SOURCE: "Figures of Male Repute," in The Art of Rupture: Narrative Desire and Duplicity in the Tales of Guy de Maupassant, University of Michigan Press, 1994, pp. 111-41.

Maupassant's strategic maneuvers of narrative desire and duplicity situate the social type that he calls I'hommefille as an ambiguous agent in various scenarios of the art of rupture. Writing in the Gil Blas, where he also published such chroniques as "Politiciennes" ["Women politicians"] and "La Guerre," Maupassant seems implicitly to identify himself, through his narrator, with this group given that "the most irritating of the species is assuredly the Parisian and the boulevardier" ("L'Homme-fille," CSS 715; CN 1:757).¹ In this chapter, I wish to examine such scenarios within tales of the war-machine that functions to degrade women of the demimonde and grand monde while stressing the sexual difference among them and that simultaneously emphasizes the hypocrisy of their exploiters, diverse mondains and bourgeois who seek their com pany while rejecting them from society. Far from being "relatively banal" (Bernheimer 309), these tales depict incursions of the war-machine into the bourgeois activities that Maupassant presents as the "strange spectacle of a real harlot and an homme-fille" (CSS 715; CN 1:757)—the incessant combat between women and the mondains and bourgeois to whom I refer as figures of male repute. Furthermore, these tales are of particular interest in providing access to what Peter Brooks has identified (in Eugène Sue's fiction of prostitution) as "the modern narratable," "that eminently storied subworld, realm of power, magic, and danger" (Reading 162). It will therefore be useful to consider the manner in which these figures of male repute act as agents of a narrative as well as a discursive vengeance and are thus deployed as weapons of the war-machine, but also how they may become the unwitting victims of its shrewd manipulation by the dangerous objects of their pursuit.

One narrative trait of this strange spectacle is the prevalence of Maupassant's use of framed tales, embedded narration, usually to heighten the identification of the framed interlocutors with the narrator's own experiences and also, as we shall see, to limit significantly the possible meanings that the listener/reader might make of the framed tale.² Indeed, like many of his framed narrators, Maupassant seeks to appeal to as well as to draw in the Baudelairian "hypocrite reader" whose very nature, in fact, lends itself to his deceptive tactics. For, as the narrator of "L'Homme-fille" concludes: "Under the right cir cumstances, I'homme-fille will reveal weaknesses and commit infamies without even realizing it at all, since he obeys unquestioningly the oscillations of his ever susceptible mind" (CSS 715; CN 1:757), in other words, the ideal prey as well as weapon for the art of rupture.

Moreover, the attitude of constant, mutual struggle between la fille or la femme du monde and her environment in relationships with l'homme-fille suggests a critical approach other than simply examining "venal love" in Maupassant's writing through the different portraits of filles.³ It is possible, then, to pursue the dual hermeneutic described in chapter 1 [of The Art of Rupture] by considering the diverse ways in which these portraits are determined through the depiction of the hommes-filles themselves in their responses to these women. As Maupassant insists in a number of chroniques and tales, whatever may be the innate limitations of woman, "created weak, changeable, capricious, easily influenced by nature itself," it is due to society's influence and to continued contact with men that woman is "raised to give pleasure" and is "instructed in this thought that love is her domain, faculty and sole joy in the world" ("Le préjugé du déshonneur," Chr 1:232).

I propose, then, to examine various narrative and discursive developments of the "strange spectacle" of struggle that unfolds in these tales of prostitution: in section 1, I will study a textual counterpart to the ordeal of one femme galante, in "Boule de suif," through the depiction of filles soumises (registered prostitutes) and their provincial bourgeois clientele, both under the protection of a wily madame at "La Maison Tellier" ("Madame Tellier's Establishment"). In section 2, I will explore the diverse relationships between filles and hommes-filles, examining in particular the discursive means by which the narrating hommes-filles, whether self-designating or duplici tous, situate their tales "between men."⁴ This examination will prepare my consideration, in section 3, of the means by which this already inaccessible other is rendered even more alien as well as degraded through three narrative strategies of alterity, or othering. This perspective will allow us to see how Maupassant's representation of women as other is not limited to gender, but extends also to race, ethnic origin, and class distinctions. Throughout these three sections, I undertake a dual consideration, on one hand, of the relation of l'homme-fille to prostitutes, to women du grand monde (from the city) and du petit (from the country), and on the other hand, of l'homme-fille as counterpart to his interlocutor(s) and reader(s) alike. In turn, these considerations will prepare the study, in part 3, of Maupassant's narrative and discursive deployment of the art of rupture in terms of fidelity and conjugality, maternity and paternity, and through the hallucinatory register, of subjectivity and identity themselves.

1. La Maison That Is a Home

To situate the complex relations that reign within Madame Tellier's establishment as well as with the surrounding (and invading) community, let us consider the typology that we can derive from the elaboration of social regulation during the nineteenth century (cf. Corbin, Women for Hire). We may better understand these relations by contrasting them to the immediate tensions underlying Elisabeth Rousset's interactions in "Boule de suif," in her status as a femme galante (translated as "coquette"), a kept woman freely sharing her "admirable qualitiés" (CSS 6) [qualités inappréciables (CN 1:91)]. As such, this unregistered prostitute is by definition insoumise, unsubmissive, to the official pa triarchal scrutiny leveled at activities of all women.⁵ It was her practice, therefore, to share her qualities outside the regulations of the moral order imposed by the bourgeois administration, increasingly obsessed in the late nineteenth century with the dangers of moral and physical "contagion" of unregistered prostitutes and femmes galantes. As Bernheimer notes in reviewing Parent-Duchâtelet's discourse of regulation (see 14-33), "through strategies of camouflage, role playing, and fictionalizing, the clothed body of the insoumise becomes a means to deceive the policing authority that attempts to translate it into knowledge" (27).⁶

In fact, in Maupassant's fiction, the focal point of activity of the fille with l' homme-fille rarely occurs within the confines of the regulated, registered maisons de tolérance, but rather "in contact with both the proletariat and with a 'slumming' potential in itself by way of erotic curiosity mediated by money" (Brooks, Reading 162). We have seen one such inhabitant, Rachel in "Mademoiselle Fifi," who finally returns to "the establishment from which she came" (CSS 237) [le logis public (CN 1:397)], only to be rehabilitated through marriage, a miraculous feat given the prevailing sentiment regarding the immutably corrupt, and corrupting, nature of the prostitute. However, her unexpected elevation to the ranks of "Lady" is indeed consistent with the theme of the patriotic prostitute who serves as "guarantor of stability in morals and an obstacle to the increase in adultery and the development of erotic behavior in bourgeois women" (Corbin, Women for Hire 20).

In "La Maison Tellier," the sole tale by Maupassant that focuses its primary attention on the brothel inhabitants and on their bourgeois clientele, the rupture between the characters is not explicitly internal, as in "Boule de suif."⁷ Rather, the strategy consists of constructing the appearance of nearly blissful harmony while deploying the textual warmachine, in fact, against l'homme-fille through his relations with the filles. This strategy suggests a dual consideration of the tale: I will observe, on one hand, the function of the seemingly mystical transformation that the filles and the proprietress of the maison, Madame Tellier, undergo during their trip to attend a first communion in the latter's home village. On the other hand, I will scrutinize the role played by the bourgeois clientele in terms of the transformation of their relations with the occupants of the maison. By following the key moments of this trans formation in the tale's three sections—the preparation for change implicitly announced with the maison's unexpected closure on a Saturday night in rural Fécamp, the transformative trip on Saturday and Sunday, and the metamorphosis of activities in the re-opened maison on Sunday evening—I will study how Maupassant deploys the art of rupture as a weapon aimed at filles as well as at hommes-filles.

From the first sentence onward—"Men went there every evening about eleven o'clock, just as they went to the café" (CSS 43) [On allait là, chaque soir, vers onze heures, comme au café, simplement (CN 1: 256)]—,the tale suggests that its focus and frame consist precisely of the relationship of the filles to hommes-filles, of the maison to its clientele, between which occur the women's excursion and transformation. The nominative devices employed to designate the distinction of the proprietress are, first, the author initially placing her title, Madame, in italics and, second, the narrator noting emphatically that "Madame, who came of a respectable family of peasant proprietors in the department of the Eure, had taken up her profession, just as she would have become a milliner or dressmaker," for a simple reason:

The prejudice against prostitution, which is so violent and deeply rooted in large towns, does not exist in the country places in Normandy. The peasant simply says: "It's a paying business," and sends his daughter to keep a harem of fast girls, just as he would send her to keep a girls' school. (CSS 43; CN 1:256)

That this observation is an extraordinary example of wish-fulfillment alerts us to the perspective of I'hommefille preparing the tale's dénouement: whereas Madame Tellier's operation of the maison and management the filles correspond to laudable business practices, this submission to bourgeois principles will nonetheless yield finally, during one golden evening at least, to the generative, seductive principle of the art of rupture. For not only does the reader observe the wise distribution of female resources in the maison, specifically, two filles (Louise, "nicknamed Cocote," and Flora, "called Balançoire [the swing] because she limped a little") for the commoners in the downstairs café, and three filles (Fernande, la juive Raphaële, and "a little roll of fat," Rosa la Rosse) (CSS 45; CN 1:258-59) for the bourgeois clients upstairs in the salon.⁸ The reader also learns an important detail of the widow Tellier's character: that, besides exhibiting exemplary refinement, reserve, and maternal solicitude, "since Madame had been a widow, all the frequenters of the establishment had wanted her, but people said that personally she was quite virtuous" (CSS 44) [absolument sage (CN 1:257)]. To her clients, her presence above the demands of her calling served the vital and shrewd marketing function of providing "a rest from the doubtful jokes of those stout individuals who every evening indulged in the commonplace amusement of drinking a glass of liquor in company with girls of easy virtue" (CSS 44; CN 1:258).⁹

Given that her maison had become for her bourgeois clientele "a resource" and that they "very rarely missed their daily meetings there" (CSS 45; CN 1:260), it is understandable that their finding the maison inexplicably closed one Saturday evening would throw the group into disarray. The depiction of their plight is quite instructive since Maupassant does not fail to attach each name to a civil status. Thus, M. Duvert ("the gunmaker"), M. Poulin ("timber merchant and former mayor"), M. Tournevau ("the fish curer"), M. Philippe ("the banker's son"), M. Pimpesse ("the collector"), M. Dupuis ("the insurance agent"), and M. Vasse ("the judge of the tribunal of commerce") all find the doors shut. M. Tournevau is especially "vexed" since "he, a married man and father of a family and closely watched, only went there on Saturdays—securitatis causa, as he said, alluding to a measure of sanitary policy which his friend Dr. Borde had advised him to observe. That was his regular evening, and now he would be deprived of it for the whole week" (CSS 46; CN 1:260). Joining four other regulars, the "sad promenaders" wander listlessly, M. Poulin ("timber merchant and former mayor") and M. Dupuis ("insurance agent") nearly coming to blows in their frustration, and a group of four eventually returns "instinctively" to the still "silent, impenetrable" maison. Much later, wandering alone, "exasperated at the police for thus allowing an establishment of such public utility, which they had under their control, to be thus closed," M. Tournevau discovers the notice that had been posted on a shutter all along, "Closed on account of first communion" (CSS 47; CN 1:262), a statement that "emphasizes the equation maison-commercial establishment" and partially clarifies the enigma of the maison's closure that dominates the opening sequence (Dickson 45-46).

