Butterball (1880, Boule de suif), by Guy de Maupassant, translated by Andrew Brown

Having belatedly discovered that Marina Sofia has been posting for #FrenchFebruary I scoured the TBR for something I could read quickly so that I could contribute.  I don’t know who to thank for my purchase of Guy de Maupassant’s Butterball (‘Boule de suif’) but it is a perfect little novella to share. With the added bonus that I can use it to make a contribution to my long-neglected collaborative Marvellous Maupassant site.

Butterball was first published as part of the collection known as Les soirées de Médan by authors Émile Zola; Joris-Karl Huysmans; Henri Céard; Léon Hennique; Paul Alexis and Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). The authors were all associated with French Naturalism (of which Zola is the best known exponent) and all six stories all concern the Franco-Prussian War.  As Wikipedia explains:

The aim of the collection was to promote the ideals of Naturalism, by treating the events of the Franco-Prussian War in a realistic and often unheroic way, in contrast to officially approved patriotic views of the war.

Well, Butterball certainly does that!

It’s a satire of bourgeois hypocrisy set in the wake of the occupation of Rouen by Prussian forces in the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871). It begins with streets deserted and shops closed as the inhabitants await the arrival of the Prussians.  Hasty preparations are made to secure vital interests, and strategic relationships covertly emerge when Prussian officers billet themselves in the comfort of bourgeois homes. And so it is that before dawn a carriage is able to set out for Dieppe without interference.

When the sun rises the passengers are able to see who their companions are.  They are a microcosm of bourgeois French society: two nuns; a wine merchant and his wife; a wealthy cotton merchant and his wife; a count and countess; and the terror of respectable folk, the Democrat Cornudet who has spent his inheritance in anticipation of The Republic.

And there is Elisabeth Rousset.

The woman, one of the so-called ‘women of easy virtue’, was famous for her precocious corpulence, which had earned her the nickname of Butterball. She was small, round all over, as fat as lard, with puffed-up fingers congested at the joints so they looked like strings of short sausages; with a glossy, taut skin, and a huge and prominent bosom straining out from beneath her dress, she nonetheless remained an appetising and much sought-after prospect, so fresh that she was a pleasure to see. (p.14)

In the Introduction, Andrew Browne discusses the way Butterball is characterised. In the 21st century this characterisation makes us feel uncomfortable because of our awareness of fat-shaming, and I think he has tried to address that but I’m not entirely convinced by his argument. It seems anachronistic to ascribe it to feminism.

Fat is a feminist issue.  Why else does Maupassant make the prostitute in one of his most famous stories, ‘Butterball’, excessively well endowed with feminine tissue? This is a story about food, sex, and politics, and about the impossibility of separating them out or establishing a secure order of priority between them.  Which comes first, need (the need to eat, the need to stave off or compromise with an occupying military force if one is to survive), or desire (the desire for other bodies, the more symbolic desire for recognition of oneself as a full person)? (p.xiii)

(He also discusses in some detail the multiple allusions that her name has in the French, less crude and more symbolic than the English Brown has chosen to use.)

FWIW I think the characterisation is meant to represent abundance, generosity, enjoyment of life, and a rejection of strait-laced hypocrisy.

Anyway…

The company sniffs in disapproval, overcoming their disdain only when she offers to share her picnic basket.  The weather is foul, and the snow has delayed their journey by hours: they are all hungry though only one of them needs to effect a graceful faint before succumbing to these ‘tainted’ provisions.  But their real test, brilliantly satirised by Maupassant, comes when the carriage has to stop for the night at an inn, and the Prussian officer presiding there refuses to let them travel onward unless he can have a night with the whore.

Butterball refuses.  Unlike the rest of them, she is no collaborator, and the novella shows how brittle their solidarity is when their own self-interest is at stake.

My Hesperus edition comes with a Foreword by Germaine Greer and an Introduction by translator Andrew Brown.  (It’s full of spoilers, so defer reading it until after reading the story.) The cover image isn’t credited, and while it’s apt, I prefer the saucy wench and the Prussian officer on the cover of the 1907 edition that I found at Wikipedia.

There are five other short stories in this collection:

• The Confession (La confession)
• First Snow (La Première neige)
• Rose (Rose)
• The Dowry (La Dot)
• Bed 29. (Le Lit 29)

Links to all of these at Project Gutenberg can be found at Marvellous Maupassant.

You can also read Jonathan’s thoughts about Boule de suif here. He read a different translation, which judging by the excerpt that we have both chosen, I prefer to Brown’s. (I didn’t much like his translation of Zola’s The Dream (Le Rêve) either.)

Image credit: ‘Boule de suif’ cover of the 1907 edition from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Boule_de_Suif.jpg

Author: Guy de Maupassant
Title: Butterball (‘Boule de suif’)
Foreword by Germaine Greer
Introduction and translation by Andrew Brown
Design by Fraser Muggeridge
Publisher: Hesperus Books, 2003, first published in in the collective collection Les soirées de Médan in 1880, first published together in French as ‘Boule de suif’ in 1901
ISBN: 9781843910473, pbk., French flaps, 106 pages.
Source: Personal library, purchased from Wormhole Books

This review is cross-posted at ANZ LitLovers.

