Bel-Ami (Oxford World's Classics) by Guy de Maupassant

Author:Guy de Maupassant [de Maupassant, Guy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2001-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 8

His duel had established Duroy as one of the principal staff writers on La Vie française; however, as he found it extremely difficult to come up with ideas, he made it his speciality to rail against moral decline, a new weakness of character, the demise of patriotism, and the anaemia affecting the French sense of honour. (He himself had discovered the word ‘anaemia,’ and was very proud of it.)

And when Mme de Marelle, in that teasing, sceptical, mocking style that is called Parisian wit, poked fun at his tirades that she would deflate with an epigram, he replied with a smile: ‘Bah! It’s giving me a good reputation for later on.’

He was living now in the Rue de Constantinople, where he had conveyed his trunk, his hairbrush, his razor, and his soap, which was all his removal had entailed. Two or three times a week, the young woman arrived before he was up, undressed in an instant and, shivering all over from the cold outside, slipped into his bed.

Duroy, by contrast, went for dinner every Thursday at the couple’s home and made up to the husband by talking to him about agriculture; and as he himself loved things to do with the land, both of them sometimes became so absorbed in their conversation that they forgot all about their woman, sitting dozing on the sofa.

Laurine, too, would fall asleep, sometimes on her father’s lap, sometimes on Bel-Ami’s.

And when the journalist had left, M. de Marelle never failed to declare in that doctrinaire tone which he used for even the most trivial remarks: ‘That young man is really most agreeable. He has a very good mind.’

It was almost the end of February. In the streets, now, in the morning, you could smell violets as you passed the flower-vendors’ barrows.

For Duroy, there was not a cloud in the sky.

On returning home one night, however, he found a letter slipped under his door. He looked at the stamp, and saw ‘Cannes’. Opening it, he read:

Dear friend,

You told me, didn’t you, that I could rely on you for absolutely anything? Well I am asking a grim favour of your friendship: to come and help me, so that I am not alone during Charles’s last hours, for he is dying. He may not live through the week, although he is still able to get up; but the doctor has warned me.

I no longer have the strength or the courage to watch this agony day and night. And I am terrified when I think of his last moments, which are very close. You are the only person of whom I can ask a thing like this, for my husband has no family left. You were his comrade; he gave you your start at the newspaper. Come, I beg you. I have no one to turn to.

Your most devoted friend,

Madeleine Forestier.

Like a breath of air, an extraordinary feeling filled Georges’s heart, a feeling of deliverance, of space opening up before him, and he murmured: ‘Of course I’ll go.

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