Madame Tellier's purpose for taking the five filles in her employ along to the country birthplace, in fact, follows sound business practice since the canny proprietress wants to avoid the consequences of difficulties that would inevitably arise in her absence: the "rivalries between the girls upstairs and those downstairs," the drunkenness of the footman, Frédéric, events that would upset the smooth functioning of her establishment. The majestic effect of these women on the quiet village—whether on a simple promenade that becomes "a procession" before the villagers (CSS 51; CN 1:268), on their way to the church as "Madame Tellier's regiment" (CSS 53; CN 1:271), or at the mass and com munion ceremony in the tiny church—is indeed impressive, all the more so since their profession is unknown in this isolated rural community. But of greater importance for the implicit development of the narrative war-machine is the effect of this environment itself on these women that contributes to producing a profound metamorphosis. This process is initiated as much by the attitude of Madame's niece, "the wellbehaved child, fully penetrated by piety, as if closed off through absolution" (CN 1:269) [l'enfant bien sage, toute pénétrée de piété, comme fermée par l'absolution (omitted from translation)], as by the "perfect repose of the sleeping village," causing the visitors to shiver, "not with cold, but with those little shivers of solitude which come over uneasy and troubled hearts" (CSS 51; CN 1:269). That night in the village is particularly difficult for one fille, Rosa the Jade (Rosa la Rosse), "unused to sleeping with her arms empty" (CN 1:269), until she goes to comfort Madame Tellier's sobbing and frightened niece, taking her back into her bed where Rosa "lavished exaggerated manifestations of tenderness on her and at last grew calmer herself and went to sleep. And till the morning the girl slept with her head on Rosa's naked bosom" (CSS 52) [Et jusqu'au jour la communiante reposa son front sur le sein nu de la prostituée (CN 1:270)].

This astonishing juxtaposition of the sacred and the profane and, following Michel Crouzet, the "permanent conflict between farce and its conjuration" (248), establish an implicit destabilization of bourgeois commonplace images, a fact not lost on the (anonymous) English translator who systematically distorts the original by rendering communion by confirmation, communion recipient by confirmation candidate, and extensively censoring the consecration scene that follows. During the mass, Rosa is again at the center, this time of the veritable outbreak of "contagious weeping." For having recalled her own first communion, her sobbing transmits throughout the church a "strange sympathy of poignant emotions" that affects everyone: "Men, women, old men and lads in new blouses were soon sobbing; something superhuman seemed to be hovering over their heads—a spirit, the powerful breath of an invisible and all-powerful being" (CSS 54; CN 1:274).¹⁰ Receiving communion from the "old priest," the people "opened their mouths with spasms, nervous grimaces, eyes closed, faces pale" (CN 1:274; omitted from translation). Then,

Suddenly a species of madness seemed to pervade the church, the noise of a crowd in a state of frenzy, a tempest of sobs and of stifled cries. It passed over the people like gusts of wind which bow the trees in a forest, and the priest remained standing, immobile, the host in his hand, paralyzed by emotion, saying: "It's God, it's God who is among us, who is manifesting his presence, who is descending as I speak to his kneeling congregation." And he stammered out incoherent prayers, those inarticulate prayers of the soul, in a furious burst toward heaven. (CSS 54; CN 1:274)¹¹

His no doubt heartfelt final words are turned cruelly ironic from the perspective of the textual war-machine, for in seeking to calm the crowd, the priest bestows a special benediction on the visitors "whose presence among us, whose evident faith and ardent piety have set such a salutary example to all." "Without you," he continues, "this day would not, perhaps, have had this really divine character. It is sufficient at times that there should be one chosen to keep in the flock, to make the whole flock blessed" (CSS 54) [Il suffit parfois d'une seule brebis d'élite pour décider le Seigneur à descendre sur le troupeau (CN 1:274)]. Finally, "his voice failed him again from emotion, and he added, 'I wish for you divine grace. So be it'" [C'est la grâce que je vous souhaite. Ainsi soit-il (CN 1:275; omitted from translation)].¹²

The concluding scenes of this second section, as Dickson has remarked, alternate between "euphoric and dysphoric tonalities" (46), i.e., the spiritual elevation that returns to more sensual pursuits during the subsequent scenes of the village celebration, and especially of the attempts by Madame's brother, Rivet, to seduce Rosa. Following their departure and uneventful return to Fécamp, the impact of the women's "euphoric" experience is of considerable import to the clientele of the maison Tellier. For, with "the flock returned to the fold" at the start of the third section (CSS 57) [dans la bergerie le troupeau était revenu (CN 1:280)], the news spreads quickly throughout the town, and the customers swarm to the festive establishment, even M. Tournevau finding a ruse to absent himself from the imprisoning family gathering on this Sunday evening. The downstairs pair, Louisa and Flora, are already working hard with the sailors, drinking with one and all, thus earning more than ever "their nickname of the 'Two Pumps.'" Yet, they long to share the euphoric atmosphere upstairs that evening, running up to spend a few minutes "while their customers downstairs grew impatient, and then they returned regretfully to the café" (CSS 58; CN 1:282). Deprived of the transformative vigor still enjoyed by their colleagues, and two filles being hardly adequate for the work ahead, "for them, the night promised to be toilsome" (CSS 57) [la nuit pour elles s'annonçait laborieuse (CN 1:280)].

Upstairs, however, more delicate negotiations are in motion as M. Vasse, "the judge of the tribunal of commerce, Madame's usual platonic wooer, was talking to her in a corner in a low voice, and they were both smiling, as if they were about to come to an understanding" (CSS 57; CN 1:280). M. Poulin ("the former mayor") with Rosa; M. Pimpesse ("the tax collector") and the young M. Philippe ("the banker's son"), both with "la grande Fernande"; M. Dupuis ("the insurance agent") negotiating with Raphaële who concludes their talk, "Yes, my dear, tonight I will. … Tonight, anything you want," and is then swept off her feet and out of the room by the determined M. Tournevau; Madame waltzing with M. Vasse, looking at him "with a captivated glance, with this gaze that answers 'yes,' a 'yes' that is more discreet and more delicious than any spoken word" (CN 1:281); the champagne that keeps flow ing, ordered by the usually more economical men—all these events betoken excellent business, but not as usual. For it is not only the "demoiselles" that evening "who exhibit an inconceivable willingness" (CN 1:282); Madame also is involved in "long private talks in corners with M. Vasse, as if to settle the last details of something that had already been agreed upon" (CSS 58; CN 1:282). At the close of the evening, the men only had to pay the cost of the champagne, the details of which the narrator notes with peculiar insistence, "six francs a bottle instead of ten, which was the usual price" (CSS 58; CN 1:283).

However, as if to explain not only this truly inconceivable generosity, but also the general willingness that contributes to maintaining the euphoric atmosphere, Madame, "who was beaming, said to them: 'It's not every day that we have a holiday'" [Ça n'est pas tous les jours fête]. Yet, as has been amply noted (Crouzer 248-49; Dickson 49-50), this final statement contains not merely the focal ambiguity between the determining festive events, holy (first communion) and carnal (the homecoming). It also underscores the ambiguity of Madame's intentions: on one hand, she may provide a recapitulative "justification" of these activities, drawing into her radiant joy readers and customers alike. On the other hand, this justification may also serve as a prospective, business-like limitation to such generosity, to the fête that does and will not come everyday, when business as usual will certainly prevail. The latter reading is supported by the fact that, unlike the euphoric abandon of the women under her charge, Madame negotiates at length with M. Vasse before yielding anything from her precious "capital" amassed over the years—her reputation as being "absolument sage," not only virtuous, but wise. This reading situates the tale finally within the letter of the Law, albeit one that an empowered woman (relatively so, of course, within an oppressive patriarchal framework) chooses to exercise according to her principles of exchange and usage, but within an "establishment of public utility" (CSS 47; CN 1:262) that must respect its commercial function and thereby maintain the proper balance between conjugal and sensual pursuits.

The preceding analyses of "Boule de suif and "La Maison Tellier" have shown two portrayals of prostitutes implicitly situated at opposite poles of the regulationist spectrum, the filles soumises in the hierarchized and well—established maison de tolérance of the widow Tellier, and the femme galante, therefore insoumise, represented by the independent Elisabeth Rousset. In each tale, the prostitute serves as the dual focal point for duplicitous narrative strategies: while the heterodiegetic narrators situate the filles so that they represent the least ridiculous and/or repellent subject-position, thus performing the subversive function (especially for nineteenth-century readers) of providing the filles as the most likely pole of attraction, the clients' social status is juxtaposed directly to their sensual pursuits so that their moral hypocrisy is all the more evident. However, just as Elisabeth Rousset, the model of a forthright, even principled patriot, is primarily represented in her professional role, symbolized by the nickname Boule de suif, she is first seduced, then abandoned by one (the Prussian) and all (the traveling companions) in an explicit manipulation of the art of rupture.

In contrast, while rupture is not at all evident in "La Maison Tellier," it is the sincere religious fervor of Madame Tellier, the women under her care, and even the rural congregation that is, in fact, exploited for narrative ends. For the ultimate euphoric result of this experience is the effusive male enjoyment at the maison Tellier of an "inconceivable willingness, of the festive swoon by which every man's desire is satisfied, without a single chain attached. Furthermore, these representations (harlots as plump, religious, patriotic) not only rely on myths of the prostitute prevalent throughout the nineteenth century, but are "drawn up in virtually definitive form by Parent-Duchâtelet" (Corbin, Women for Hire 8). In each case, as well as generally in Maupassant's tales of prostitution, the hommes-filles necessarily render their counterparts other in order better to abandon them: Boule de suif is cast out of society, and the women of the maison Tellier succumb for a golden evening precisely to the sexual fantasies of I'hommefille, after which he can retreat to the security of the conjugal surveillance. These overlapping analyses provide the necessary foundation for studying the depiction of l'homme-fille in relation to filles as well as the concomitant situation of the reader in relation to the diegetic and discursive strategies that animate Maupassant's art of rupture.