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‘A Woman’s Life’ (Une Vie) by Guy de Maupassant

A Woman’s Life was first published as Une Vie in 1883. Maupassant began working on it in 1877 when he was only twenty-seven and it was to be his first novel. The translation I read was from 1965 by H. N. P. Sloman for Penguin Books.

The book covers the adult life of Jeanne and begins with her returning home after five years in a convent. She is aged seventeen and is happy to be returning to the Poplars, the home of her loving parents. Her parents are reasonably wealthy, owning several farms, but they are slowly selling these off to raise money. Jeanne’s father, the Baron, is trying to move with the times by introducing new farming methods on his farms. Jeanne’s mother, once beautiful, now suffers from various ailments which leaves her exhausted and short of breath. A frequent visitor to the house is Jeanne’s Aunt Lison; she is in her forties, timid and unobtrusive. Here is Maupassant’s description of her:

She was a short, silent, unobtrusive woman, only appearing at meal-times and then retiring to her room, where she remained closeted all day. She had a friendly manner and was beginning to feel her age, though she was only forty-two. Her eyes were soft and sad and she had never counted for anything in the family. As a child no one had ever kissed her, for she was neither pretty nor noisy; she was like a shadow or some familiar object, a living piece of furniture that one sees every day without noticing it.

Aunt Lison appears at different parts of the story but is hardly noticed by any of the other characters at all.

Although not particularly religious the family attends church regularly out of respect for the abbé. One day at church they are introduced to their new neighbour, the young Vicomte de Lamare, who has inherited the property following his father’s recent death. Jeanne and Julien, the Vicomte, soon begin courting and decide to marry. This is, for Jeanne, a blissful period of her life. The wedding is planned for six weeks time followed by a honeymoon in Corsica. There is a wonderful scene where the two lovers go off for an evening walk in the gardens. The Baron and Baroness go to bed and ask Aunt Lison to wait up for the young couple. Coming back Julien notices that Jeanne’s shoes are wet and asks ‘Aren’t your darling little feet cold?’ Lison, hearing this, begins to tremble, then sob. When asked why she says ‘No one has ever asked me a question like that…never…never.’ She then runs off to her room much to the amusement of the young couple. Jeanne mutters ‘Poor Auntie!’ Jeanne is amused at the thought of any man making love to Aunt Lison but Jeanne is just as unprepared for her wedding night and married life. Maupassant is quite explicit, for a nineteenth century writer, in his depiction of their wedding night. Jeanne gets used to married life but does not enjoy the physical side.

After the misery of the first night Jeanne had got used to Julien’s touch, his kisses and tender embraces, though her revulsion from their more intimate relations remained. She found him attractive and loved him, and her light-heartedness and gaiety returned.

During their honeymoon in Corsica Jeanne continues to feel embarrassed about Julien’s sexual appetite. However, one day finding themselves alone whilst trekking up a mountain path she becomes more playful with Julien and she experiences physical sexual pleasure for the first time. The remainder of the honeymoon is like a dream for her.

Well, what with this being a nineteenth century novel we know that things will slowly get worse from hereon. Once they return to the Poplars the everyday realities of life become clearer. It becomes apparent that Julien is extremely miserly, even resenting spending money on food and heating, and he seems to have quickly lost interest in his wife. Jeanne, meanwhile, realises that she has nothing to occupy her time as Julien takes complete control of the finances and the running of the property. It turns out that Julien’s lack of sexual interest in his wife is because he is chasing other women; first there is the maid, Rosalie and then a local Countess, Gilberte. As the novel progresses Jeanne is let down by everyone, one by one. Her husband has affairs; even her parents, it turns out had lovers in the past; her son becomes a dissolute young man who, through his gambling debts and reckless business deals, drains Jeanne’s whole inherited wealth. When a new, puritanical, abbé arrives Jeanne becomes momentarily drawn towards religion but in the end she can’t accept his vengeful, vindictive God.

As Jeanne is introduced to the miseries of life Maupassant portrays her compassionately, he does not ridicule her for her naivety, instead he shows how she copes with it and adapts to the new situations. She is naturally optimistic even if events are sometimes overwhelming. By the end of the book Rosalie has returned and helps to organise the day-to-day running of Jeanne’s life and they become friends. The novel ends with her son, Paul, wishing to return, having already delivered his newly born daughter into her care, whom she instantly dotes on. Rosalie sums it up: ‘You see, life is never as good or as bad as one thinks.’ Maupassant has convinced us to hope for the best for Jeanne.

This was cross-posted on my blog Intermittencies of the Mind

Like Death (Fort comme la Mort) by Guy de Maupassant, translated by John D. Lyons

Like Death (Fort comme la Mort), the fifth novel of Guy de Maupassant, renowned for his huge oeuvre of short stories, is the reason why I retrieved John D. Lyons’ French Literature, a Very Short Introduction from my TBR.  Having read my way all through Balzac’s La Comedie Humane and Zola’s Rougon-Macquart Cycle, and sampled a few other well-known classic French authors I belatedly thought it was about time I found something to put these works into context.  But alas, Maupassant doesn’t rate a mention in this VSI, which is fair enough in a little book of only 132 pages that doesn’t purport to be comprehensive.  So it is up to me to interpret the chapter on 19th century authors to draw my own conclusions about how the novel fits into the literary preoccupations of its era.

