SOURCE: "Women and Religion," in A Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction, French Forum, Publishers, 1986, pp. 82–108.

The disaffection for traditional religion that was prevalent at the end of the 19th century in France had many sources, literary, philosophical, scientific, historical. France's sobering defeat at the hands of the Prussians in the War of 1870 shattered French self-confidence; the horrors of the Commune even further shocked the nation and plunged her into an emotional depression from which she did not fully emerge until the end of the century. Marked by a resurgent interest in Romanticism's dark side,¹ the literature of this period reflects the pessimism of the day, a faithless pessimism that found the roots of its disbelief in the determinism of Darwin and Taine, the cynicism of Schopenhauer and the tradition of blasphemy going back to Sade.

A superficial reading of Maupassant's work suggests that he was in perfect step with the fin-de-siècle skepticism preached by his contemporaries. The profanatory spirit in which he makes use of religious themes and décors conforms precisely to what Jean Pierrot terms "le catholicisme esthétique" (L'Imaginaire décadent, 106) of the decade beginning in 1880, that is, the use by non-believing writers of religious subjects solely for artistic effect, for the pittoresque. And yet a closer analysis of Maupassant's treatment of religious themes reveals unsuspected complexities, as well as a contempt for the concept of God which cannot be traced uniquely to the "hors-texte" of his era, but which is closely bound to the role played by women in his fictional universe.

From the beginning Maupassant's women enjoy a privileged (one is tempted to say "sacred") relationship with the Divinity. With few exceptions ("La Reine Hortense,"² la comtesse de Brémontal in L'Angélus), their faith knows no limits and their naturals expansiveness no greater outlet than that offered by religion. From this point of view prostitutes and nuns are indistinguishable; whether a woman gives herself to Christ or to men is of no importance, since it is generally the result of an accident of nature (in the case of the elder nun in "Boule de suif," for example, a disfiguring smallpox is clearly responsible for the woman's "vocation"); whatever path she chooses to follow, a woman is guided by her emotions. It is this "éternelle tendresse" (I, 595) that I'abbé Marignan despises and fears in women and that seems to him to be an integral part of their emotional make-up. Even nuns are possessed of it:

Il la sentait dans leurs regards plus mouillés de piété que les regards des moines, dans leurs extases où leur sexe se mêlait, dans leurs élans d'amour vers le Christ, qui l'indignaient parce que c'était de l'amour de femme, de l'amour charnel…. ("Clair de lune," I, 595)

While it is obvious that Maupassant intended to ridicule his misogynistic priest, who, "port[ant] bien son nom de bataille" (I, 594), looked upon woman as the Enemy, a threat to his virtue, a blemish in God's otherwise flawless creation,³ it is also true that the portrait of women as irrational creatures whose "âme aimante" governs all of their relationships, divine as well as human, is a cliché of the early work and is intimately connected with what is seen as woman's "piety." The legacy of Flaubert and the Goncourts is plain here, and, although Maupassant stops short of portraying woman's "weakness" for the trappings of religion as maliciously as had the latter in their Madame Gervaisais (1869), he is not above ridiculing what he sees as a feminine debility. The letter-writer of "La Relique" (1882), Henri Fontal, cutting through to the heart of women's "religious" sensibility, recognizes it as a purely emotional need, illogical, more akin to superstition than to faith. Having persuaded his fiancée Gilberte of the authenticity of a relic (which is in reality nothing but a piece of mutton bone) by telling her that he personally had stolen it from a châsse in the Cologne cathedral, he is amused by her reaction. Instead of expressing horror at the profanation that she believes he has committed, she falls into his arms, thrilled by his courage, even more thrilled to possess what she believes to be a bone chip from one of the 11,000 virgins, despite—perhaps even because of—the way in which it was acquired:

J'avais commis, pour elle, un sacrilège. J'avais volé; j'avais violé une église, violé une châsse, violé et volé des reliques sacrées. Elle m'adorait pour cela; me trouvait tendre, parfait, divin. Telle est la femme…. (I, 592)

Fontal invites the reader to marvel at the contradictions in the feminine nature that are illustrated here. A "pious" young woman who condones—even rewards—sacrilege, Gilberte is typical of early heroines, passionately devout, yet flagrantly amoral.