2. L'Homme-fille: "Sentiments like the Affections of Harlots"

Let us consider some additional details of the peculiar temperament of l'homme-fille and of the ongoing struggle that pits him in battle with la vraie fille, a struggle that Maupassant describes toward the end of the quasi-conie "L'Homme-fille":

For the relations of these hommes-filles are uncertain. Their temper is governed by fits and starts, their enthusiasms unexpected, their affection subject to sudden revulsions, their excitement is liable to eclipse. One day they love you, the next day they will hardly look at you, for they have, in fact, a harlot's nature, a harlot's charm, a harlot's temperament, and all their sentiments are like the affections of harlots. (CSS 715; CN 1:756)

Far from revealing the sympathy toward filles for which Maupassant has occasionally been noted (cf. Vial, Faits 240), these sentiments express a "reversal" that is hardly "chiasmic" (cf. Donaldson-Evans, "Doctoring" 357). That is, instead of degrading one type as the other is elevated (the case for the bourgeois vis-à-vis Boule de suif), here the temperament of one type is dragged down by the negative weight of the other's. After asserting that the hommes-filles "treat their friends as kept women treat their pet dogs" (CSS 715) [Ils traitent leurs amis comme les drôlesses leurs petits chiens (CN 1:756)], Maupassant's narrator paints a vivid portrait of the "strange spectacle" of the real harlot with I'homme-fille:

He beats her, she scratches him, they loathe each other, cannot bear the sight of each other, and yet cannot part, linked together by no one knows what mysterious bonds of the heart…. They cause each other to suffer atrociously without being able to separate. They cast invectives, reproaches and abominable accusations at each other from morning till night, and then, excessively excited and vibrating with rage and hatred, they fall into each other's arms and kiss each other madly, uniting their quivering mouths and harlots' souls. (CSS 715; CN 1:757)

Among the gripping examples of such combat that Maupassant provides in his fiction, it is in "L'Épingle" [The hat pin] (translated as "Doubtful Happiness"), that the ambivalence of such struggle is narratively portrayed most dramatically.¹³ On one hand, the interlocutor of the first-person (homodiegetic), framing narrator thus describes his relationship with his mistress Jeanne de Limours: "For three years ours was a frightful but delicious existence. I was very near to killing her five or six times; she tried to jab out my eyes with the pin that you were just looking at." This relationship is only explicable for I'homme-fille within the ambivalent logic that we have located in the art of rupture:

How can I explain this passion? You could never comprehend it. There should be such a thing as a simple love, born of the dual transport of two hearts and two souls; but assuredly there is such a thing as an atrocious, cruelly torturous love, born of the invincible rapture of two beings totally unalike who detest while adoring each other. (CSS 617; CN 2:522)

On the other hand, having exiled himself abroad and there amassed a small fortune, the interlocutor responds to the question, "Will you try to see her again?" by indicating his plans for the final struggle, to return and keep this passion and himself alive, if only provisionally: "Surely! I have here now, in money and land, seven or eight hundred thousand francs. When the million is completed, I will sell everything and leave. I will have enough for a year with her, one solid year.—And then, adieu, my life will be finished" (CSS 618; CN 2:524).

We can consider more fully the role of l'homme-fille as he consorts with women on the end of the regulationist spectrum that corresponds to the activities of an Elisabeth Rousset, i.e., the numerous tales of filles who attempt to resist submission, insoumises as much to the patriarchal order of enforced surveillance as to the exploitive and often destructive art of rupture. However vague the designation of fille insoumise came to be during the nineteenth century (cf. Corbin, Women for Hire 128-32), Maupassant simplifies matters by portraying women belonging to three categories:

tales of femmes galantes, of which "Boule de suif" is one example ("Yveline Samouris," "Yvette," "La Baronne," and "Les Soeurs Rondoli");

tales of filles de la rue (streetwalkers) ("L'Odyssée d'une fille," "Les Tombales," "Nuit de Noël," and "L'Armoire"); and

tales of filles aux canotiers, most likely female shop assistants (demoiselles de magasin) or dressmakers' assistants (explicitly the case in "Ça Ira"), who frequent the society of male canoeists on the Seine ("Ça Ira," "Mouche," and, in terms of the tale's setting, "La Femme de Paul").¹⁴

We may nuance this typology in light of the aforementioned narrative characteristic prevalent in nearly all of these tales, the device of embedding a tale within a narrative frame. In previously examining an example of this device in "Les Idées du colonel," we saw the structure's duplicitous function in providing the author with even more control over the manner in which a tale is received. Angela Moger suggests that, on one hand, "the frame would italicize the framed, implying that the story's mimetic status is a self-deception on the part of the reader, whose earnest attitude is implicitly derided" (322). On the other hand, the assignment of the narrator's role to a physician, in the tales "En voyage" and "La rempailleuse," Moger argues, "enhances the credibility of the narrative and at least initially gains the confidence of the reader," the narrative being posed not as "the creation of a litterateur but the first hand report of a scientist" (322). In "Les Idées du colonel," and Forestier's objections notwithstanding (CN 2:1397), the idiosyncrasies of the colonel's remarks tend finally to reinforce his demonstration of the invigorating effects of la femme in ways that were perhaps impossible in the unframed predecessor, "Le mariage du lieutenant Laré."

But what are we to make of l'homme-fille as narrator, whose "temper is governed by fits and starts"? Following Chambers's remarks on the device of embedding, this type of narrator would seem the ideal practitioner of the textual art of rupture since the device would allow, on one hand, "for relatively intense interpretive involvement on the part of the reader." On the other hand, the device would limit "the reader's options in approaching the text," i.e., "opening up interpretive options while simultaneously programming them" (Story 35). At once volatile and constraining, l'homme-fille would, on both narrative and discursive levels, seemingly open up the polysemy of the tales recounted while seeking to determine their meaningfulness, directly among the interlocutors, indirectly for readers. Of the two tales in which the narrator remains ostensibly covert, "La Femme de Paul" and "Yvette," the latter (which I will consider among tales of femmes galantes) is firmly anchored to embedding: it begins with a framing discussion between two hommes-filles/interlocutors, then proceeds to a longer, heterodiegetic narration of its earlier version (the framed tale, "Yveline Samouris"), with the maternal character appearing subsequently within yet another frame in "La Baronne." While Femme de Paul" appears exempt from the discursive manipulation imposed by narrational embedding, in section 3 we shall observe a different form of embedding that continually positions the reader discursively vis-à-vis the narrative agency, and thereby plays a crucial role in the deployment of the art of rupture.

Femmes galantes

Considering first the group of women whose professional stature makes them the colleagues closest to Elisabeth Rousset, the femmes galantes—and just as importantly, the men whose desire constitutes these women as such—we find in "Les Soeurs Rondoli" ["The Sisters Rondoli"] the depiction of what may be the beginnings of the career either of a femme galante (free agent) or femme d'attente (kept woman). Moreover, this presentation occurs explicitly from the perspective of l'homme-fille, Pierre Jouvenet, who frames his tale by explaining the "charming insights of the manners" of Italy that he received on his two unsuccessful attempts to "penetrate" the country beyond its borders (CSS 202; CN 2:133). The account of these evidently difficult circumstances, solicited obliquely by an undefined interlocutor, constitutes the material of his retrospective tale of seduction, abandonment, then the subsequent promise of renewed seductions.¹⁵

One fascinating aspect is how closely Jouvenet fits the type of I'homme-fille, his temperament governed by the characteristic "fits and starts," "enthusiasms," and "revulsions" described in "L'Homme-fille." For example, Jouvenet's departure is forced on him by "the violent vigor of spring [that] infuses the fervor for love and adventure" (CSS 202) [la sève violente du printemps vous met au coeur des ardeurs de voyage et d'amour (CN 2:133)]. His obsessive character becomes evident concerning not only his own detailed collection of "little instruments of cleanliness" that he carries along on the trip, but especially the explicit details that he provides of Francesca's lack of cleanliness, for instance, her reluctance to use soap and her excessive use of perfumes and powders creating "such a violent odor that I was overcome with a migraine" (CSS 211; CN 2:149).¹⁶ His inexplicably growing at traction to Francesca is based on "a secret bond, that mysterious bond of animal love, the secret attachment to a possession that does not satiate" (CSS 214; CN 2:153; my emphasis). The continued experience of fever and the memory of Francesca well after leaving her haunt Jouvenet "with strange persistency," torturing him "like a nightmare" (CSS 216-17; CN 2:157), forcing him to return to Genoa. The resolution of this dilemma is, of course, ideal for I'homme-fille, in that he has a continued intimacy with fresh and youthful females, similar enough to the original to evoke the same sensations in the same locale, but different enough to provide variety, all with the added attraction of maternal approval and no chains to bind.

However, what is perhaps less evident, yet is crucial for understanding the deployment of the war-machine by and against I'homme-fille, is the manner in which this tale of seduction, (dis)possession and renewal, rendered more spicy by Jouvenet's final reflections about Mme Rondoli's other daughters, obliquely presents the homosocial interactions of two hommes-filles, Jouvenet and Pavilly. For, Pierre Jouvenet initially has no intention of seducing the woman in their train compartment; it is Paul Pavilly who undertakes to impress her, as a man for whom "woman is everything, the world, life itself," all of whose acts and thoughts "have women for their motives" (CSS 203; CN 2:135), ac cording to the framing narrator, Jouvenet. Once they discover that, speaking no French, she could not understand a single gallant word Pavilly has pronounced, Jouvenet must intervene as interpreter, a polyglot pimp of sorts, inviting her to share their food, and trying to discover her plans. When she finally volunteers to accompany them to their hotel in Genoa and chooses Pierre Jouvenet, not Pavilly, as her patito (the man who looks after a woman), Paul's enraged response is "All the better for you!'" (CSS 210) [Tant mieux pour toi (CN 2:146)].

The question that arises is who has Pavilly really lost through his linguistic impotence, the mysterious woman or the man who tempted him into the voyage in the first place with promises of charming Italian women and of Naples's refined society (CSS 204; CN 2:136)? I submit that it is truly more the latter than the former, since the tale of heterosexual intimacy is itself particularly uninteresting, rendered all the more so through Francesca's committed indifference repeatedly emphasized by "her perpetual 'Che mi fa?' or her no less perpetual 'mica'" (CN 2:154) [What's that to me? and Leave me alone (CSS 214)]. With Pavilly, however, we see a veritable lovers' struggle between men, Paul's "execrable temper," "rage and swearing" (CSS 211-15; CN 2:149-54) growing in direct proportion to the length of time he remains near the two, but strangely unable to travel or return to Paris alone, despite repeated threats to do so. Moreover, Paul evokes the bourgeois fear of contagion, prostitution's "terrible threat to the future of the race" (Corbin, Women for Hire 23), in order to separate the lovers:

"You declare that she is not a tart! And you persuade yourself that you are not running any more risk than if you were to go and spend the night with a woman who had smallpox." He laughed with an unpleasant and angry laugh. I sat down, a prey to uneasiness. What was I to do, for he was right after all? A struggle began within me, between desire and fear. (CSS 212; CN 2:150)

But, desire wins out, a victory that Pierre exclaims to his friend: "You know the old saying: ¢ victory without perils is a triumph without glory.'" Finally, given an opening by Francesca's absence one day, Paul counterattacks, insisting that the two men leave, and when she fails to return to the hotel that night, he presses his advantage with mockery. Claiming that a wait of twenty-four hours is enough for his "conscience to be quite clear" (CSS 216; CN 2:156), Pierre packs his belongings the next morning, and they return to Paris.

This homosocial bonding "between men" plays itself out time and again in Maupassant's tales of prostitution, and we can understand the framed conte as itself lending a formal basis to this implicit homosocial intimacy. For the act of orally re-presenting to one or several (male) interlocutor(s) the phases and circumstances of the heterosexual art of rupture is tantamount to reliving and relieving those "imperious needs," while whetting the appetite verbally for still more such carnal exchanges. Furthermore, the dual gesture of the art of rupture, of breaking with the grasping women, and yet having them all narratively again and again, enables l'homme-fille to render woman other and distant and still maintain that possession by sharing it/her with the same, that is, among hommes-filles.