(Let’s hope there are no scholars reading this, eh?)

According to Lyons, the pace of change brought a nostalgia for the Ancien Régime and the Christian cultural heritage as well an idealisation of rural life.  I think that in Like Death you can see Maupassant sharing Balzac’s distaste for the French Revolution and the excesses of French society, and his character Annette shows the innocence and purity of a rural upbringing which is very quickly corrupted by the ambition to make a good marriage in Paris.

Maupassant was from the Naturalist school of writers as Zola was, though it seems from this novel that he was not as prone to depict the seamy side of life and was more interested in depicting bourgeois society.  While Zola’s novels in this decade traverse different aspects of the pace of change in everything from the pressures of the Industrial Revolution on mining in Germinal (1885) to The Ladies’ Paradise (Au Bonheur des Dames) (1883) showing the emergence of ruthless entrepreneurs and the impact of the Industrial Revolution on small artisan storekeepers, Maupassant is more interested in the psychology of his characters, narrating the story from the perspective of his two main characters, two lovers who find themselves conflicted by the onward pressures of ageing. It seems to me that Like Death (1889) has more in common with Zola’s rather un-Zola-like The Dream (Le Rêve) (1888) because it’s also a tale of love thwarted by reality.

Olivier Bertin is an award-winning society portraitist who is having a long-term affair with the Countess Anne de Guilleroy.  Her husband the Count, a deputy of agriculture in the government, is unaware of their liaison, even though Bertin is a regular visitor both to their home in Paris and to their country estate, the Chateau du Roncières in the Eure Valley.

Bertin’s rheumatism, however, has kept him away from the chateau for three years, and in that time Anne’s only daughter Annette has grown up to become a lovely young woman for whom an advantageous match has been arranged with the Marquis de Farandal when she comes to Paris.  Her childhood in the countryside, spent with her ageing grandmother, has made her into a young woman innocent of the shallow values of Parisian society (about which Maupassant is, through Olivier’s musings and occasionally less tactful dialogue, satirically scornful.)

At first Anne is only too delighted at Annette’s resemblance to herself in her youth, and they dress alike on the occasion when Annette is first presented to society.  But before long she realises what Bertin does not at first recognise himself – that he has fallen in love with the youthful duplicate of the woman he has loved for decades.

This love triangle of a different sort brings both Bertin and the Countess to a realisation of their own mortality.  Anne is only 40 while he is much older, but she becomes painfully aware of changes in her face and body, while Bertin’s dawning jealousy of the inane Farandal that Annette is supposed to marry makes him realise that the days when he could have anything he wanted, are waning. What makes this even worse is when his art is compared to the new Impressionists and dismissed as old-fashioned.

Maupassant writes of love, jealousy, ageing and fear of annihilation with empathy so that we see the tragedy of a couple ideally suited who can never marry and who come to regret that they cannot share the companionship they crave.  Bertin had enjoyed his liberty to spend his time in bachelor clubs and sporting pursuits, but when he feels the pain of young Annette’s indifference to him as a suitor, he yearns for the consolation and companionship of marriage.   These perils of vanity are shown at their most poignant when Anne hides herself away in her chateau so that her lover cannot see the ravages of mourning for her mother on her face.  The irony here is that she first met and enchanted Bertin when she was in mourning for her father, but in youth, the black of mourning dress only enhanced her beauty.  She feels dethroned.

This is the first time the New York Review has sent me one of their Classics collection to review, and unfortunately they have ignored my objection to reading uncorrected proof copies so I can’t quote anything to show you Maupassant’s style.  (I’ll spare you a list of the spelling mistakes in the hope that these are resolved in the final edition, but it does make me wonder about standards when I see examples like ‘hording’ and ‘gayety’ which any spell-check would identify as non-words.)

Though I wouldn’t call it elegant as they have at The Kirkus Review, the translation by Richard Howard seems mostly good to me, capturing Maupassant’s style (as I translate it from the copy at Gutenberg) with only occasional clumsiness and an ill-advised use of the slang ‘kids’ in place of Maupassant’s whimsical reference to ‘mice’ meaning small children.  Like Death is one of Maupassant’s lesser-known novels, so it is good to have a more recent translation though I would like to know of others as well.

Author: Guy de Maupassant
Title: Like Death (Fort comme la mort)
Publisher: New York Review Books , 2017, first published 1889
ISBN: : 9781681370323
Review copy courtesy of New York Review Books.

Available from January 2017. Pre-order from Fishpond: Like Death ($AUD 20.37 postage free)

©Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers, 21/12/16. See the lower RH menu at ANZ LitLovers for copyright restrictions.

Cross-posted at ANZ Litlovers