This absence of scruples in even the most "religious" of Maupassant's heroines is everywhere apparent. Cogny has pointed out that, according to a common prejudice of the period, "un homme qui pratique est un sot, et une femme qui ne pratique pas une gourgandine" (Maupassant, 41). The corollary of this statement—the woman who does practice her religion is virtuous—does not apply to the world contained in Maupassant's fiction, where harlots are endowed with a religious fervor far exceeding that of most women, and for good reason. If the Goncourts had bequeathed to Maupassant the notion that religion satisfied a woman's sexual needs, or, put somewhat less crudely, that woman's sexuality and her religiosity had a common source ("La religion est une partie du sexe de la femme," they had proclaimed in an 1857 entry to their Journal),⁴ Maupassant was quick to draw the obvious conclusion: the more "sexual" the woman, the greater her capacity for religious ecstasy. One has only to consider Boule de Suif, who derives immense satisfaction from prayer, or the prostitutes of "La Maison Tellier," whose uncontrollable weeping during a First Communion service gains an entire congregation and causes the priest to assert with considerable emotion that a miracle has taken place in his church:

Pendant que Jésus-Christ pénétrait pour la première fois dans le corps de ces petits, le Saint-Esprit, l'oiseau céleste, le souffle de Dieu, s'est abattu sur vous, s'est emparé de vous, vous a saisis, courbés comme des roseaux sous la brise. (I, 275)

It must have been with mirthful malice that Maupassant selected his priest's words, whose double-entendre brings to mind monstrous visions of Christ as rapist, the Holy Spirit as vulture and man not as roseau pensant, to use Pascal's image, but rather as a fragile reed battered by emotion in the "wind" of God's breath. The mockery that can be discerned at the lexical level is consistent with the symbolism of the narrative itself: the emotional frenzy into which the congregation has been thrown is not divinely, but humanly inspired, and the source of the inspiration is a prostitute whose reminiscences of childhood purity move her to tears. Inasmuch as their profession demands that they raise their customers to an orgasmic pitch of passion, in the communion scene the prostitutes have merely transferred from the physical to the emotional plane their role as allumeuses, and the renewed enthusiasm with which they undertake their normal duties later the same day appears not as alien, but as complementary to the contagious excitement they had felt in the church, maison de Dieu which is an obvious counterpart of the maison de passe in which the women work.⁵ To the communion wine thus corresponds the champagne offered gratis to all customers that evening. "Ça n'est pas tous les jours fête," explains the radiant madam in the story's closing line.

The rapprochement between church and brothel is in fact a leitmotif in Maupassant's work, "La Maison Tellier" being merely the first of several blasphemous identifications between the two. The following year (1882) saw the publication of "Conflits pour rire" in the Gil Blas. Here it is a priest who draws the analogy between church and bordello. Embarrassed by the rather explicit statue of Adam and Eve which adorns the portal of his country church and humiliated by the mocking laughter of passers-by, he reflects that in fact "son église portait au front un emblème de honte, comme un mauvais lieu" (I, 427). When dressing Adam fails as a permanent solution to the problem (for he is promptly undressed by one of the townspeople), the virginal young priest castrates him. The playful irreverence of this anecdote is but a thin disguise for the seriousness behind it: this country cleric is cut from the same cloth as the priest of "Le Saut du berger" (March 1882), whose frustrated sexuality led him from verbal to physical violence, from the cruel killing of a bitch that had just given birth to the murder of a couple discovered embracing in a shepherd's hut. According to Maupassant's clever formula, "une chose surtout le soulevait de colère et de dégoût: l'amour" (I, 378). Like Father Tolbiac of Une Vie, after whom he is modeled,⁶ this obsessed clergyman is tormented by his celibacy. And just as l'abbé Tolbiac is linked by antithesis to the indulgent abbé Picot, Maupassant's apparent taste for binary oppositions led him to create, one week after the publication of "Le Saut du berger," a curé for whom the dictum of chastity was certainly not to be taken seriously. Although the abbé Argence of "Le Lit" is present in the narrative only by implication, being the destinataire of several letters found sewn into the lining of a chasuble (thus playing the narratological role of narrataire insofar as the récit enchâssé is concerned),⁷ the compromising nature of the letters leaves no doubts as to this priest's "virtue." The first three, which "fixaient simplement des rendez-vous" (I, 382), are not transcribed; the fourth, which is a meditation upon the subject of the bed (whence the title) by the priest's temporarily bed-ridden mistress, brings to mind once again the relationship between the sacred and the profane. Although the maison de Dieu/maison de passe metaphor does not reappear here, it is clear that for the writer of the letter the bed, "symbole de la vie" (I, 384) and locus of the three essential acts of human existence (naissance, amour, mort), is possessed of a religious transcendence. "Tabernacle de la vie" (I, 383) in which one life becomes two, the bed itself seems to come to life when it sets the scene of "le délirant mystère d'amour," an embrace "faisant de deux êtres un seul" and giving to each an ineffable joy "qui descend en eux comme un feu dévorant et céleste." The