Even a text that is not framed, such as "Yvette," reveals textual similarities with the framed tale from which it is derived, "Yveline Samouris," The opening section of each text, one with a framing device ("Yveline"), the other with an introductory exposition of two hommes-filles, Jean de Servigny and Léon Saval, conversing as they stroll along the boulevard, reveals the circumstances of the countess Samouris/Obardi as courtesan and, more important, of her daughter Yveline/Yvette, "born an honest woman" (CN 1:684). However, as Servigny declares, Yvette "disturbs me, allures me, and makes me uneasy, at once attracts me and frightens me…. She provokes me and excites me like a harlot, and guards herself at the same time as if she were a virgin" (CSS 106-7; CN 2:238-39). In any case, he concludes, like a practical consumer, "If she has had lovers, I shall make one more. If she has not, I shall be the first to take my seat in the train" (CSS 107; CN 2:239).

In both tales, the girl is, in fact, naive and innocent, a virgin as well, but her discoveries of the mother's marginal status and, therefore, of her own circumscribed destiny (accurately defined by l'homme-fille, Servigny, in the initial, framing analysis of "Yvette," [CN 2:239-40]), are the elements that lead to the culminating attempt at suicide. Whereas Yveline successfully takes the final step when her mother ignores her ultimatum to change their existence (CN 1:687), Yvette succeeds only in inducing a delightful chloroform high and in frightening the company assembled with her mother in a rented country retreat. However, according to the hommes-filles, these divergent outcomes result from differences in women's inherent constitutions, and even evaluation, within and by society. As Irigaray notes,

Prostitution amounts to usage that is exchanged. Usage that is not merely potential: it has already been realized. The woman's body is valuable because it has already been used. In the extreme case, the more it has served, the more it is worth. Not because its natural assets have been put to use this way, but, on the contrary, because its nature has been "used up," and has become once again no more than a vehicle for relations among men. (This Sex 186)¹⁷

Since she was born an honest woman, Yveline seemingly has no choice but to die given her inevitable destiny of unacceptable usage (use as well as wear and tear), a death that leads the narrator to conclude, with convenient tardiness, "In truth, if I had known,—but one never knows,—I would have perhaps married that harlot" [cette fille-là (CN 1:687)].

Servigny, on the contrary, has no such illusions about Yvette: whether or not she is a virgin and whether or not he loves her, it is certain "that I shall never marry her" since, quite simply, by dint of her eventual usage, she is destined to be "a vehicle for relations among men" (Irigaray, This Sex 186). Servigny thus comments correctly, "she can't possibly marry ever. Who would marry the daughter of the Marquise Obardi, Octavie Bardin? Clearly, no one, for any number of reasons" (CSS 107; CN 2:239). Yvette's drug-induced stupor and hallucinations function in exactly the same transformative manner as the divine ecstasy during the communion ceremony and the subsequent euphoria for Mme Tellier and her employees: Yvette's resistance to her fate and her will to die are swept aside in the euphoric reflections at the edge of death, strangely similar in their content as well as indirect form to Renardet's in "La Petite Roque": "Why not live? Why should she not be loved? Why should she not live happily? Everything now seemed possible, easy, sure" (CSS 144; CN 2:300). It is Servigny who discovers her suicide note, "I die so that I may not be a kept woman. Yvette. Goodbye, Mother dear. Forgive me" (CSS 147; CN 2:305). As he kneels by her bedside, whispering, "Listen to me, mam'selle," she feels the happy, gentle "caressing breeze," no longer wishing to die, feeling instead "a strong, imperious desire to live, to be happy, no matter how, to be loved, yes, loved" (CSS 147; CN 2:306; my emphasis). So, Servigny's words of wisdom regarding existential and, here, sexual economy—"We must all accept our share of things, however sad" (CSS 148; CN 2:307)—fall on welcoming ears, and body, as "their lips met," and as she asks and promises softly, "You will love me very much, won't you?" [Vous m'aimerez bien, dites?], to which the only reply possible for the conquering homme-fille comes easily, "I adore you" (CSS 148) [Je vous adore (CN 2:308)].¹⁸

Filles de la rue

All the tales of the filles de la rue are embedded within narrative frames, and this device provides not only the possibility for homosocial bonding, more or less clearly defined depending on the tale's initiating frame, but also a means for the narrator to distance himself discursively from what is for him the uniformly disturbing, even distasteful experience with women from the lower end of the hierarchy of filles. As Dijkstra notes, "a confused mixture of sexual desire and guilt, a vague sense of class difference and exploitation, and a desire to hold onto privileges gained made the prostitute seem to these men, as the brothers Goncourt had remarked in their journal, the means whereby the proletariat revenged itself upon the rich" (358). In one such tale, "L'Armoire" ["Florentine"] the overt connivance between men is presented in the opening framing device: "We were talking about filles, after dinner, for what else is there to talk about among men?" (CSS 593; CN 2:401). However, at least this once, the man's disgust "in this public bed" (that he nonetheless entered readily) turns to pity, not so much from uncovering the lies in tales of her first lovers that the fille relates, as from finally discovering that the strange noise he has been hearing is her little boy, Florentine, hidden in a cupboard "at the head of our bed" (CSS 596; CN 2:406). The mother's angry, tearful explanation—"What can you expect? I do not earn enough to put the child in school! I must take care of him somehow, and I cannot afford to rent another room"—and the "timid and pitiful" child's frightened weeping lead l'homme-fille to an uncharacteristic sympathy: "I, too, had a desire to weep. And I returned home to my own bed" (CSS 597; CN 2:407), a rupture that results, in fact, in minimal loss and no binding attachment.

In the other tales of filles de la rue, however, the narrator's impulse is implicitly to distance himself emotionally from the intrusive other. For example, the framing narrator in "L'Odyssée d'une fille" ["A Poor Girl"] responds to the story of a fille's origins quite differently than the narrator of "L'Armoire." The path of prostitution that she describes, her betrayals by older bourgeois men, and the dangers she runs by dint of her unregistered status, all provoke in him "the sinister sensation of invincible fatality" and allow him "to comprehend fully how impossible an honest life is under some conditions" (CSS 695; CN 1:996). Yet, having identified himself as a married man, he insists then on a moral attitude of disgust as interlocutor of the fille. By thus distancing the framing narrator, Maupassant can safely depict the trajectory and perils of the framed narrator's (i.e., the fille's) career, and can also unveil the hypocrisy of the upper bourgeois hommes-filles that renders inevitable the trusting girl's path to prostitution, notably the old, devout grain dealer, Lérable, and the old judge whose excesses result in his death and her imprisonment.

In another such tale, "Nuit de Noël" ["Christmas Eve"], the term réveillon (Christmas Eve supper) evokes for the framing narrator "the dirtiest trick in the world" [le plus sale tour du monde], a translation that includes an interesting pun on trick, since it is his taste for corpulent women that led him one Christmas Eve to invite back to his lodgings an appropriately proportioned fille. The "dirty trick" occurs after dinner with the delivery of a petite fille, a baby to which the fille gave birth in his bed. Despite his self-imposed obligation to support the child, the only real recourse for l'homme-fille is to the art of rupture: having lost weight quite understandably following the delivery, the fille "had grown as thin as a homeless cat, and I turned the skeleton out of doors" (CSS 835) [J'ai flanqué dehors cette carcasse (CN 1:699)]. Yet, she still continues to wait for him in the street, "enough to drive me mad. That is why I never keep Christmas Eve now."¹⁹

A third tale, "Les Tombales" ["Graveyard Sirens"], presents a garçon (bachelor) with the opportunity to relate to four other men (another bachelor and three married) une aventure singulière (a curious thing) that occurred as a result of an encounter in a cemetery: attracted by the tears of a weeping woman, supporting her as she fainted before the tomb of a navy captain killed in action, the narrator gradually found himself led to the woman's apartment, where she responded to his embrace, ambiguously crying, "Finish it, do finish it" (CSS 425) [Finissez … Finissez donc (CN 2:1243)]. He interprets this ambiguity to his sexual benefit, but after three weeks, he broke off the liaison since "man tires of everything, especially of women." A month later, however, he met her once again among the tombs at Montmartre, accompanied by an officer of the Legion of Honor. This encounter leads the narrator to wonder whether she was indeed "an inspired prostitute" who works the cemeteries "like the street," as a "graveyard siren" (tombale), or if it was her idea alone "to profit by the amorous regrets awakened in these awful places" (CSS 426; CN 2:1245). In each of these tales, then, the mixture of attraction to and repulsion by the filles reveals, on one hand, the implicit narrative investment of the homme-fille in the strategic alienation of the female other constitutive of the art of rupture, and on the other hand, by dint of the framing device, the evident connivance of hommes-filles and garçons established through the habitually shared pleasure, narrative and discursive, "among men" (CSS 593; CN 2:401).

Filles aux canotiers

It is clear from the third group of tales, those of the filles aux canotiers, that these women are treated the most fondly, perhaps due to Maupassant's own nostalgia for years spent on the river as an energetic and devoted canoeist (cf. Troyat 47-54). In one case, "Ça Ira" ["The Tobacco Shop"], the framing narrator explains how the proprietress of a rural tabac, into which he chanced to enter, had at one time been "a poor, thin girl who limped," employed for a Parisian modiste (dressmaker), and who became "a part of our band" of canoeists (CSS 691-92; CN 2:573-74). What makes this tale unusual is that rather than relate the story of her origins, the woman, nicknamed by the band Ça Ira (So-it-goes), tells the narrator "a thousand things of the secret life of a Parisian woman, … the whole story of the heart of a working girl, that sparrowhawk of the sidewalk who hunts through the streets" (CSS 692; CN 2:575). She reveals that she had distinguished between the canotiers, who she and her friends frequented "for pleasure" (pour le plaisir), and the men that they "hunted" in order to survive. Having employed an array of ruses concocted by her comrades la belle Irma and Louise, Ça Ira explains finally that her illegitimate son's father, previously a law student in Paris and eventually elected député, had arranged for her to occupy the functionary's position as tobacconist (a detail also recalling Maupassant's appointment through influence to a position in the naval ministry; cf. Troyat 37-45). The narrator's emphasis on the solemn moment of leave-taking as she introduces him to her son, Roger, "a future subprefect," is implicit recognition of the successful ascent of the woman in social rank, especially to a respectable position in which she affirms, rather than threatens, the order of law and reason: "I saluted this functionary [the son] in a worthy manner and went back to my hotel, after having pressed with gravity the extended hand of Ça Ira" (CSS 695; CN 2:579).

In "Mouche—Souvenir d'un canotier" ["Mouche—A Boating Man's Reminiscence"], the frame is as slim as possible, as the tale begins, "He said to us: 'What queer things and queer women I have seen in those long-ago days when I used to go on the river'" (CSS 31) [Il nous dit: 'En ai-je vu, de drôles de choses et de drôles de filles aux jours passés où je canotais' (CN 2:1169)]. As Forestier notes, this tale is quite autobiographical, not merely evoking details from the 1873-79 period of Maupassant's canoeing life, but using the nicknames that his real comrades had adopted at that time (CN 2:1699-1700). As for the woman nicknamed Mouche, so called because she was "a little blister fly … strangely disturbing the whole crew of the Feuille-à-Uenvers" (CSS 33; CN 2:1172), her adoption by and enjoyment with the crew results in a pregnancy which itself becomes a collective event for these hommes-filles. The group paternity, of which all, and no one in particular, are responsible, is cause for a second "adoption," when the miscarriage after an unfortunate boating accident is turned from tragedy into ironic comedy by Mouche's total acceptance of and by the eager group. "Be comforted, little Mouche, be comforted," advises one canoeist, "we'll make you another one." The framed narrator and paternal candidate interprets her response in their favor: "The sense of humor that was bred in her bones woke suddenly, and, half convinced, half joking, still all tears and her heart contracted with pains, she asked, looking at us all: 'Promise?' And we all answered together: 'Promise'" (CSS 36-37; CN 2:1178). "Mouche" suggests quite clearly another facet of the art of rupture: how enjoyable it would be for group paternity to occur when, using the Maupassantian metaphor, the chains that might otherwise be attached individually can be shared "between men" and its consequences narratively aborted with little ado.

