By the time Guy de Maupassant published “Les Tombales” in 1891 it was becoming increasingly clear that he was losing his prolonged battle with syphilis. Eleven years earlier a syphilitic lesion had been diagnosed in the nerve of his right eye which caused excruciating migraines and resulted in a progressive loss of sight (Borel 1951:132). In February of the same year Maupassant wrote to Flaubert: “Je n'y vois presque plus de l'œil droit,” and an acquaintance recalls that already in 1883, “se regardant dans la glace: le verre ne lui rendait pas sa propre image” (Borel 1929:109). For an author whose work was so intimately tied to attentive observation, the threat of being disabled by failing eyesight must have been particularly distressing.

And it is the very notion of “imperfect vision” that concerns the author of “Les Tombales,” a tale that takes mistaken identity as its plot premise. In fact, the history behind the narrative's own identity is mystifying in itself. André Vial remarks in a note that it is possible that Henry Céard, one of Maupassant's friends and colleagues, may have actually been the original source for the story (314). According to Francis Steegmuller, although published towards the end of Maupassant's life, “Les Tombales” was most probably written earlier in his career (312). Its principal theme is certainly not uncommon in the author's œuvre: such stories as “Les bijoux” (1883) or “La parure” (1884) also address the dichotomy between looks and reality. But where these tales shed light on the mœurs sociales as they relate to external appearance, “Les Tombales” serves as a revealing commentary on the state of the mœurs littéraires. As he narrates a personal anecdote for an intellectually disengaged audience of friends, the protagonist, Joseph de Bardon, exposes himself as an apathetic narrator and undiscerning reader; his brand of “imperfect vision” is rooted in his stunted literary perception. In short, “Les Tombales” reveals itself to be a metacritical tale whose principal themes are misinterpretation and narrative autonomy.

The story is structured as a frame-tale and its latent literary concerns are introduced at the outset by the nameless frame-narrator:

Les cinq amis achevaient de dîner, cinq hommes du monde murs, riches, trois restés garçons […]. On bavardait sur tout, sur tout ce qui occupe et amuse les Parisiens; c'était entre eux, comme dans la plupart des salons d'ailleurs, une espèce de recommencement parlé de la lecture des journaux du matin.¹

The scene is likened to a literary salon, a setting in which the activity of reading serves as the premise for the discussion to follow. But the intent of the frame-narrator goes beyond simply establishing a literary context. He presents these “hommes du monde” as a rather boring and smug group whose pseudo-literary gatherings are pitifully unimaginative. Each meeting is marked by its dull repetitiveness: “[A]insi tous les mois, en souvenir de leur jeunesse, et, après avoir dîné, ils causaient jusqu'à deux heures du matin” (99). The group members actually rely on repetition as the primary means of structuring their meetings, for they expect Joseph to lead the conversation by telling the same anecdote for the umpteenth time: “Il avait la sienne, chaque fois, son histoire, sur laquelle on comptait. Il se mit à la lire sans qu'on l'en eût prié” (99). This intellectual gathering, then, is predicated upon pure ritual; there is no novelty whatsoever, either in the tale's spiritless narration or in its perfunctory reception:

[Joseph] dit, entre deux bouffées de fumée:

—Il m'est arrivé une singulière aventure il y a quelque temps.

Toutes les bouches demandèrent presque ensemble: “Racontez.”

(100)

Joseph de Bardon, “I'orateur du dîner” and the story's principal narrator, is compared to his interlocutors as “un des plus gais” (99). In a delightful jibe à la Maupassant, this remark in no way pays a compliment to Joseph but rather elucidates, even more singingly, the lamentable nature of the group assembled. He is described as

[un] homme du monde dans le sens le plus large et le plus bienveillant que puisse mériter ce mot, doué de beaucoup d'esprit sans grande profondeur, d'un savoir varié sans éruditon vraie, d'une compréhension agile sans pénétration sérieuse.