proliferation of religious terms in the description of the bed and the acts that are accomplished upon it prepares us for the parodical distortion of one of Catholicism's most important dogmas: "Hors l'Eglise point de salut" becomes "Rien n'est excellent hors du lit" (I, 384). The narrative irony is strong here, and the perspicacious reader will note that the épistolière, for whom "le lit, c'est l'homme," treats Christ's divinity with unconscious malice when she links it to the absence of a bed at two of the three basic moments of human existence, birth and death: "Notre Seigneur Jésus, pour prouver qu'il n'avait rien d'humain, ne semble pas avoir jamais eu besoin d'un lit. Il est né sur la paille et mort sur la croix, laissant aux créatures comme nous leur couche de mollesse et de repos" (I, 384). The heretical theology of this statement, which ignores Christ's humanity, brings into sharp relief the subtly blasphemous nature of this "meditation" and the false piety of the "meditator." The allusion at the beginning of the story to a "marchande à la toilette" is thus given meaning by what ensues, for her dual role (according to Forestier, I, 1408, she serves both as saleswoman of used clothing, jewelry, fabrics, etc., and as entremetteuse) is reflected by that of the letter, which, ostensibly a reverent meditation, is in fact (like the three which preceded it) an invitation to an amorous encounter, its perlocutionary aspect being unequivocal: "Venez me voir demain à trois heures, peut-être serai-je mieux et vous le pourrai-je montrer."

The notion of commerce associated with prostitution provides an important foundation upon which the church/brothel metaphor is sometimes built. Just as l'amour is a prostitute's bread and butter, for Maupassant's priests "la mort est un gagne-pain" (I, 446). The old peasant, Amable ("Le Père Amable"), is terrified of priests and never sets foot in church, which he regards as "une sorte d'immense maison de commerce dont les curés étaient les commis, commis sournois, rusés, dégourdis comme personne, qui faisaient les affaires du bon Dieu au détriment des campagnards" (II, 735). Amable's deprecatory view of priests and organized religion is typical of Maupassant's pre-1887 skeptics and free-thinkers, who for the most part regard clergy as money-grubbing hypocrites, "voleurs d'âmes … violeurs de consciences" ("Le Marquis de Fumerol," II, 811). Only when their own material welfare is at stake do such heroes align themselves with the church and its traditions ("Un Normand," "La Confession de Théodule Sabot").

Associated with many of Maupassant's heroines by their disgust of sexuality, early priests in particular are seen by the male protagonists as the enemy, the Other. Duroy's amusing comment in the Church of the Trinity to the priest who had just heard Virginie Walter's desperate confession and has thereby thwarted (temporarily at least) the young man's seduction strategy reflects this identification: "Si vous ne portiez point une jupe, vous, quelle paire de soufflets sur votre vilain museau!" ([Bel-Ami (B-A)], 411). Ironically, perhaps, the church becomes in Maupassant's work all things for all women. While the frigid ones can take the veil of religion ("elle … avait épousé Dieu, par dégoût des hommes," I, 445), the promiscuous ones can hide behind it, using as pretexts charitable activities in order to betray their husbands ("La Confession," "La Chambre II"); and the prostitutes can use religion as priests themselves do, soliciting customers in much the same way that the latter solicit converts, by appealing to their "spiritual" needs. Two stories, "La Baronne" (1887) and "Les Tombales" (1891), are exemplary in this respect.