3. Narrative Strategies of "Othering"

Besides the different forms of tales as well as the repeated use of the narrative frame by which I'homme-fille can distance himself discursively and narratively from the women described, the war-machine is further deployed as means to render women into objects of masculine discourse through a number of textual strategies: the depiction of women as lesbians, that I will consider in the tale "La Femme de Paul"; the use of onomastic elements in different tales, especially related to the Semitic other; and the presentation of a specifically exotic object of desire, the Arabic fille du sable (harlot of the sand).

Lesbians

The first strategy concerns homosexuality, a subject about which Maupassant reveals himself to be distinctly uneasy. We have already seen the homosocial tension that emerges in certain tales like "Les Soeurs Rondoli," of barely concealed desire between men, and in the discussion of Maupassant's liaison with Gisèle d'Estoc (chapter 2), I cited several examples of Maupassant's homoerotic fascination and anxiety. We should also recall that Maupassant incarnated the extension of this fascination in his role as the bisexual prostitute in A la Feuille de Rose. Maison Turque. The author's equivocal fascination brings us to the narrative depiction of lesbianism, the most dangerous form of love, not merely as perceived by the nineteenth-century regulationists (Corbin, Women for Hire 7-8, 124-26), but also in terms of the narrative consequences of this form of attachment. Indeed, the "lesbian scenario" was one aspect of a distinct narrative strain in nineteenth-century French literature, from the Romantic pornography of "Gamiani," attributed to Musset and well-known among Maupassant's contemporaries (36-57), to what Dijkstra calls "the turn of the [nineteenth to twentieth] century's emblem of [woman's] enmity toward man," her "desire to embrace her own reflection, her 'kiss in the glass'" (150; cf. 152-59).

In "La Femme de Paul" ["Paul's Mistress"], set in the context of joyful promiscuity of the canoeists, Maupassant depicts the fatal results not merely for a young woman, Madeleine, "corrupted" by other women renowned for their enjoyment of the pleasures of "Lesbos," but also for her companion, Paul Baron, a senator's son, floating on the wild side of the social bas-fonds (lower regions). Confronted by the presence on the river of lesbian canoeists, he shows himself to be unreasonably disturbed, "borne away by a male jealousy, by a profound, instinctive and ungovernable fury. He stammered, his lips quivering with indignation: 'It is shameful! They ought to be drowned like bitches, with a stone around their necks'" (CSS 1058; CN 1:297). Madeleine's angry response is significant: "And what has it to do with you? Aren't they free to do what they want, since they owe no one anything? Leave us alone with your manners and mind your own business" (CSS 1059; CN 1:297; my emphasis). The first person plural object of "fiche-nous la paix" could be interpreted simply as rejecting Paul's intrusive judgements on behalf of all women. However, given the events that follow, it is clear that Madeleine is at the very least susceptible to, if not having already participated in, lesbian activities.

Far from constituting the Baudelairian "innovation" of "the lesbian as heroine of modernity" (Walter Benjamin, qtd. in Buci-Glucksmann 85), the particular practice of dispossession of men by these distinct "others" is devastating for a budding homme-fille such as Paul, particularly from the perspective of the art of rupture. For the tale's conclusion leaves no doubt: losing his mistress to an onomastic as well as sexual counterpart, "Mme Pauline," Paul is literally driven mad in his search for Madeleine along the Seine near Bougival. Like Renardet carried away by his visions, what Paul perceives as Madeleine's ecstatic, orgasmic shrieks leaves him "astounded and overwhelmed, as if he had discovered a mutilated corpse of one dear to him, a crime against nature, a monstrous, disgusting profanation" (CSS 1064; CN 1:306). That this description could apply to Renardet's crime as well is no mere coincidence; as we saw in "La Petite Roque," and as is the case in "La Femme de Paul," both men transgress the lines of Law and Reason imposed by bourgeois society and must therefore suffer the consequences. Paul's own desperate, "frightful cry: 'Madeleine!' … shot across the great silence of the sky, and sped over the horizon," announcing, as it were, the only recourse apparently left to an homme-fille driven so far from the safe confines of bourgeois regulations: "With a tremendous leap, with the bound of a wild animal, he jumped into the river" (CSS 1064; CN 1:306).

The focalization shifts finally to Paul's former companion, Madeleine, who intuitively understands the sound of his cry and rushes to the bank, only to find men dragging the hideously discolored corpse from the river. Already "green, with his mouth, his eyes, his nose, his clothes full of slime," the corpse seems in a state of decomposition not merely from drowning, but from the contaminating realization that had preceded and, in fact, caused his final act. Yet, rather than being horrified by the fatal event that she seemingly caused, Madeleine easily accepts not only Pauline's brutal insight, "It is not your fault, is it? It is impossible to prevent men from doing silly things," but also her comforting embrace and words of support, "Come, my dear … we will cure you," of her suffering, no doubt, but perhaps of her remaining attraction to heterosexual love as well. Madeleine's departure with "her head upon Pauline's shoulder, as though she had found refuge in a more intimate and more certain, a more familiar and more confident tenderness" (CSS 1065; CN 1:308), would offer, in another text and sociohistoric context, a rather beautiful vision of homosexual closure. Given the blatant exposition of cause and effect that precedes, however, the usurpation and deformation of the male practice of the art of rupture lays added emphasis on the profane impulses of "nurturance" displayed by a willful, dominant, yet ultimately doomed, feminine "other."

"La belle juive"

A second means by which women are distanced and rendered other in these tales is through the manipulation of key onomastic elements. As was common practice upon entering a maison de tolérance, a prostitute was given "a pseudonym, which she usually kept throughout her career, even when she moved to a different establishment" (Corbin, Women for Hire 77).²⁰ Onomastic elements in Maupassant's tales, as Forestier has noted (following commentary by Dr. Reuss in La Prostitution, CN 1:1416), correspond to the then current practice of nicknames (e.g., Boule de suif; in "La Maison Tellier," Rosa la Rosse, Louise Cocote, and Flora Balançoire; Mouche; Ça Ira; and Eve la Tomate in "Mademoiselle Fifi") and names ending in a, especially those borrowed from literature, theater, and café-concerts (e.g., Pamela and Amanda, in "Made moiselle Fifi").²¹ However, we can specify three further ways in which the manipulation of onomastic elements determines women as objects and other. First, in all the tales in which l'homme-fille comes into contact with a fille de la rue, she remains anonymous, designated by the third person elle, or takes over the tale as je (as in "L'Odyssée d'une fille") for scrutiny as an object/abject lesson in human misery. Even when nicknames are used, such as Mouche or Ça Ira, no Christian name (except Elisabeth Rousset for Boule de suif) ever comes to replace them, or to personalize the women beyond the behavior that had earned them the particular appellation.

Second, besides several of the aforementioned nicknames that indicate physical characteristics, certain other names take on symbolic importance for l'hommefille: appearing in "La Maison Tellier" and in "Ça Ira," Louise is also the first name of la petite Roque and has a curious resonance in Maupassant's life, as the name of his aunt and of his first boat (Louisette). The use of Madame for the widow Tellier does not stand simply for her previously married status, but for her role as proprietress and desired woman somehow removed from directly carnal exchange. And Madeleine, in "La Femme de Paul," clearly evokes the "fallen woman," here remaining unredeemed, even "condemned" to a life engulfed in a fatal "tenderness."²²

A final means of manipulating onomastic elements occurs for the first time in "La Maison Tellier" with the use of the name Raphaële to designate the apparent exoticism provided in the establishment by "the indispensable role of the belle juive [beautiful Jewish woman]" (CSS 45; CN 1:259). Maupassant had previously adopted this name for his role in A la Feuille de Rose. Maison Turque, and while other women's names (for example, Fatma in A la Feuille de Rose, Fernande in "La Maison Tellier," and the sisters Rondoli, Francesco, and Carlotta) also might be said to provide an exotic tonality, the recurring presence of the belle juive has particular value in Maupassant's tales. For, in each case, the woman's striking traits—Raphaële's "black hair, which was always covered with pomatum" (CSS 45; CN 1:259), and Rachel's features in "Mademoiselle Fifi," "a very young, dark girl, with eyes as black as ink, a Jewess, whose snub nose confirmed by exception the rule which allots hooked noses to all her race" (CSS 234; CN 1:392)—establish an exotically and ethnically distinct presence, seemingly an indispensable mainstay of the fully equipped maison de tolérance.²³

This association of fille and juive in Maupassant's tales is hardly surprising since, as Buci-Glucksmann notes in her discussion of Otto Weininger's Sex and Character, the modern period reveals the confluence of the figures of "woman" and "Jew(ess)" as the time of "a non-subject possessed by his/her all-powerful sexuality, an 'a-moral' and 'anti-social' non-subject, prisoner of a libido of evil and 'ignorant of the State/Status'" (146). In fact, Buci-Glucksmann continues, "the parallelism between 'woman' and 'Jew,' the simultaneous rise of a philosophical anti-feminism stemming from Schopenhauer and a diversified anti-Semitism … is a veritable commonplace in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth" (149-50; see also Dijkstra 218-21). Indeed, the period of Maupassant's youth and particularly of his literary production (1860-91) saw, as well, the sharp rise of anti-Semitic sentiment in France (notably in Catholic, financial, and political milieus), the organization of the first explicitly anti-Semitic ligues, and the publication of influential anti-Semitic texts, e.g., by Gougenot des Mousseaux and the best-seller La France juive (1886) by Edouard Drumont.²⁴ Furthermore, Forestier suggests both cultural and personal connections for Maupassant's interest in Jews,²⁵ and Albert-Marie Schmidt goes further, pointing out that Maupassant's predilection for the "charm" of Jewish women was well known among his peers, for example, the Goncourt brothers.²⁶ Regarding the presence of Jews in Maupassant's work, Forestier concludes that by the mid-1880s, "Israelites begin to take hold of a large place in Maupassant's imagination: Mont-Oriol will soon confirm this" (CN 2:1511), referring to the character of the entrepreneur Andermatt in Maupassant's third novel (1887).²⁷

It is Maupassant's use of this commonplace of the period that renders it so intriguing, notwithstanding Forestier's disclaimer of Maupassant's simple devotion to realism's "humble truth."²⁸ For example, the tale to which Forestier's commentary refers, "Ça Ira," would seem to have little connection to Maupassant's growing "interest in Jews" except for a bizarre semantic slide that occurs concerning the eponymous nickname. Reflecting on his earlier life among the canotiers, the framing narrator notes:

