Authors: Guy de Maupassant
The most widely available translation of
Une vie
has been the version by H. N. P. Sloman in Penguin Classics (1965), who retains the unsatisfactory title of
A Woman's Life
. Sloman's practice of running Maupassant's short paragraphs together has not been followed in the present translation on the ground that Maupassant's practice in this respect is an intentional stylistic device and one which he owed in large measure to Flaubert.
In the preparation of this translation I am once more deeply indebted both to my wife Vivienne for her encouragement and patient reading of the typescript and to I. P. Foote for his painstaking and invariably well-judged advice on how inaccuracy, infelicity, and anachronism might be avoided.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
In English
Maupassant in Translation
Novels
Bel-Ami
, trans. Douglas Parmée (Harmondsworth, 1975).
Pierre et Jean
, trans. Leonard Tancock (Harmondsworth, 1979).
Short Stories
A Day in the Country and Other Stories
, trans. and ed. David Coward (Oxford, 1990).
Mademoiselle Fifi and Other Stories
, trans. and ed. David Coward (Oxford, 1993).
A Parisian Bourgeois' Sundays and Other Stories
, trans. Marlo Johnston (London and Chester Springs, Pa., 1997).
Biographies
Francis Steegmuller,
Maupassant. A Lion in the Path
(New York, 1949; repr. London, 1950; 1972).
Paul Ignotus,
The Paradox of Maupassant
(London, 1966).
Michael Lerner,
Maupassant
(London, 1975).
Roger L. Williams,
The Horror of Life
(London, 1980); pp. 21772 provide a judicious and well-informed account of Maupassant's medical history.
Critical Studies
Edward D. Sullivan,
Maupassant the Novelist
(Princeton and Oxford, 1954).
Maupassant: The Short Stories
(London, 1962).
Richard B. Grant, 'Imagery as a Means of Psychological Revelation in Maupassant's
Une vie
',
Studies in Philology
, 60 (1963), 66984.
Albert H. Wallace,
Maupassant
(New York, 1973).
Naomi Schor, '
Une vie
or the Name of the Mother', in her
Breaking the Chain: Women, Theory and French Realist Fiction
(New York,
1985), 4877. A translation of '
Une vie
/Des Vides ou le nom de la mère',
Littérature
, 26 (May 1977), 5171.
Mary Donaldson-Evans,
A Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction
(Lexington, Ky., 1986). Of particular relevance to
A Life
.
In French
Standard Editions of Maupassant
Collected Works
Romans
, ed. Louis Forestier, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 1987).
Contes et nouvelles
, ed. Louis Forestier, 2 vols., Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris, 19749).
OEuvres* complètes
, ed. Gilbert Sigaux and Pascal Pia, 17 vols., Cercle du Bibliophile (Evreux, 196971).
Chroniques
, ed. Hubert Juin, 3 vols. (Paris, 1980). Brings together over 200 texts published between 1876 and 1891.
Editions of Une vie
Une vie
, ed. André Fermigier, Folio Classique (Paris, 1974).
Une vie
, ed. Antonia Fonyi, GF-Flammarion (Paris, 1993).
Biographies
Armand Lanoux,
Maupassant le Bel-Ami
(repr. Paris, 1983).
Henri Troyat,
Maupassant
(Paris, 1989).
All biographies of Maupassant are subject to caution: solid biographical evidence is in short supply, many myths are perpetuated from one biography to the next, and undue reliance is frequently placed on Maupassant's fictions as sources of biographical information. A valuable discussion of these issues is provided by Jacques Lacarme, 'Le
Maupassant
de Morand ou la biographie impossible', in
Maupassant et l'écriture
, ed. Louis Forestier (Paris, 1993), 27183.
Critical Studies
General
Pierre Cogny,
Maupassant, l'homme sans Dieu
(Brussels, 1968). A valuable overview.
Mariane Bury,
La Poétique de Maupassant
(Paris, 1994). An analysis of Maupassant's literary art.
André Vial,
Guy de Maupassant et l'art du roman
(Paris, 1954). Still the standard work.
On
Une vie
André Vial,
La Genèse d"Une vie' premier roman de Guy de Maupassant
, (Paris, 1954).
