west France) being proverbially loquacious and boastful.
Pithiviers: town north-east of Orléans.
the Phare de la Côte and the Sémaphore havrais: invented titles, variants on real newspapers like Le Phare du Havre and Le Sémaphore de Marseille. See Introduction, p. xx.
Rue Tronchet: in the prosperous eighth arrondissement, directly behind the church of the Madeleine.
Rue Montmartre: the narrow and busy street leading north-west up from the central markets of Les Halles.
Sorrento or Castellamare: on the bay of Naples.
the Roches Noires: section of the beach at Trouville on which the boardwalk is situated, famous for its hotel of the same name immortalized in Monet’s L’Hôtel des Roches-Noires à Trouville (1870).
Louis XV: king of France, 1722–44.
Company: i.e. the Compagnie Générale Transatlantique (cf. note to p.20).
the ‘Lorraine’: see Introduction, p. xxxix.
Medical School: i.e. the École de Médecine (cf. note to p. 44).
Mas-Roussel, Rémusot, Flache, and Borriquel: invented names, but also an authorial in-joke, the first two of these having been given to doctors in his previous novel, Mont-Oriol (1887).
you French, you never keep your promises: as far back as 1830, the Poles seeking to liberate themselves from Russia had looked in vain to France for help; Napoleon III had promised assistance to the Polish rebellion of 1863 (cf. note to p. 37).
Blessed are the poor in spirit: Matthew 5: 3; i.e. the simple-minded. ‘Blessed are those who are satisfied with life,’ Maupassant wrote in an article of 1884, ‘those who enjoy themselves, those who are content.’
Saint-Nazaire: major French port on the Atlantic coast, at the mouth of the Loire.