We baptized her "So-it-Goes" (Ça Ira), because she was always complaining of her destiny, of her misfortune and her sorrows. Each Sunday morning they would say to her: "Well, So-it-Goes, how goes it?" And she would always answer: "Not too well, but we must hope that it will go better someday." (CSS 691; CN 2:574)

Once this first, baptismal generation of canotiers moved on, however, "our successors, not knowing why we had christened her as we did, believed her to have an oriental woman's name and called her Zaïra." Continuing on to the next generations, "Zaïra had now become Zara, and later Zara was modified into Sarah. Then they thought she was an Israelite. The last ones, those with the monocles, called her simply 'the Jewess.' Then she simply disappeared" (CSS 692; CN 2:574). This onomastic displacement would seem to indicate, at the very least, that hommes-filles associated la juive quite easily, even expected to associate her, whether in a brothel or not, with the practice of "the trade which demands the most grace, tact, cleverness and beauty" (CSS 692; CN 2:574), not to men tion exotic charm and mystery. These reflections of an homme-fille/narrator would stand as a mere curiosity if they did not take an even more sinister turn in another tale, "L'Inconnue" ("The Unknown"), written earlier the same year (1885) and appearing with "Ça Ira" in the same collection of tales, Monsieur Parent (December 1885). In fact, Schmidt refers to this tale as an example of Maupassant's "ambiguous feelings" toward Jewish women, a feeling "made of sadistic desire and sacred horror, that incites the outsider to slide into the beds of prophetesses and ghouls" (115). Such is the strange exotic force that l'homme-fille naturally attributes to la juive in this tale. Relating a (framed) anecdote "between men" of his fascination with and seduction of a femme de la rue, Roger des Annettes describes "a tall and rather sturdy young woman who made on me … an altogether amazing impression." According to des Annettes, she was darkhaired, hirsute even, with a slight mustache that set him "dreaming … dreaming …," and had eyes "like ink stains on the gleaming white skin," eyes "through which one saw right into her, entered into her." Quite "naturally," then, des Annettes "imagined her to be a Jewess" (CSS 412; CN 2:443-44), a detail which seems to relate simply to the homme-fille's need for exotic stimulation. However, at the end, as if to explain the obsession with this woman that has overwhelmed his every moment since meeting her, des Annettes slips into this final, delirious stream of consciousness: "Who is she? An Asiatic perhaps? Mostly likely an eastern Jewess. Yes, a Jewess. I am convinced she is a Jewess. But why? Yes, why indeed? I do not know!" (CSS 414-15; CN 2:447).²⁹ These ravings reflect the link between "threatening" women and "degenerate races" that the theories of Otto Weininger would systematize in Sex and Character at the turn of the century, views that "simply updated and made more fashionably diabolical what had already become a commonplace about the inherently dependent nature of woman" (Dijkstra 221).

La fille du sable

This fascination, even the imperious obsession with what is deemed to be the exotic, oriental object of desire finds expression in the third strategy of "othering" in Maupassant's tales set in North Africa where he made three trips during the 1880s.³⁰ Even the titles of these tales of la fille du sable, "Marroca" (1882), "Châli" (1884), and especially "Allouma" (1889), suggest Maupassant's need to designate exoticism and alterity onomastically. However, this tendency is not isolated from the fiction and art of the author's period (cf. Said 166-97; Dijkstra 112-18), not even from "the whole history of European colonialism" (Behdad, "Eroticized" 122). Nor is this "orientalist desire" (cf. Behdad) exceptional in Maupassant's fiction, since one of Maupassant's earliest works, A la Feuille de Rose. Maison Turque, "illustrates how the harem conceit was used in pornography to signal a place where the phallus is fully mythified as a super-performative" (Apter, "Female Trouble" 210). And in the middle of his lengthy nautical reverie, Sur l'eau, Maupassant imagines the delight of living, like the protagonist of "L'Épingle," far from society, "in one of these countries of the Orient," served by "handsome black slaves," and entertained by "five spouses from five parts of the world, who would bring me the savor of the blossoming feminine beauty of all races" (132-34).

Moreover, each of the aforementioned tales contains various thematic traits developed elsewhere: "Marroca" depicts, first, a woman caught unaware and framed within nature by the insistent male gaze while bathing, as in "La Petite Roque." Following this scene of the gaze is a distinct variation of marital relations in the form of Marroca's uniquely forceful mode of understanding "conjugal duties, love and hospitality" (CSS 582; CN 1:376) by implicitly threat ening her husband with a hatchet in order to assert her right to keep a lover.³¹ In "Châli," the harem of pre-pubescent girls recalls not only "La Petite Roque" through Maupassant's continued interest, as Forestier points out, in "the delicate body of the child-woman" [le corps gracile de la fillette-femme (CN 2:1340)], but also "Les Soeurs Rondoli," through the fantasy of a visiting male's temporary sensual attachment without obligation to the "naturally" solicitous female children. In "Allouma," the Arab fille who herself dares to exercise the prerogative of the art of rupture is a direct descendent of the Parisienne, Jeanne de Limours from "L'Épingle," especially in terms of the framed narrator's obsession with this woman, manifested in "Allouma" by his willingness to forgive everything for the sake of more pleasure since, as he pronounces finally, "where women are concerned, one must either forgive …or ignore" (CSS 1263; CN 2:1117).

What makes these tales important from the critical perspective that I have developed is the radical discourse by which the homodiegetic (and framed, in "Châli" and "Allouma") narrators experience the eponymous women.³² For the tales that the narrators relate "between men" situate the female objects of their gaze and desire as racially "other," specifically it terms of their animality. While the device certainly occurs elsewhere, e.g., la Roque's "animal cry" emitted upon discovering her murdered daughter, the narrators all seem fixated upon these colonized women as belonging to a species distinctly different from humans. Not only does Marroca's body suggest "something of the animal," thus making her "a sort of inferior yet magnificent being" (CSS 579; CN 1:371), even her speech contains animal traits. Consider, for example, the manner in which she explains why she wants the narrator to sleep at her home in her husband's absence (omitted from translation): "When you are no longer here, I will think of it. And when I kiss my husband, it will seem to me to be you" [Quand tu ne seras plus là, j'y penserai. Et quand j'embrasserai mon mari, il me semblera que ce sera toi]. The narrator emphasizes the distinctive traits of her statements: "And the rrrai and the rrra took on in her voice the familiar rumblings of thunder" [Et les rrrai et le rrra prenaient en sa voix des grondements de tonnerres familiers (CN 1:372)]. In "Châli," the "naturally" savage Indian prince, who is the traveler/narrator's host, offers the royal gift of a pre-pubescent harem, "the herd of children" (CSS 75; CN 2:88), "little human animals" (CSS 76; CN 2:89), "a pack of kittens" (CSS 76; CN 2:90). In contrast, the fillette chosen by the traveler "to become truly my woman" [ma femme pour de vrai] is consistently reified as "a little statue of ancient ivory" (CN 2:89; omitted from translation), with "her little sphinx's head" (CSS 76; CN 2:90), with the "hieratic pose of sacred stat ues" (CSS 76; CN 2:90). Yet, all of the activities of the narrator and the harem members are surrounded and observed by tamed apes of the prince's compound, providing a suggestive metonymic resonance to the visitor's reminiscences.

The conditions of sensual deprivation of the framed narrator in "Allouma," Monsieur Auballe, "haunted by the lure of the female" (CSS 1252) [ce goût de la femme (CN 2:1100)], prepares his readiness to accept the Algerian "girl with the face of a statue" (CSS 1252) [fille au visage d'idole (CN 2:1101)] that his manservant introduces into the master's dwelling. His examination of her features includes such racist reflections as "she had an unusual face: with regular, refined features with a slightly animal expression, but mystical like that of a Buddha. Her thick lips … pointed to a slight mixture of Negro blood, although her hands and arms were irreproachably white" (CSS 1253; CN 2:1101; my emphasis). Later, the narrator expresses his general distaste for "the young women of this primitive continent…. They are too close to human animality, their hearts are too rudimentary, their feelings are too poorly refined to waken in our souls the sentimental exaltation that is the poetry of love" (CSS 1256; CN 2:1107). Still later, as Allouma spo radically disappears into her nomadic wanderings and then returns to the narrator, he explains his love for her: despite his earlier desire to punish her disappearance "as I would have thrashed a disobedient dog," he admits, "I loved her, in fact, rather as one might love a very rare animal, a dog or a horse that one could not replace. She was a wonderful, a delightful animal, but no more, in the form of a woman." And he concludes, "I can hardly describe what a gulf separated our souls, although perhaps our hearts came into contact at times and responded to the touch. She was a pleasant object in my house and in my life, an extremely agreeable habit to which I had become attached and which appealed to the carnal man in me, the one with only physical senses" (CSS 1261; CN 2:1114-15).³³

We must be suspicious, however, of these seemingly dispassionate descriptions, all the more so since they accompany abundant evidence of the effects of Allouma's alluring power. The narrator's reminiscence of their first encounter reveals not only the contradictions in his own responses, but also the obsessive force of her powers of attraction in terms of the imminent struggle by which l'hommefille is always threatened:

Her eyes, burning with the desire to bewitch, with that need of conquest that imparts a feline fascination to the immodest gaze of a woman, appealed to me, captivated me, robbed me of all power of resistance, and roused me to an impetuous passion. It was a short, silent and violent struggle carried on through the medium of the eyes alone, the eternal struggle between the primitive man and woman, in which man is always conquered. (CSS 1253; CN 2:1101-2)

This emphasis on the fundamental contradiction in the relations between l'homme-fille and the vraie fille points to an inner turmoil with which the framed narrator of "Allouma" simply cannot come to terms, the "left hand," says Didier Coste, that does not to speak "to the right."³⁴ When asked finally by the framing narrator if he would take her back, Monsieur Auballe's brief answer reveals these contradictory impulses: "The wicked girl!" [sale fille], says the conquering male, the man of Law and Reason. But then, "Yet I should be very glad all the same" (CSS 1263) [Cela me ferait plaisir tout de même (CN 2:1117)], responds the conquered male, caught in the grips of the war-machine against which l'homme-fille and all his strategic defenses cannot resist, except to "keep them all" in the contradictory, yet complementary, solution of the art of rupture.

