Bel-Ami

Georges Duroy is twenty-eight years old, with six months' employment at the Northern Railway, three francs and forty centimes in his pocket to see out the month, and a hunger twisting his stomach on a stifling June evening in Paris. He is handsome, and he knows it—a curling blond mustache, a hussar's bearing, blue-gray eyes that catch the gaze of women on the pavement—but this beauty does not feed him. A former non-commissioned officer returned from Algeria without a penny, he roams the sweltering streets with the swagger of a soldier fallen into civilian life, when chance, that helping hand Paris sometimes extends to the starving, throws Charles Forestier in his path, an old regimental comrade now a writer for La Vie Française. Forestier lends him two louis, invites him to dinner at his home, and there, in a drawing room frequented by the newspaper's proprietor, a bitter old poet, a duelist chronicler, and above all, two women—Madeleine Forestier, the shrewd and formidably intelligent wife, and Clotilde de Marelle, a lively little brunette whose husband is forever traveling—Duroy instinctively understands that his fortune lies in this world, somewhere between the columns of a newspaper and the arms of women who know everything, know everyone, and pull the strings that men believe they are pulling themselves.

And so he becomes a reporter. He does not know how to write—his two pages on Algeria, actually dictated by Madeleine Forestier in her husband's study, cause a sensation; the subsequent ones, which he attempts alone, are so poor they are rejected. No matter: he learns the trade from the bottom up, chasing local news, drafting society gossip, and above all, he seduces. Clotilde de Marelle is the first to fall. She instates him in a small apartment on the Rue de Constantinople, bestows upon him a nickname—Bel-Ami—coined by her young daughter Laurine, and loves him with a cheerful, chaotic, somewhat blind passion that asks for nothing but his presence and his kisses. Duroy allows himself to be loved. He also tries his luck with Madeleine, who rejects him outright but offers him a pact of friendship, ultimately far more useful in the long run than a night of pleasure.

Forestier's health declines. The cough worsens, his frame withers, and Madeleine summons Duroy to Cannes to help her endure the final days. Forestier dies one night, his face hollowed, his eyes wide open to a void that Duroy contemplates with a mixture of disgust and calculation. Before the corpse is even cold, he asks the widow to marry him. She does not immediately say yes—she says she will think about it, that it will take time, that she wishes to keep her freedom. Then she accepts, in her own way: by organizing everything, settling the financial details with the steady hand of a businessman, choosing the date, inventing the name. For it is she who, scribbling combinations on a piece of paper, transforms the son of Norman tavern-keepers into Du Roy de Cantel, aristocratic particle included, with the jubilation of a little girl presented with a beautiful toy.

The marriage takes place in May, with no religious ceremony, almost in secret. The train carries them toward Rouen, and in the carriage, amidst the clumsiness of a desire she rationally repels and the chatter about the future, something takes shape that resembles a partnership of talents rather than love: she possesses the wit, the connections, the political flair; he possesses the audacity, the charm, the instinct for the low blow. Together, in the study where Forestier's foot-muff and penholder still linger, they manufacture devastating articles against the cabinet, she whispering the sentences into his ear, he adding the venomous innuendos. The campaign causes an uproar. Duroy signs himself Du Roy de Cantel, rises in the ranks, and becomes the political editor. But at the newspaper, people sneer: they call him Forestier. And this corridor jest gnaws at him, because it rings true—he owes everything to his wife, just as the other man did before him.

The visit to his parents in Canteleu is a quiet disaster. The father, a red-faced and jovial little tavern-keeper; the mother, a tall, gaunt, and hostile peasant woman; the tavern itself, where sour cider is served to domino players—Madeleine endures it all with a frozen smile, but she coughs in the pipe smoke and wishes to leave by the very next day. Georges laughs, promises to return, leaves two hundred francs, and the carriage heads back down toward Rouen, toward the river, toward the factory chimneys puffing their black breath opposite the church spires.

Then the jealousy begins. Not the jealousy of a lover toward a living rival, but the stranger, more corrosive jealousy of a husband toward a dead man. Forestier is everywhere—in the furniture, in Madeleine's habits, in the words she lets slip, in the white flannel dressing gown she wears in the morning, whose fabric seems to have retained the touch of the other man. Duroy relentlessly hounds his wife with intimate questions about the deceased, wanting to know if he was ridiculous in bed, if he wore a cotton nightcap, if he was a cuckold. One evening, in a cab rolling toward the Bois de Boulogne, he insists so much that an exasperated Madeleine drops an ambiguous word that chills him to the bone—and he will never know if it was a confession or a mere refusal to answer.

Meanwhile, he resumes his habits with Clotilde de Marelle, who always returns, and he sets his sights on Virginie Walter, the proprietor's wife. She resists for a long time, then yields one evening in a cab, with the sobs of a woman who knows she is ruined. Duroy relishes the conquest far more than the woman; very soon, she becomes a burden, suffocating him with her visits, her tears, her frantic love. But she imparts a secret of the utmost importance: her husband and the deputy Laroche-Mathieu, now Minister of Foreign Affairs, are covertly preparing the Moroccan expedition, all the while heavily buying up Moroccan debt. Walter is going to make a fortune. Duroy, however, does not have enough money to capitalize on the scheme. Rage overtakes him—against Walter, against Laroche-Mathieu, against his own financial mediocrity.

He then devises a plan of methodical brutality. He knows that Madeleine is seeing Laroche-Mathieu in secret. He summons a police superintendent, has himself escorted to the apartment where the lovers meet, and catches them in bed. The adultery is formally documented. The divorce is pronounced. Madeleine exits his life with cold dignity, and Duroy finds himself free, unburdened of a wife who has outlived her usefulness, ready for his next move.

That next move is Suzanne Walter, the proprietor's younger daughter—nineteen years old, blonde, fresh, somewhat foolish, and madly in love with him. He orchestrates an abduction that is nothing of the sort: Suzanne runs away of her own free will, and Duroy writes to her parents that their daughter will not return unless they consent to the marriage. Virginie Walter, mad with grief and jealousy, begs her husband to refuse. But Walter yields: the scandal would be worse than the alliance. The wedding is celebrated at La Madeleine, before all of high society, complete with a bishop, flowers, incense, and a crowd gathered on the parvis. Duroy, kneeling before the altar, feels an almost religious gratitude welling up within him toward the deity that has so favored him. He rises, offers his arm to Suzanne, walks through the sacristy, and receives the congratulations of an endless procession of senators, deputies, and generals. On the church steps, he glimpses the Chamber of Deputies yonder at the end of the square, and it seems to him that he need only take a single bound to leap from where he stands to its doors. Then, in the crowd, he spots Clotilde de Marelle, who steps forward, shakes his hand, and murmurs a few words; her eyes state clearly that nothing is over between them.