Places: Bel-Ami

*Paris. Bel-AmiCapital of France and the social, political, and cultural center of French life. Georges Duroy’s rise (and there are passages where he literally climbs stairways to one success or another) is reflected in his material and romantic triumphs. The novel’s first chapter shows the beginning of Duroy’s career as a boulevardier, an individual who spends a good deal of time going from café to café to see and be seen. In fact, while strolling some of Paris’s “grands boulevards” and adjacent thoroughfares, Duroy meets magazine editor Forestier, his future boss and the present husband of Duroy’s future wife Madeleine. After realizing that they served in the army together, the two men stroll through Paris, covering quite a bit of territory together.

The opening scenes of the novel are exciting, presenting a kind of panorama of Paris’s Right Bank (the north side of the Seine River). Guy de Maupassant alludes to the Opera and to the Church of the Madeleine, where Georges’s second wedding will take place. There is an interlude at the Folies Bergère, where a prostitute makes overtures toward Georges, and a scene on the Champs Élysées, perhaps Paris’s most famous street. Maupassant creates a powerful sense of the terrain on which Georges will fight for success, from the glamour of this beautiful city’s monuments, to its cafés and bistros, to its seamy underside–all of which prove to Georges that, as his friend tells him, it is primarily through women that a man becomes successful in Paris. Later, Maupassant characterizes Paris as a colossus with a life of its own, a life derived from the collective heat, lust, and activity of its inhabitants.

*Church of the Trinity. Right Bank church in Paris that is the setting of scenes that characterize Duroy and three of his victims. It serves as a trysting-place for Duroy and Virginie Walter, the wife of his publisher, whom Georges brutally seduces and then discards. This seduction is particularly shocking because Madame Walter takes great pride in her Christian virtue and purity. Maupassant makes Madame Walter’s moral downfall seem all the more terrible by setting its beginning in a church. This scene will remind readers of a similar passage, in Madame Bovary (1857; English translation, 1886), by Gustave Flaubert, one of Maupassant’s mentors. In that novel, the heroine’s virtue is assaulted in a cathedral.

*Church of the Madeleine. Another prestigious Parisian church, one that provides a stunning irony: It is there that Georges marries the wealthy Suzanne Walter, daughter of Virginie Walter, with the cream of Paris society in attendance. However, even during the wedding reception, Georges is planning a rendezvous with a longtime mistress.

*Normandy. Region of western France in which Maupassant himself was born. After Georges marries Madeleine Forestier, the widow of his boss, they visit his parents in a tiny, primitive village near Rouen. Their short stay here is uncomfortable for all concerned except Georges, who enjoys revisiting his childhood home. This passage emphasizes the contrast between rural France and the glitter of Paris as well as demonstrating the humble background of the soon-to-be powerful Duroy. His mother quickly learns to hate Madeleine as a parasitic city woman; Madeleine is shocked by the crudeness of the villagers and the conditions in which they live. Most of all, however, the visit to Normandy demonstrates the sharp clash between harsh reality (as shown in the presence of factory smokestacks amid the pretty, bucolic landscape) and a kind of poetic naïveté in Madeleine; one evening during the visit, she even experiences a sudden, sharp, spiritual crisis which precipitates the couple’s return to Paris.