(99, emphasis added)

In other words, he emerges, at best, as a radiant example of intellectual mediocrity. As he settles down to recount his tale, Joseph appears to be benumbed by his environment, “engourdi dans une atmosphère de tabac aromatisée par le café chaud” (99). In this mentally deadened state he is “chez lui tout à fait, comme certains êtres sont chez eux absolument, en certains lieux et en certains moments” (99). Indeed, as the frame-narrator points out, Joseph is much like “un poisson rouge dans son bocal” (100), for he floats around the same circles, views life from a skewed and restricted angle, and, no matter where he turns his attention, he invariably sees things in the same way. He may appear to be superior given his substandard entourage, but then again, bearing in mind the notion of “imperfect vision,” dans le pays des aveugles, les borgnes sont rois.

The frame-narrator's insistence on the number five, “cinq amis,” “cinq hommes du monde,” also alludes to the literary concerns underlying the story. Anyone remotely involved in literature at the time would have associated these five men with those who had once attended “Les dîners des Cinq” at Flaubert's house (Flaubert, Turgenev, Goncourt, Zola, and Daudet), or maybe with the smaller “Cinq,” also known as “le train de Zola,” (Maupassant, Alexis, Hennique, Céard, and Huysmans), or even the “Cinq” who wrote the 1887 manifesto against Zola's La terre (Bonnetain, Rosny, Descaves, Margueritte, and Guiches) (Boyd 202). By simultaneously pointing his finger in three different directions, Maupassant is being deliberately vague. The story's post-prandial setting evokes an article published in Le Gaulois in 1880, in which Maupassant describes the fictious genesis of Les soirées de Médan (1880), the creative effort of the five men that made up “le train de Zola.” Although the stories included in this collection were actually composed in Maupassant's Paris apartment, in his article he situates their creation at Zola's summer home in Médan. In a manner strikingly reminiscent of the one he would later adopt for Joseph de Bardon, Maupassant casts Zola as the garrulous “orateur du dîner” and as a shortsighted observer who is gullible and easily fooled:

Nous nous trouvions réunis, l'été, chez Zola, dans sa propriété de Médan. Pendant les longues digestions des longs repas […] nous causions. Il nous racontait ses futurs romans, ses idées littéraires, ses opinions sur toutes choses. Quelquefois il prenait un fusil, qu'il manœuvrait en myope, et tout en parlant, il tirait sur des touffes d'herbe que nous lui affirmions être des oiseaux, s'étonnant considérablement quand il ne retrouvait aucun cadavre.

(Maupassant 1938:21, emphasis added)

How telling that Zola does not find a corpse where there ought to be one; Joseph de Bardon makes the same discovery at the end of “Les Tombales.”

Maupassant was ambivalent about being associated with Zola or branded a member of the École naturaliste. Not only did he respect the opinions of his friend and mentor, Flaubert, who was far from sold on the ideas of Naturalism, but he himself was wary of being chained down to the views of any one school. Maupassant insisted that he believed no more in Naturalism than he did in Romanticism or Realism: “Pourquoi se restraindre?” he asks Paul Alexis, “le naturalisme est aussi limité que le fantastique” (1938:225). On the other hand, he sincerely cared for Zola, respected him as a fellow author, and would never have sought to hurt him deliberately. By the time he published “Les Tombales,” Maupassant was no longer under Zola's wing and he actually bequeaths Joseph de Bardon some of his own attributes. This was by no means an unusual move on the author's part: “[I]l s'incarne en chacun d'eux [ses personnages],” René Dumesnil writes about him (221). The most obvious feature in common is the first name: Maupassant had used the pseudonym “Joseph Prunier” to publish some early stories. In addition, both men “[étaient] célibataire[s] et [vivaient] la vie parisienne de la façon la plus complète et la plus fantaisiste” (99), and both based their stories on frequent wanderings through the city.² Pol Neveux also points out that in the latter part of his life, Maupassant “vit dans les salons et les raconte, exclusivement” (cited in Dumesnil 219). Indeed, as is evidently the case with Joseph, the author's perennial visits to the salons, with their constant and meaningless flattery, may have softened his standards.³

Joseph begins his tale by reminding his friends: “[V]ous savez que je me promène beaucoup dans Paris” (100). In a poetic move, he creates for himself the familiar persona of the Parisian flâneur, the aimless wanderer: “[P]uis, comme je flânais, l'idée me vint de pousser jousqu'au cimetière de Montmartre” (100). Joseph, the frame-narrator tells us, “tirait de ses observations, de ses aventures, de tout ce qu'il voyait, rencontrait et trouvait, des anecdotes de roman comique et philosophique en même temps” (99). His stories are based on perception, but as he ambles along the streets, Joseph does not simply observe the scenery, he “reads” it. It becomes clear, however, that although his very surname connotes possible ties to the strolling poet of yore—“de Bardon” distinctly evokes “barde”—Joseph's voyeuristic endeavors are rather superficial and devoid of any true literary insight.