In the first la baronne Samoris, a high society courtesan who attends Mass regularly and receives the sacraments "avec recueillement" (II, 909), goes to great lengths not to compromise herself for fear of jeopardizing her daughter's chances to marry well, but falls upon hard times. Unwilling to sell herself openly, she appeals to a close friend for a loan of 30,000 francs. The friend, an antique dealer and the story's principal narrator, decides instead to lend her an ivory statue of Christ dating from the 16th century, with the promise that he will give her address to appropriate clients who express an interest in seeing this precious objet d'art. Should she be successful in selling the Christ, 20,000 of the 50,000-franc selling price will be hers to keep. The antique dealer's ingenious idea does indeed save Madame Samoris from "degradation": after six months she is financially solvent enough to purchase the statue herself, upon condition that her friend will continue to send clients to her, "car il est encore à vendre … mon Christ" (II, 912). The desacralization—indeed, desecration—of a sacred icon could hardly be more obvious. This Christ, involuntary proxénète who, in an ironic reversal of the Biblical account of Mary Magdalene, makes it possible for this prostitute to continue the practice of her "profession," is on display in the chapel of Madame Samoris's daughter Isabelle: "C'était une sorte de boudoir pieux où brûlait une lampe d'argent devant le Christ … couché sur un lit de velours noir" (II, 911). To the sensuality of the setting corresponds the sybaritic comfort of the entire lodging, "une demeure confortable qui invitait à rester" (II, 912), where one detects the mingled fragrances of incense, flowers and perfume. The metaphoric identification between the carnal and the spiritual is nowhere more evident than in this story, bringing to mind once again the parallel established six years previously (in "La Maison Tellier") between the house of ill repute and the house of God.

Liturgical ornaments, characterized by "La Reine Hortense" as "de la marchandise à pleureurs" (I, 802), can clearly be exploited in other ways as well. Given the depths of amorality and egotism to which Maupassant's later heroines regularly sink, it is hardly unexpected to find in 1887 a woman violating the sanctity of a religious object.

In sum, however, Madame Samoris's profanation, dictated by need, is quite innocuous in itself, and Maupassant's treatment of the religious theme is patently derisive. The perverse exploitation of human emotion practiced by the charming prostitute of "Les Tombales" (1891), on the other hand, suggests a much darker view of the human female. Like clergymen who are envisioned by the dying Moiron as crows sent upon cadavers by a malicious God, the whore of this story is a friend of death, a "sépulcrale chasseresse" (II, 1245) who solicits in cemeteries rather than on sidewalks, gathering her customers from among the bereaved and the lonely. Her hypocrisy, her shameless exploitation of the grief of others, mirrors that of Maupassant's earlier priests and underscores her relationship with religion: for her, as for them, "la mort est un gagne-pain." From a relatively "innocent" complicity between women and priests in the early work (Jeanne consults l'abbé Picot about duping Julien into fathering another child in Une Vie) to the conscious use by the later heroines of religion's most persuasive schemes, from the redemptive heroine of "Le Mariage du lieutenant Laré" to the diabolical femme fatale of the later works, the growing depravity of Maupassant's heroine can also be measured by plotting on the chronological axis Maupassant's use of religious terminology in describing the male-female relationship. To do this, however, we must begin again at the beginning.

As with the aquatic imagery, one of the first things to strike the reader about the religious code in Maupassant's fiction is its versatility. Having briefly considered the role played by religion at the syntagmatic level of the plot, we now turn to religious metaphor to discover that it is brought into play primarily in portrayals of two sorts of love, filial and sexual. The false identification of the mother with the Virgin, with all that is holy and pure and irreproachable, finds its principal expression in Une Vie, "La Veillée" and Pierre et Jean, and offers an abundant source of such imagery. At her mother's wake Jeanne de Lamare has the consoling inspiration to read her mother's correspondence, "comme elle aurait fait d'un livre pieux" (Vie, 240). To do so would be to accomplish "un devoir délicat et sacré" (p. 240), and Jeanne begins to read the yellowing letters with filial tenderness and piety. Her horror upon discovering a packet of passionate love letters addressed to her mother by an old family friend is echoed six months later in "La Veillée," which recounts the same anecdote with modifications dictated by the exigencies of a different genre, the short story.⁸ Here it is a nun-daughter and a magistrate-son who read their mother's letters at her wake, an act the nun readily likens to "un chemin de la croix" (I, 447). As might be expected, their revulsion (unlike Jeanne's) gives way to a judgmental pose: they close the curtain upon their mother's bed, condemning her to a symbolic isolation.