While the contemporary resisting reader will no doubt see through the sexist and racist strategies that Maupassant deploys in these tales, the reader must still be attentive to the nuances created, and the narrative duplicity imposed, by the thematics of ethnic and racial "othering" and by the use of embedded narration that structures most of these tales on different narrative levels. From the perspective of recent analyses of "orientalism" (Said) and "orientalist desire" (Behdad), the art of rupture operates fully in these tales through the depiction of oriental sexuality that serves a simultaneous, dual function: to contain the effects of the threatening excess and danger posed by the seductive attraction to the oriental "other," yet also to offer "a simulacrum for the European domination and colonization of Asia and Africa, since [the fantasm of the harem] also embodied an oppressive power structure of the master-slave type" (Behdad, "Eroticized" 124). Indeed, the title of one of Maupassant's earliest creative efforts, the licentious A la Feuille de Rose. Maison Turque, includes at once a direct reference to the ultimate site of exotic "otherness," an "oriental" brothel, and an oblique homage paid to the final scene of Flaubert's L'Éducation sentimentale, i.e., the adventure at la Turque's establishment presented retrospectively in the reminiscences of the aging Frédéric and Deslauriers, an event that represented "the very best" days of their youth (Flaubert 2:456-57).³⁵

Moreover, the explicit circumstances of this play's mise-en-scène, Maupassant's and his young comrades' cross-dressing as prostitutes and engaging in their trade with successive customers, point to the more subtle narrative and discursive strategies that the author subsequently deploys. I refer to the formal basis that the framed tale lends to the implicit homosocial bonding "between men," as narrative and discursive processes through which the appetites of characters and narrators (and even duplicitous readers) are propelled verbally and carnally toward more such mutually stimulating intercourse. These strategies function, then, as effective tactics of engagement in the art of rupture, through the narrative repetition of "othering," yet exchanging tales among hommes-filles. Such exchange again raises questions about the implicit "hommo-sexuality" in Maupassant's works (to borrow a neologism from Irigaray). We have confronted this process not merely in tales of homosocial bonding, like "Les Soeurs Rondoli," but especially in the foremost tale that exposes Maupassant's horror of, yet fascination with, the other and the same, in the lesbianism of "La Femme de Paul."³⁶ The homosocial/hommo-sexual specularity implied in these preceding tales of the socio-sexual war-machine provides, then, new grounds for rereading other networks of Maupassant's tales….

Notes

¹ Two other "species" described in "L'Homme-fille," found at "our Chamber of Deputies" and newspapers, are the special targets of Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (cf. Donaldson-Evans, "Harlot's Apprentice" 620-24).

² See Lehman (227-29), for a structuralist typology of narrative frames in Maupassant's tales.

³ This has been the critical approach of choice; see Vial ("La Vénus vénale," Faits 231-41) as well as Alvado ("L'Amour vénal" 47-72), and Lecarme-Tarbone ("Enigme"). Edmond de Goncourt's expression, "les amours vénais," appears in the preface to La fille Elisa (qtd. Alvado 48).

⁴ Chambers distinguishes "narratives that focus on their own status as narration," i.e., self-designating, often through narrational embedding, and "narratives that historically have tended to background their status as narrative act so as to focus attention on their content," i.e., duplicitous (Story 32-33). However, Chambers is careful to note that self-designating narratives, "although open as to their status as narrative, tend to be situationally duplicitous, their openness as narrative coinciding with seductive programs" (Story 217-18). In my own use of the term duplicitous, I identify this trait generally with the art of rupture so that all narrators are, in a broad sense, duplicitous.

⁵ It is clear from the explanation of her reasons for leaving Rouen that Boule de suif did not share her "house full of provisions" with anyone, and certainly not with a Prussian (CSS 9; CN 1:96). As Corbin notes regarding femmes galantes, "All these women operated in isolation, at home, at whatever times suited them, whether they lived in an apartment, which was generally the case, or in a townhouse, as the wealthiest of them did. Their clientele was exclusively composed of rich men, foreign aristocrats, grands bourgeois of finance or industry, members of the Parisian bonne bourgeoisie, or rich provincials who specialized in immoral women on the decline. As good courtesans, the femmes galantes exercised choice and were able, therefore, to maintain the illusion with which they surrounded themselves" (Women for Hire 133).

⁶ Corbin notes, "Threatened in its very health, the bourgeoisie was also threatened in its fortune. The mangeardes (women who 'eat up' men's money) … are now described as the terror of bourgeois mothers, who will look back fondly to the days when their sons were content to frequent the maisons de tolérance. The femmes galantes and all the unregistered prostitutes are partly responsible for the 'extraordinary mobility of money' which threatens the most apparently stable positions…. The disorderliness of vice, at once the cause and symbol of social disorder, was, by its essence, what haunted the regulationists most" (Women for Hire 24). Corbin cites Maxime Du Camp's "La prostitution" (in his 1872 Paris, ses organes, ses fonctions et sa vie, vol. 3, 116).

⁷ Other tales employ the brothel as secondary narrative focus, e.g., "Les Vingt-cinq Francs de la supérieure" ["The Mother Superior's Twenty-five Francs"], and as a supportive function, e.g., as source of fortune, even of a curious respectability ("L'Ami Patience" ["A Way to Wealth"]), and of male potency ("Le Moyen de Roger" ["Roger's Method"]). While "Le Port" ["In Port"] is also set in a Marseille maison inhabited presumably by filles soumises, the focus of the tale leads to the discovery of incest between a brother, the sailor Celestin Duclos, and his sister, Françoise, who only recognize each other's identity after sexual relations. Another tale in which incest, between father and daughter, is discovered after the act, "L'Ermite" ["The Hermit"] presents another form of unregistered prostitution, the femme de brasserie, the barmaid who serves with no legal difficulties within an established workplace with a usually fixed clientele (Corbin, Women for Hire 168-71). Of course, Maupassant's very first production is set in a maison, the mise-en-scène of the licentious A la Feuille de Rose. Maison Turque.

⁸ Referring to "La Maison Tellier" as an example of how the hierarchy within provincial maisons de tolérance is less subtle than in Paris, Corbin concludes, "This literary example, like the typology pertaining to the capital, is a good illustration of the influence of dominant modes of social life, since the bourgeois salon and the popular café were the models on which these establishments had been based" (Women for Hire 60).

⁹ As Corbin emphasizes with specific reference to "La Maison Tellier," "The brothel became a place of escape, a place to get away from one's ordinary life, a place where one could make up for the austerity of life at home. There, new forms of sociability were developed between the petty-bourgeois men of the area and a society of women who, in a way, helped to refine their sensibility as well as their sensuality" (126-27). Maupassant fruitfully plays upon the word maison (house) in "Une soirée" ["The Noncommissioned Officer"]: a merchant having misunderstood the type of maison sought by a visiting quartermaster on leave, the latter faithfully follows the directions received and produces a marvelously embarrassing effect among the town's bourgeois elite.

¹⁰ Donaldson-Evans also points out that "the rapprochement between church and brothel is in fact a leitmotif in Maupassant's work" (A Woman's Revenge 84-86), e.g., in "Conflits pour rire," "Le Saut du berger," and "Le Lit"; and in "Le Marquis de Fumerol," the eponymous character's death-bed caress, intended for one of two filles sitting at bed-side, is interpreted by the receiver, his sister (and the framed narrator's mother), as a sign of religious conversion in extremis. See Jean Paris's exhaustive analysis of the generative disjunction of bordelléglise ("La Maison Tellier"), and MacNamara's study ("Feminity") of "La Maison Tellier" as a locus of feminine enclosure. On space in Maupassant's novels, see Giacchetti (Espaces).

¹¹ In a blatant act of censorship, the translation at this point omits two full paragraphs that describe the distribution of holy communion to the children, clearly an essential moment in the tale, as well as the reference to the host held by the priest and his stammering statement. In the subsequent paragraphs, references to his distributing communion "in a state of overexcitement," his lengthy opening statement on feeling the presence of the Holy Ghost, and his brief closing blessing are also omitted (CSS 54-55; CN 1:274-75).

¹² "Conte de Noël" ["A Miracle"] provides a strange complement to the mystical effects of religious experience, since the Eucharist is employed as an instrument of exorcism; see Donaldson-Evans ('"Nuit de Noël'" 70-71).

¹³ See also "Le Modèle" ["The Artist's Wife"] for the repercussions of a fatal passion between a susceptible male artist and a demoiselle. On the relationship between the painter and feminine sensibilities, see Bailbé.

¹⁴ On the contes de canotage, see Delvaille. Although "Une Partie de campagne" ["A Country Excursion"] might be considered a tale of the canotiers, I will include it in chapter 6 among the tales of conjugal relations.

¹⁵ Having successfully seduced the enigmatic, taciturn Italienne, Francesca Rondoli, whom he met while en route by train to visit the cities of Italy in 1874 with his companion, Paul Pavilly, Jouvenet remains in Genoa with Francesca, as well as with the reluctant Pavilly, for three weeks rather than continue the voyage. Succumbing eventually to Pavilly's incessant urgings, Jouvenet and he abruptly return to Paris, but the following year, traveling to Italy alone, Jouvenet attempts to locate Francesca at the address that she had given him, where he encounters her mother who welcomes him into her home. Explaining that Francesca is now happily situated with a painter in Paris, Signora Rondoli suggests that since he is alone in Genoa, Jouvenet accept the company of Carlotta, the eldest of three remaining daughters. Doing so, then leaving her behind after two weeks of (elided) enjoyment, Jouvenet recalls a final thought, "with a certain uneasiness, mingled with hope, that Mme Rondoli has two more daughters" (CSS 219; CN 2:161).

¹⁶ See Corbin (The Foul and the Fragrant), on the "new calculus of olfactory pleasure" and the "perfumes of intimacy" in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France (71-85 and 176-99, respectively).

¹⁷ See also the reflections of Buci-Glucksmann, following Walter Benjamin, on the "political economy of the prostitute(d) body" (117-24).

¹⁸ On "Yvette," see Danger ("La transgression" as well as, generally, Pulsion et désir) and Lecarme-Tabone ("La relation mère-fille"). In another tale of sexual economics recounted "between men," "La Baronne" ["Bric-à-Brac"], the framed narrator, the merchant Boisrené, describes his efforts on behalf of the Baroness Samoris, "a kept woman capable of making herself respected by her lovers more than if she did not sleep with them" (CSS 783; CN 2:909), to help her raise sufficient funds to maintain an economic level suitable for arranging an attractive marriage for her daughter. By himself furnishing her with a "Christ of the Renaissance" to sell at a profit on his behalf from her home, Boisrené unwittingly provides the Baroness with the proper tool to reimburse him and, more importantly, to attract wealthy suitors interested more in usage, i.e., of the objet d'amour, than in exchange, i.e., of the objet d'art, both of which, at the end of the tale, are "still for sale … my Christ …" (CSS 785; CN 2:912).

¹⁹ For a study of the role of food in this tale, see Donaldson-Evans's comparison between "Nuit de Noël," published in the Gil Blas the day after Christmas 1882, and the more respectable "Conte de Noël," published the previous day in Le Gaulois; see also Donaldson-Evans (A Woman's Revenge 52-53).

²⁰ Corbin points out that just as "the most common baptismal names—Marie, Jeanne, Louise, Joséphine, Anne—do not appear on the list of pseudonyms," the most common pseudonyms—"Carmen, Mignon, Suzanne, Renée, Andrée, Marcelle, Simone, Olga, Violette, Vyette, Paulette—hardly appear at all on the list of given names" (Women for Hire 77). Furthermore, besides revealing the influence of literature and musical theater on determining the choice of pseudonyms, the purpose of names ending in -ette, 65 percent of the pseudonyms, "was probably to emphasize youth." Yet, "none of the pseudonyms has a specifically erotic character of its own, and none suggests sexual specialties or perversions" (Women for Hire 77). See also Valette's typology of proper names.

²¹ Another perspective on onomastics in Maupassant's work is provided by Philippe Bonnefis ("Catoptrique du Nom").

²² A complementary onomastic analysis would be necessary for another "Madeleine," Madeleine Forestier in Bel-Ami, so succinctly described in Maupassant's chronique "Politiciennes" [Women politicians] (Chr 1:316-20).