The significance of vision in Joseph's adventure is already underscored in the reasons that prompt him to wander out into the street: “[O]n a toujours un vague désir de faire visite à une jolie femme quelquonque” (100). Joseph does not seek any novelty or distinctiveness, he seeks—and halfheartedly at that—a generic woman, “une femme quelconque.” And so, rifling through his mind's catalogue, Joseph opts to visit a former mistress, now deceased and buried in the Montmartre cemetery, just as one might reach over to a dusty bookshelf and select “un livre quelconque” with which to pass the time. In fact, Joseph describes his former mistress as “une histoire de cœur” (100, emphasis added), a very telling epithet. This seemingly innocuous euphemism for “une liaison amoureuse” hints distinctly at the literary sphere. Joseph's mistress is introduced as more than a romantic memory; she is “une histoire,” a human narrative of sorts to which Joseph, its reader, had reacted rather emotionally: “[Elle] m'avait pincé [et] très ému” (100).

As he meanders along the rows of tombs Joseph “pokes around” and examines everything from the monuments to the tombstones, as a flâneur might investigate back-alleys, or, as Joseph himself remarks, “comme les bibelotiers qui fouillent les vitrines” (100). At first glance this comparison may not appear in any way significant, but given the story's oblique insistence on literature and reading, the resemblance between “bibelot” and the root -biblo begs closer examination. As he proceeds to peruse the epitaphs upon which he comes, Joseph might as well be rummaging through the stacks in a bibliothèque:

Et je me mis, moi, à lire les épitaphes. Ça, par exemple, c'est la chose la plus amusante du monde. Jamais Labiche, jamais Meilhac ne m'ont fait rire comme le comique de la prose tombale. Ah! Quels livres supérieurs à ceux de Paul de Kock pour ouvrir la rate.

(101, emphasis added)

Through his derisive remarks on the nature of the epitaphs, Joseph sets himself up as the victim of the story he is narrating. The allusion to the light comedies and dubious imbroglios of Meilhac and Labiche, as well as the comparison of the “prose tombale” to Paul de Kock's racy stories, will come back to haunt him. Beyond equating him to a “bibelotier,” one who collects trinkets, a number of Joseph's verbal analogies expose him as a bibeloteur, “quelqu'un qui fait du bibelot,” someone who dabbles in second-hand literature.

Joseph's abilities as a littérateur are put to the test when he catches sight of a young woman kneeling at a nearby grave site. As though putting down one book and taking up another, Joseph turns his attention to her and proceeds to read both her appearance and actions:

Certes, elle devait souffir d'une profonde douleur. Elle avait enfoui son regard dans ses mains, et rigide, en une méditation de statue, partie en ses regrets, égrenant dans l'ombre des yeux cachés et fermés le chapelet torturant des souvenirs, elle semblait elle-même une morte qui penserait à un mort.

(102)

What Joseph actually sees is vastly outweighed by what he reads into it. “Elle avait enfoui son regard dans ses mains” is the only clause that is untampered by a conditional verb or modal expression like “devait” or “semblait.” To be sure, the use of verbal suggestion as a means to distinguish between surface appearance and reality is a common device in much of Maupassant's œuvre, but here it serves in particular to underscore the story's concern with its own textuality. As Joseph observes the young woman's movements, he simultaneously supplies them with meaning, or “interprets” them: “[J]e devinai qu'elle allait pleurer, je le devinai à un petit mouvement du dos” (102, emphasis added). Joseph sees iconic value in her movements and reads them as though they were sequentially organized to constitute a narrative progression. We should recall, however, that Joseph's powers of observation are “sans pénétration sérieuse,” and his textual approach suffers from the same limitations. The series of actions that the young woman performs in his presence are indeed designed to be read in a certain way: to lead Joseph to the conclusion that she is a young, helpless widow:

Elle me vit la regarder, parut honteuse et se cacha encore toute la figure dans ses mains. Alors ses sanglots devinrent convulsifs, et sa tête lentement se pencha vers le marbre.

