When the cashier gave him the change from his hundred-sou coin, Georges Duroy left the restaurant. As he was handsome, by nature and by the pose of a former non-commissioned officer, he arched his waist, twirled his mustache with a military and familiar gesture, and cast a quick and circular glance at the lingering diners, one of those glances from a pretty boy that spread like a hawk's strike. The women had raised their heads towards him, three little working girls, a music teacher between two ages, badly combed, neglected, wearing a hat that was always dusty and a dress that was always crooked, and two bourgeois women with their husbands, regulars at this fixed-price greasy spoon. When he was on the sidewalk, he remained motionless for a moment, wondering what he was going to do. It was June 28th, and he had just three francs forty left in his pocket to finish the month. That represented two dinners without lunches, or two lunches without dinners, as he chose. He reflected that the morning meals being twenty-two sous, instead of thirty that the evening ones cost, he would have, by contenting himself with lunches, a bonus of one franc twenty centimes, which still represented two snacks of bread and sausage, plus two bocks on the boulevard. That was his great expense and his great pleasure of the nights, and he started down the rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. Maupassant's second novel is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man making it to the top in fin-de-siecle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa. It explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own and is a devastating satire of the sleaziness of contemporary journalism. Bel-Ami enjoys the status of an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic.
Bel-Ami
Year
1885
Pages
303
Tags
Description
When the cashier gave him the change from his hundred-sou coin, Georges Duroy left the restaurant. As he was handsome, by nature and by the pose of a former non-commissioned officer, he arched his waist, twirled his mustache with a military and familiar gesture, and cast a quick and circular glance at the lingering diners, one of those glances from a pretty boy that spread like a hawk's strike. The women had raised their heads towards him, three little working girls, a music teacher between two ages, badly combed, neglected, wearing a hat that was always dusty and a dress that was always crooked, and two bourgeois women with their husbands, regulars at this fixed-price greasy spoon. When he was on the sidewalk, he remained motionless for a moment, wondering what he was going to do. It was June 28th, and he had just three francs forty left in his pocket to finish the month. That represented two dinners without lunches, or two lunches without dinners, as he chose. He reflected that the morning meals being twenty-two sous, instead of thirty that the evening ones cost, he would have, by contenting himself with lunches, a bonus of one franc twenty centimes, which still represented two snacks of bread and sausage, plus two bocks on the boulevard. That was his great expense and his great pleasure of the nights, and he started down the rue Notre-Dame de Lorette. Maupassant's second novel is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man making it to the top in fin-de-siecle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa. It explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own and is a devastating satire of the sleaziness of contemporary journalism. Bel-Ami enjoys the status of an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic.
What to read after Bel-Ami.
Tell us what you’re craving.