²³ While not explicitly identified as juive, the prostitute insoumise in Bel-Ami, Rachel, resembles her namesake: "She was a large brunette with skin whitened by make-up, with dark eyes, lengthened, emphasized by eyeliner, framed under enormous artificial eyelashes" (Romans 208).

²⁴ As Zeldin notes, "Anti-Semitism was an expression of the ignorance of the modern world that the [Catholic] church suffered from in the mid-nineteenth century rather than a close observation of [the Jewish community]. The anti-Semitic work that the aristocrat [H. R.] Gougenot des Mousseaux (commander of the Order of Pius IX) published in 1869 [Le Juïf le judaïsme et la judaïsation des peuples chrétiens] was inspired by the belief that Jews were cabalistic worshipers of Satan" (2:1037). See Zeldin on anticlericalism and anti-Semitism in the late nineteenth century (2:1036-39), Corbin on the place of Jewish prostitutes in the white slave trade (Women for Hire 275-98), Willa Silverman on anti-Semitism and occultism in fin de siècle France, and for a general reference and bibliography, see Berkovitz.

²⁵ Forestier comments: "La Juive, based on a libretto by Scribe, is an opera by Fromental Halévy, whose daughter, widow of Georges Bizet, remarried the lawyer Straus and maintained a literary salon attended by Maupassant which was the model for the salon of the duchess of Guermantes in Proust's work" (CN 2:1511).

²⁶ Schmidt qualifies as "false and cruel" a comment in the Goncourt memoirs, "Jewish society has been deadly for Maupassant and Bourget. It has turned these two intelligent beings into literary dandies, with all the pettiness of this race" (Journal 4:125 [22 July 1891], qtd. in Schmidt 115).

²⁷ See Forestier's commentary on the historicopolitical context of Maupassant's Jewish characters Walter (Bel-Ami, 1885) and Andermatt (Romans 1328-34; 1434-39). See also Hausmann who provides a thorough examination of the portrayal of Jews in nineteenth-century French literature.

²⁸ Forestier maintains that, "with Andermatt, the writer is not settling a score with the Jewish race, but is painting an actual figure of contemporary France. It is still 'the humble truth'" (Romans 1439). See an earlier example of Maupassant's depiction of Jews in his adaptation of the legend of the Juif errant (Wandering Jew), "Le Père Judas" ["Father Judas"] (Le Gaulois, 28 February 1883).

²⁹ On "L'Inconnue" see Christopher Lloyd's detailed analysis.

³⁰ From these trips resulted not only fiction, but chroniques and two books of essays, Au Soleil (1884) and La Vie errante (1890). See especially Maupassant's description of Algerian filles in "Province d'Alger" in Au Soleil (54-91) and reminiscences of visits to brothels in Djelfa and Tunis in the 1889 chronique "Les Africaines" (Chr 3:367-77), partially reprinted in the chapter of La Vie errante entitled "Tunis" (159-68). On Maupassant's chroniques, see Chessex (18-22), Marsigli, and Delaisement (Guy de Maupassant, vol. 2, 41-45, including a selection of chroniques coloniales [211-23]; and "Les chroniques coloniales").

³¹ As the "daughter of Spanish colonists" and wife of a French functionary in the Algerian town of Bougie, Marroca is not, strictly speaking, a fille du sable, but the circumstances in which the narrator finds her, as well as their subsequent relations, demonstrate abundantly her complete adaptation to the customs of native women, at least as related by l'homme-fille.

³² The original versions of "Marroca" (entitled "Marauca") and "Châli," both published in the Gil Blas, contain significantly different frames and details from the versions adopted in volumes. The original of "Châli" is of particular interest since the framing narrator's depiction of the after-dinner discussion that precedes the tale, recounted by the old admiral de La Vallée, includes women interlocutors who debate with male counterparts diverse literary questions that treat l'amour mondain (CN 2:1340-42).

³³ This description of animality recalls another tale, "Boitelle," in which a "young négresse" is described, in the indirect mode, as "a little black animal" [un petit animal noir], and her marriage with the son Antoine Boitelle strikes his parents "as if he had proposed a union with the Devil" (CSS 1123) [comme s'il leur avait proposé une union avec le Diable (CN 2:1088-89)].

³⁴ Coste studies how "the primary structure of the interior separation of the subject" is figured in "Allouma" not only in topographical and cultural terms, but also in lexical, syntactic, and rhetorical traits. See also Donaldson-Evans's discussion of "Allouma" (A Woman's Revenge 115-19).

³⁵ Let us recall that Flaubert attended the second representation of this play and appreciated it greatly for its "freshness" (Feuille de Rose 23-30; Goncourt, Journal 2:1189).

³⁶ As Irigaray argues, "So there will be no female homosexuality, just a hommo-sexuality in which woman will be involved in the process of specularizing the phallus, begged to maintain the desire for the same that man has, and will ensure at the same time, elsewhere and in complementary and contradictory fashion, the perpetuation in the couple of the pole of 'matter'" (Speculum 103, 127).

Bibliography

[Selected] Works by Maupassant

Chroniques. Ed. Hubert Juin. 3 vols. Paris: U.G.E., 1980.

The Complete Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant. Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955.

Contes et nouvelles. Ed. Louis Forestier. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1974-79.

Selected Critical Works on Maupassant

…..

Alvado, Hervé. Maupassant ou l'amour réaliste. Paris: La pensée universelle, 1980….

Bailbé, Joseph-Marc. "Le peintre et la sensibilité féminine chez Maupassant." In Forestier, Maupassant et l'écriture 75-85….

Bonnefis, Philippe. "La Catoptrique du Nom." In La Chose Capitale. Ed. Philippe Bonnefis and Alain Buisine. Lille: PU de Lille, 1981. 175-208….

Chessex, Jacques. Maupassant et les autres. Paris: Éditions Ramsay, 1981….

Coste, Didier. "Allouma, ou ce que la main gauche n'a pas dit à la main droite." French Forum 13.2 (1988): 229-42.

Crouzet, Michel. "Une rhétorique de Maupassant?" Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France 80.2 (1986): 233-61….

[Danger, Pierre.] Pulsion et désir dans les romans et nouvelles de Guy de Maupassant. Paris: Nizet, 1993.

——. "La transgression dans l'oeuvre de Maupassant." In Forestier Maupassant et l'écriture 151-59….

[Delaisement, Gérard.] Guy de Maupassant, le témoin, l'homme, le critique. 2 vols. Orléans-Tours: CRDP de l'Académie de Tours, 1984….

Delvaille, Bernard. "Bords de Seine." Magazine littéraire 310 (1993): 34-36….

Dickson, Colin. "Théorie et pratique de la clôture: l'exemple de Maupassant dans 'La Maison Tellier'." The French Review 64.1 (1990): 42-53….

[Donaldson-Evans, Mary.] "Doctoring History: Maupassant's 'Un Coup d'état'." Nineteenth-Century French Studies 16:3-4 (1988): 351-60….

——. "The Harlot's Apprentice: Maupassant's Bel-Ami" The French Review 60.5 (1987): 616-25….

——. "'Nuit de Noël' and 'Conte de Noël': Ironic Diptych in Maupassant's Work." The French Review 54.1 (1980): 66-77.

——. A Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction. Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986….

[Forestier, Louis.] ed. Maupassant et l'écriture. Paris: Nathan, 1993….

[Giacchetti, Claudine.] Maupassant. Espaces du roman. Geneva: Droz, 1993….

Lecarme, Jacques, and Bruno Vercier, eds. Maupassant: Miroir de la nouvelle. Saint-Denis: PU de Vincennes, 1988.

Lecarme-Tabone, Éliane. "Enigme et prostitution." In Lecarme and Vercier 111-23.

——. "La relation mère-fille dans l'oeuvre de Maupassant." In Forestier, Maupassant et l'écriture 87-98….

Lehman, Tuula. Transitions savantes et dissimulées: Une étude structurelle des contes et nouvelles de Guy de Maupassant. Helsinki: The Finnish Society of Sciences and Letters, 1990….

Lloyd, Christopher. "Maupassant et la femme castratrice: lectures de 'L'Inconnue'." In Forestier, Maupassant et l'écriture 99-108.

MacNamara, Matthew. "Femininity and Enclosure in Maupassant's Nouvelles." In L'Hénaurme Siècle. A Miscellany of Essays on Nineteenth-Century French Literature. Ed. Will L. McLendon. Heidelberg: Carl Winter Universitätsverlag, 1984. 155-65….

Marsigli, Marie-José Hoyet. "Paesaggio 'fantastique' e paesaggio 'féerique' nei 'Carnets de Voyage' di Guy de Maupassant." Bérénice 5.12 (1984): 153-70….

Moger, Angela S. "Narrative Structure in Maupassant: Frames of Desire." PMLA 100.3 (1985): 315-27….

Paris, Jean. "La Maison Tellier." In Lisible/Visible: essai de critique générative. Paris: Seghers/Laffont, 1978. 51-92….

Schmidt, Albert-Marie. Maupassant par lui-même. Paris: Seuil, 1962….

Troyat, Henri. Maupassant. Paris: Flammarion, 1989.

Valette, Bernard. "Le nom des personnages dans les contes de Maupassant." In Forestier, Maupassant et l'écriture 207-18….

Vial, André. Faits et significations. Paris: Nizet, 1973….

Other Critical and Literary Works

…..

Apter, Emily. "Female Trouble in the Colonial Harem." differences 4.1 (1992): 205-24….

Behdad, Ali. "The Eroticized Orient: Images of the Harem in Montesquieu and his Precursors." Stanford French Review 13.2-3 (1989): 109-26….

Berkovitz, Jay R. The Shaping of Jewish Identity in Nineteenth-Century France. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1989.

Bernheimer, Charles. Figures of Ill Repute: Representing Prostitution in Nineteenth-Century France. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989….

Buci-Glucksmann, Christine. La raison baroque: De Baudelaire à Benjamin. Paris: Galilée, 1984….

[Chambers, Ross.] Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984….

Corbin, Alain. The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1986. Trans. of Le miasme et la jonquille. Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1982.

——. Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1990. Trans. of Filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et prostitution (19e et 20e siècles). Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1978….

Dijkstra, Bram. Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-siècle Culture. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986….

[Flaubert, Gustave.] Oeuvres. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1952….

Hausmann, Frank-Rutger. "Juden and Judentum in der französischen Literatur des 19. Jahrhunderts." Conditio Judaica: Judentum, Antisemitismus und deutschsprächige Literatur vom 18. Jahrhunderts bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg. Ed. Hans Otto Horch and Horst Denkler. Vol. 2. Tubingen: Max Wiemeyer Verlag, 1989. 52-71. 2 vols….

Irigaray, Luce. Speculum of the Other Woman. Trans. Gillian C. Gill. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Trans. of Speculum de l'autre femme. Paris: Minuit, 1974.

——. This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. Trans. of Ce sexe qui n'en est pas un. Paris: Minuit, 1977….

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Random House, 1978….

Silverman, Willa Z. "Anti-Semitism and Occultism in fin-de-siècle France: Three 'Initiates'." In Modernity and Revolution in Late Nineteenth-Century France. Ed. Barbara T. Cooper and Mary Donaldson-Evans. Newark: U of Delaware P, 1992. 155-63….

[Zeldin, Theodore.] Intellect, Taste and Anxiety. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1977. Vol. 2. of France, 1848-1945. 1973-77. 4 vols.