(103, emphasis added)

Once the young woman has Joseph's attention, her actions are pointedly directed towards him, her “readership,” and he blindly accepts the mise-en-scène thereby betraying his vapid critical approach. This is all the more emphasized when he recalls attempting to revive her “tout en lisant l'épitaphe très simple: ‘Ici repose Louis-Théodore Carrel, capitaine d'infanterie de marine’” (103, emphasis added). Whether he is reading a situation, a person, or the prose of the gravestone, Joseph has no doubts that he can easily glean its simple significance. Like his former mistress, this woman also appears to be a human narrative, another “story,” and her body actually exudes its textual make-up: “[S]on histoire [était] sortie par fragments de sa poitrine haletante” (103, emphasis added).⁴ Joseph's attempt to read her in the same old way, as “une femme [ou texte] quelconque,” proves to be entirely fallacious. Though he compares his creative endeavors to a search for simple trinkets, Joseph comes upon something quite unexpectedly complex: this alleged mourner is no “bibelot de fillette,” as Maupassant describes the young and frail Madelaine of Bel-Ami. Ultimately, Joseph is not so much vulnerable to this woman's feminine wiles as he is a helpless victim of her literary devices.

The would-be widow's unfortunate story is, aptly enough, “textbook.” She tells Joseph that she was an orphan who had barely managed to scrape together a legitimate dowry to marry an officer out of true love. But more than her spoken words, it is her gaze that directs Joseph's “reading” of the situation. He explains: “[J]e compris a son premier regard qu'elle serait polie et reconnaissante” (103). As the plot thickens, the pretended mourner's tone weakens and she has less need to speak. When she does, it is with a soft murmur that feigns false dependence on Joseph:

—Ne restez pas ici. Venez.
Elle murmura:
—Je suis incapable de marcher.
—Je vais vous soutenir.
—Merci, monsieur, vous êtes bon.

(103, emphasis added)

Joseph tells his listeners: “[J]e la soulevai, je la relevai,” and later describes how she is forced to rely on him physically in order to leave the graveyard: “[E]lle [était] appuyée sur moi, moi la portant presque par les chemins du cimetière” (104). He all but carries her through the walkways as though he were taking a book out of the library stacks in order to check it out. When he escorts her home she mumbles once again: “[J]e me sens incapable de monter seule mon escalier” (104), and Joseph, happy to oblige, sees her all the way into her apartment. Despite her assurances to Joseph that she is “incapable de marcher” (103), this young woman proves herself infinitely “capable de le faire marcher,” figuratively, literally and, literarily. In truth, she is not dependent on his physical assistance to move through the city, nor does she expect his predictable reading of her actions to reconstruct the real narrative she represents. This young woman is very much an autonomous text. Thus the story that Joseph reads into her figure and later recounts to his dinner friends is really a gross misreading of the actual narrative of her life. Once inside the apartment, the woman's already soft-spoken voice is heard still less and Joseph relies even more on his vision to draw further conclusions about the situation: “Elle était vraiement gentille avec ses yeux clairs fixés sur moi, si bien fixés, si clairs, que j'eus une tentation terrible et j'y cédai” (105). Her eyes may be limpid pools but there is nothing clear about Joseph's visual interpretations of the pretty picture before him. When he first opted to visit his former mistress at the cemetery, Joseph explained that he had chosen her “dans sa galerie [de femmes]” (100), and mused further that “dans les cimetières, il y a des monuments presque aussi intéressants que dans les musées” (101). In Maupassant's aesthetic thought, the pictorial and the literary were closely related, a belief that is manifest in his 1886 article on the state of criticism in the visual arts. When he bemoans the public's limited appreciation of the art it beholds, Maupassant might as well be describing Joseph's own “imperfect vision”:

[L]a foule, ignorante de cette subtile et singulière sensation de joie artiste communiquée par le regard au cerveau, voit et ressent naïvement, en sauvage qui vient se distraire et pour qui un musée […] n'est autre chose que du roman ou de l'histoire dessinés et mis en couleur.