Marcel Desportes
et al.
,
Analyses et réflexions sur 'Une vie' de Guy de Maupassant et le pessimisme
(Paris, 1979).
François Bessire
et al.
(eds.),
Lectures de 'Une vie' de Maupassant. Le Thème du pessimisme
(Paris, 1979).
Henri Mitterand, 'Clinique du mariage:
Une vie
', in his
Le Regard et le signe. Poétique du roman réaliste et naturaliste
(Paris, 1987), 15967.
Bernard Valette,
Guy de Maupassant
. '
Une vie
' (Paris, 1993).
Jean-Louis Cabanès, '
Une vie
ou le temps perdu', in Yves Reboul (ed.),
Maupassant multiple. Actes du colloque de Toulouse 1315 décembre 1993
(Toulouse, 1995), 7986.
Mariane Bury, '
Une vie
'
de Guy de Maupassant
, Collection Foliothèque (Paris, 1995). The most useful introductory guide to the novel.
Further Reading in Oxford World's Classics
Honoré de Balzac,
Eugénie Grandet
, trans. Sylvia Raphael, introduction by Christopher Prendergast.
Gustave Flaubert,
Madame Bovary
, trans. Gerard Hopkins, ed. Terence Cave.
A CHRONOLOGY OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT
A LIFE
For Mme Brainne
The homage of a devoted friend,
in memory of a departed friend.
*
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
I
Her trunks packed, Jeanne walked over to the window, but it had not stopped raining.
All night long the downpour had rattled on the rooftiles and against the window-panes. The lowering, water-laden sky seemed to have burst asunder and to be emptying itself onto the land, thinning the soil to a pap and dissolving it like sugar. Squalls of warm, heavy air gusted intermittently. The sluicing gurgle of overflowing drains filled the deserted streets, where the houses stood, like sponges, soaking up the penetrating moisture that made their walls sweat with damp from cellar to attic.
Jeanne, having left the convent on the previous day and being now at last forever free, ready to reach out for all the good things in life of which she had so long been dreaming, was afraid that her father might hesitate to set out if the weather did not clear; and for the hundredth time that morning she scanned the horizon.
Then she noticed that she had forgotten to pack her calendar in her travelling-bag. She took it down from the wall, a small piece of card divided into months and bearing the date of the current year 1819 in gilt numbering surrounded by an intricate pattern, and proceeded to cross out the first four columns with a pencil, putting a line through each saint's name as far as 2 May, the day she had left the convent.
A voice outside the door called:
'Jeannette!'
'Come in, Papa,' Jeanne answered.
And her father appeared.
Baron Simon-Jacques Le Perthuis des Vauds was a gentleman out of the previous century, at once an eccentric and a kindly soul. As an enthusiastic disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau
*
he loved nature with a lover's passion, its fields, its woods, its animals.
As an aristocrat by birth, he instinctively abhorred what had happened in '93;
*
but being philosophical by temperament and liberal by education, he denounced tyranny with a mild and vociferous hatred.
His great strength, and also his great weakness, was his kindliness, a kindliness that had not arms enough to caress or to give or to embrace, the kindliness of a creator, undiscriminating, unresisting, as though some sinew of his will were paralysed, as though his motor-force lacked some essential element. It was almost a vice.
Being of a theoretical cast of mind, he had planned his daughter's education in every particular, with the intention of rendering her at once happy, good-natured, honest, and loving.
She had remained at home until the age of twelve, and then, despite her mother's tears, she had been sent to the Convent of the Sacred Heart.
There he had kept her firmly shut away, cloistered, unknown and unknowing, ignorant of human things. It was his wish that she should be returned to him a virgin at the age of seventeen so that he himself might imbue her with a kind of poetry of reason and thereby, out in the countryside, in the midst of the fecundated land, unlock her soul and dispel her ignorance with the spectacle of natural love, of the simple courtship of animals, of the serene laws of existence.
And now she was leaving the convent, radiant, full of youthful sap and a hunger for happiness, primed for all the joyful experiences, all the charming chance occurrences, that she had already mentally rehearsed in solitary anticipation throughout her idle daylight moments and the long hours of the night.