Equally judgmental is Pierre of Pierre et Jean, whose "amour religieux pour sa mère" (p. 84) is based upon the illusion of her inviolable purity. When the truth regarding her youthful transgressions dawns upon him, he tries at first to reject it, accusing his jealousy for giving rise to his suspicions, examining his psyche "comme les dévots leur conscience" (p. 84). His slow movement from doubt to certainty is punctuated by periods of remorse and self-flagellation in which he inculpates his own egotism, placing his mother once again upon the pedestal from which his doubts had pulled her. Such scenes are encoded in religious symbolism:

Je suis fou, pensa-t-il, je soupçonne ma mère. Et un flot d'amour et d'attendrissement, de repentir, de prière et de désolation noya son cœur…. Oh! s'il avait pu la prendre en ses bras en ce moment, comme il l'eût embrassée, caressée, comme il se fût agenouillé pour demander grâce! (p. 104)

Increasingly moralistic as he becomes ever more certain of her perfidy, Pierre considers that it is he who has been betrayed, "volé dans son affection sacrée," "trompé dans son pieux respect" (p. 131). His outrage at his mother's betrayal is spent when he shares his discovery with his brother; after this tirade he is still tormented by a sense of injustice, but he turns his harsh judgment upon himself. Feeling great remorse for having revealed the terrible secret, Pierre "se jugeait odieux, malpropre, méchant" (p. 219). Madame Roland's impenitence (she does not regret for a moment her long liaison with Maréchal) thus carries with it the sting of irony: it is she who has flown in the face of social norms through her illicit affair, yet it is Pierre who is exiled from "society"; it is she who has "sinned," yet it is her son Pierre who is made to feel guilty. One may of course protest, and with reason, that Pierre is condemned precisely because of his self-righteous condemnation of others; one may also consider that from a psychoanalytical perspective Pierre is indeed guilty, his overreaction suggesting an abnormal love for his mother. The fact still remains that Pierre et Jean "demythifies" maternity and abolishes the distance between la mère and la femme between what Maupassant increasingly represents as their archetypes, the Virgin and the prostitute. The irreverent identification between the Virgin Mother and the fallen woman had, moreover, been explicit as early as 1882 in "Un Normand" and "Nuit de Noël."

Madame Roland's defensive stance (her deep sense of the propriety of her love affair with Maréchal) links her with many of Maupassant's heroines who readily transfer their religious sensibilities to the profane level of sexual love. Such heroines fall into two general categories: (1) those who indulge in a kind of "religious" eroticism, elevating their lovers to the status of the divine (such heroines are a phenomenon of the early work only) and (2) those to be found from beginning to end in Maupassant's literary production (but with important modifications) who confer divinity upon themselves, equating their lovers with worshippers. In the first group we find the archetypal bride evoked in "Voyage de noce." Engulfed by a feeling of immense tenderness during the magical days of her honeymoon, the newly married woman invests the man she has wed with divine attributes, placing all of her hopes in him: "Il est l'amour … il est l'espoir saisi; il est Celui à qui nous allons pouvoir nous dévouer, à qui nous nous sommes données; il est l'Ami, notre Maître, notre Seigneur, tout" (I, 510–11). In the case of the young bride the illusion does not last.

Unfaithful wives, on the other hand, bring to their extramarital affairs a religious fervor unequaled in its intensity, as "Une Passion" (1882) illustrates. When Madame Poinçot sacrifices her reputation and her previously unblemished virtue to a reluctant army officer with whom she falls deeply in love, it is in the spirit of a religious celebration, exalted, fanatical: she "avait tout jeté dans cette flamme de son cœur comme on jetait, pour un sacrifice, tous ses objets précieux en un bûcher" (I, 517). Her unrequited passion renders even more ridiculous her cult of her lover, Jean Renoldi ("Elle … s'abbattait à ses genoux pour le contempler longtemps dans une pose d'adoration," I, 517); for his part, Renoldi considers that this woman "[le] martyrise d'attentions, … [le] torture de prévenances, … [le] persécute de tendresses" (I, 517). It is Renoldi himself in fact who is the real sacrificial victim, his career ruined by this tenacious woman.