(XVI:249)

To be sure, Joseph's reaction to her beautiful eyes is “sauvage,” all instinct and no thought. As Joseph takes the young woman in his arms, Maupassant chooses a climactic and intimate moment between both man and woman, reader and text, to expose Joseph in flagrante delicto:

Je la saisis dans mes bras, et sur ses paupières qui se fermèrent soudain, je mis des baisers … des baisers … des baisers … tant et plus.

Elle se débattait en me repoussant et répétant:

—Finissez … finissez … finissez donc.

Quel sens donnait-elle à ce mot? En des cas pareils, “finir” peut en avoir au moins deux.

(105, emphasis added)

Although the notion of interpretation and multiple meaning is introduced by the woman—the text—herself, Joseph does not pause to consider it. On the contrary, he blindly ploughs ahead and intentionally suppresses the voice of the text by smothering it with kisses. As a reader, Joseph chooses to impose his own simple, and infinitely more convenient, interpretation: “Pour la faire taire je passai des yeux à la bouche, et je donnai au mot ‘finir’ la conclusion que je préférais” (105). Admittedly, the young woman stages her resistance to his embrace; she must, after all, provide a modicum of challenge to keep Joseph engaged in the narrative. But significantly, as a “human text,” her physical struggle also reflects a literary one. Through her repeated attempts to repulse Joseph's amorous advances, the young woman simultaneously cautions him against his naive reading, asserting her narrative complexity and calling attention to her textual machinations. She is, in a Shklovskian move, “bearing her devices.” Yet, because of his literary complacency, instead of noting their presence and acknowledging their function, Joseph succeeds only in becoming their unwitting victim.

While Joseph's reading comes to the smug conclusion that he adroitly seduced her, that he is “master” of the narrative, nothing could be farther from the truth. Eventually, given that “on se fatigue de tout, et principalement des femmes” (106), he discontinues their three-week liaison by feigning an important trip. Normally speaking, if he were truly in control of his “histoire d'amour,” the narrative should end once their ways part. It does not. “Son souvenir,” he recalls, “me hantait comme un mystère, comme un problème de psychologie, comme une de ces questions inexplicables dont la solution nous harcèle” (106). Joseph's forced interpretation can take him only so far and he soon begins to sense that something is not quite right; that his reading has left some unanswered questions. If he is to solve the riddle of his “amoureuse funéraire,” he must retrace his steps and return to the cemetery. In other words, he must make his way back to the library, renew his book loan, and reread the text. But the young woman is not to be found weeping over the grave of the naval officer—perhaps the book has not yet been reshelved. He soon catches sight of her, however, on the arm of a distinguished middle-aged man who is, like her, dressed in mourning: “[I]l la soutenait, comme je l'avais soutenue moi-même” (106). It appears that another library patron has already checked out the particular volume Joseph seeks. As their paths cross he takes a final look at the young woman and reads her once again:

[E]lle me fit un petit signe, un tout petit coup d'œil qui signifiat: “Ne me reconnaissez pas”, mais qui semblait dire aussi: “Revenez me voir, mon chéri”.

(106)

Clearly, her narrative did not cease to exist simply because Joseph thought it should, and, more importantly, it was quite independent of its reader all along. Once again, it is her gaze that provides Joseph with the signs he must interpret; how delightfully fitting that through a mischievous “wink of an eye” she is able to inform him that he has been shamelessly “hoodwinked”!