She resembled a portrait by Veronese,
*
with hair so blonde that its sheen seemed to have been transferred to her skin, an aristocrat's skin barely tinged with pink and dappled with the faintest down, a sort of pale velvet that became just perceptible when caressed by the rays of the sun. And her eyes were blue, of that opaque blue to be found on Delft figurines.
She had a mole on the left side of her nose, and another to the right, on her chin, which bore one or two curly hairs of such a colour as to be scarcely distinguishable from her skin. She was tall, with a well-developed bosom and a shapely figure. Her clear voice seemed at times too shrill; but her generous laugh made those around her feel joyful. Frequently, in a familiar gesture, she would raise her two hands to her temples as though to smooth her hair.
She ran to her father and gave him a hug as she kissed him:
'Well, are we leaving?'
He smiled, shaking his head covered in hair that was already white and which he wore rather long; and he gestured towards the window:
'How do you expect us to travel in such weather?'
But she implored him with playful, wheedling affection:
'Oh please, Papa, do let's be off. It will be fine by the afternoon.'
'But your mother will never agree to it.'
'Yes, she will. I'll see that she does.'
'Well, if you can manage to persuade your mother, I shall have no objection myself.'
And away she hurried to the Baroness's room. For she had awaited this day of departure with growing impatience.
Since her arrival at the Convent of the Sacred Heart she had never been out of Rouen, her father having forbidden all such diversions before she should reach the age upon which he had fixed. Twice, only, she had been taken to spend a fortnight in Paris, but that too was a city, and she dreamt only of the country.
Now she was going to spend the summer at their property at Les Peuples, an old family chateau perched on the cliffs near Yport;
*
and she was eagerly looking forward to this joyous life of freedom beside the sea. Moreover it had been agreed that she was to be made a present of this manor-house and that she would live there permanently after she was married.
And this rain, which had fallen without respite since the previous evening, was the first great sorrow of her life.
But three minutes later she came running out of her mother's room, screaming the house down:
'Papa, Papa, Mother's agreed! Have the horses harnessed!'
The deluge did not abate; indeed it seemed to fall even more heavily as the berline drew up at the door.
*
Jeanne stood ready to climb into the carriage as the Baroness came down the stairs, supported on one side by her husband and on the other by a tall housemaid as strong and strapping as a lad. She was a Norman girl from the Pays de Caux,
*
who looked at least twenty though she was eighteen at most. The family treated her rather as a second daughter, for her mother had suckled Jeanne
*
at the same time as her. She was called Rosalie.
It was in fact her principal function to help her mistress as she walked, for the Baroness had grown enormously fat in recent years as the result of cardiac hypertrophy, which ailed her constantly.
Breathing heavily, the Baroness reached the front steps of the old town-house, saw the courtyard streaming with water, and muttered:
'Really, this is not very sensible.'
Her husband replied with his usual smile:
'The decision was yours, Madame Adélaïde.'
Because she bore the sonorous name of Adélaïde, he always prefaced it with a 'Madame' which he uttered with a certain air of faintly mocking respect.
Thereupon she continued her progress and struggled into the carriage, whose springs sagged. The Baron sat down by her side, while Jeanne and Rosalie took their places with their backs to the horses.
Ludivine, the cook, brought piles of cloaks which they spread over their knees, as well as two baskets which they tucked away under their legs. Then she climbed up beside Père Simon and wrapped herself in a large rug, which covered her head completely. The caretaker and his wife came to say goodbye and shut the carriage-door. They listened to the final instructions about the trunks, which were to, follow in a cart; and away the travellers went.
Père Simon, the coachman, sat with his head bowed and his shoulders hunched beneath the rain, disappearing under the triple cape of his box-coat. Howling gusts of wind and rain beat against the carriage-windows and flooded the roadway.
Drawn by two horses at a brisk trot, the berline proceeded rapidly down towards the quayside and along the line of tall ships whose masts, yards, and rigging rose forlornly into the teeming sky like trees stripped bare of their leaves. Then it turned into the long Boulevard du Mont Riboudet.