As he concludes his anecdote, Joseph expresses complete amazement at the shady activities of his graveside mistress. He wonders where she came from, whether she is unique or part of an entire operation, and whether this is a novel form of prostitution: “[F]ait-on le cimetière comme on fait le trottoir?” (107). Even if only briefly, this encounter injures his self-assurance because he is forced to admit that he was not truly in charge of the relationship. Joseph's need to identify, name, and categorize is an attempt to regain both social and literary control. If he can pigeonhole the young woman and neatly fit her narrative into a predictable mold, he can dominate once again. But he is unable to define her; she resists any such circumscription. In his story Joseph never refers to her by name, only by epithets that constantly change, and thus she remains an untitled, sui generis, work. At one point she even changes her mourning attire and dons a different dress, a reminder that one must not judge a book by its cover.⁵

When he reflects: “[J]'aurais bien voulu savoir de qui elle était veuve, ce jour-là” (107), Joseph is quite unaware that he is broaching a quintessential literary issue, that of textual autonomy and authorial control. A widow, after all, is a woman whose husband, or authority figure, is dead, and who finds herself free of all the impositions and restrictions he represents. The answer to Joseph's question, then, is that the young woman is his own widow. Not only is he the “deadened” narrator of the anecdote he tells ad nauseam during his monthly dinner gatherings, but he is also its Barthian “dead author,” given that he holds no power over her reclaimed textuality. Joseph, who looks upon cemetery visitors rather scornfully “[parce qu'ils] n'ont pas encore rompu toutes relations avec leurs morts” (106), emerges as a figure of consummate irony. Although he attempts to reinsinuate himself into her narrative, the young woman is comfortably ensconced in her autonomous widowhood and has firmly “rompu toutes relations avec [son mort],” the dead reader/author, Joseph.

Notes

1. Maupassant 1968:99; emphasis added. Subsequent references to “Les Tombales” will give page numbers only.

2. Louis Forestier also remarks upon the similarities between Maupassant and de Bardon (412, note 2).

3. Dumesnil cites Pol Neveux to this effect: “Mais les salons, s'ils n'entamèrent point sa personnalité de romancier, s'ils n'oblitérènt point sa clairvoyance, laissèrent-ils intacte son imperturbable sérénité? Je ne le crois pas. Maupassant, en vertu de sa plasticité, a subi l'“envahissement” des mondains comme naguère celui des ruraux. Certes, il n'a pas été asservi, mais il a été enrolé. En dépit de leur banalité, les louanges persistantes finirent par émouvoir sa rude fierté” (Dumesnil 220).

4. Grant observes that in Maupassant's novel Bel-Ami the lungs and chest area are associated with authority and verbal power. A character seen to be out of breath loses the ability to dominate a situation because he/she is incapable of speaking adequately. In this case, however, the inability of the young woman's “poitrine haletante” to use language coherently puts her in a position of complete control.

5. The fact that the dress into which she changes is “grise et fort simple” (112) is exceedingly thought-provoking. After all, Maupassant was allegedly plagued by a “dame en gris” during the last years of his life. According to François Tassart, his valet, this Parisian woman, whose identity is a mystery to this day, appeared on the scene late in Maupassant's life (1890) and succeeded in draining what little energy the author still had in him. For a detailed discussion of this sinister figure and her possible identity, see Lanoux 365-73.

Works Cited

Borel, Pierre. 1929. Correspondance de Guy de Maupassant avec Gustave Flaubert. Paris: Éditions de France.

———. 1951. Le vrai Maupassant. Genève: Éditions Pierre Cailler.

Boyd, Ernest. Guy de Maupassant: A Biographical Study. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1928.

Dumesnil, René. Guy de Maupassant. Paris: Éditions Julles Tallandier, 1947.

Forestier, Louis, ed. Boule de suif. La maison Tellier. Paris: Gallimard, 1973.

Grant, Richard B. “Escaping the Naturalist Trap: Language, Body, and Myth in Maupassant's Bel-Ami.” Cincinnati Romance Review 13 (1994):88-105.

Lanoux, Armand. Maupassant le Bel-Ami. Paris: Fayard, 1976.

Maupassant, Guy de. 1938. Études, Chroniques et Correspondance. Paris: Librairie de France.

———. 1968. Œuvres complètes I. Paris: Édition d'art H. Piazza.

Steegmuller, Francis. Maupassant: A Lion in the Path. New York: Random House, 1949.

Vial, André. Guy de Maupassant et l'art du roman. Paris: Nizet, 1954.