The same cannot be said for Duroy (1885), whose liaison with the formerly virtuous Madame Walter offers some thought-provoking refinements on the prototype. More resistant to the demands of her sexuality than Madame Poinçot had been, Madame Walter (whose first name; not coincidentally, is Virginie) still struggles in vain against the temptations of the flesh, even seeking support from a priest. Her deeply devout Catholicism established from the beginning, it comes as no surprise when this overly emotional, hypersensitive adoratrice prostrates herself before her lover as she once had before Christ. (One is reminded once again of the Goncourt influence.) Nor is it by accident that, in a scene no doubt owing much to Madame Bovary, Madame Walter arranges to meet Duroy in church. (Duroy cynically reflects that religion is an en-tout-cas for women "qui se fichent du bon Dieu comme d'une guigne, mais qui ne veulent pas qu'on en dise du mal et qui le prennent à l'occasion pour entremetteur," B-A, 398). Increasingly incapable of prayer, Madame Walter is assailed by worldly thoughts as she attempts to meditate: "Au lieu de l'apparition céleste attendue dans la détresse de son cœur, elle apercevait toujours la moustache frisée du jeune homme" (p. 405). Ironically, it is Madame Walter's Jewish husband who adds grist to the mill of his wife's obsessions when he purchases a painting of Christ walking on the water. The remarkable resemblance between the painted figure and Duroy results in the complete destruction of Madame Walter's delicate mental balance, and upon learning that her lover has abducted her daughter, she rushes to the greenhouse, where she throws herself before the painted Jesus, "balbutiant des mots d'amour, des invocations passionnées et désespérées" (p. 551), only to be greeted by the same dispassionate look which her exasperated lover had worn after he had tired of her:

… ce n'était plus Dieu, c'était son amant qui la regardait. C'était ses yeux, son front, l'expression de son visage, son air froid et hautain!

Elle balbutiait "Jésus!—Jésus!—Jésus!" Et le mot "Georges" lui venait aux lèvres. (p. 551)

Despite the clearly comic aspect of Madame Walter's confusion, the situation is not without pathos. The hallucinatory identification of one's lover with one's God that reaches its apex in Bel-Ami is founded upon the feeling of painful insecurity characterizing so many early heroines. Even Christiane Andermatt, whose growing independence is traced by the diachronic movement of the narrative in Mont-Oriol, adopts a posture of total submission and abdication of will when she first gives herself to Paul. To quiet her troubled conscience, she convinces herself that she is passionately in love with her lover and determines to give him her life and her happiness, "à lui sacrifier tout, selon la morale exaltée des cœurs vaincus mais scrupuleux qui se jugent purifiés par le dévouement et la sincérité" (pp. 165–66). Like Duroy, Paul Brétigny is deified by his mistress, and the tender words she utters to him the day following his amorous conquest ("Je vous appartiens corps et âme. Faites de moi désormais ce qu'il vous plaira," p. 169) appear as a parody of the Virgin Mary's response to the angelic salutation: "Be it unto me according to thy word." Brétigny's cruel betrayal of Christiane's love and her subsequent suffering strengthen her and lead her to draw a parallel between her situation and that of Christ. When her Jewish husband Andermatt comments that he would have liked to name what he naïvely assumes to be their infant daughter after her mother, Christiane replies: "Oh! cela promet trop de souffrances de porter le nom du Crucifié" (p. 415). Moreover, Brétigny's remorse, his humility and his anguish as he pays his respects to the new mother in the final pages of the novel are those of a repentent sinner in the presence of his God. He feels himself "enfoncé dans une de ces saletés morales qui tachent, jusqu'à la mort, la conscience d'un homme" (p. 423). As with the culinary metaphor which testified to Christiane's passage from a passive to an active role, the thematic and lexical use of the religious code records her development from "dévouée sublime" (the term is used to describe Clochette in a story of the same name) to a self-determining divinity. Where the role of women is concerned, Mont-Oriol must certainly be considered a pivotal work in Maupassant's fiction.

Whereas numerous early heroines engage unwittingly in idolatry, elevating their unworthy lovers to the ranks of the divine, the rare male protagonists of the pre-1885 works who exalt their mistresses (or would-be mistresses) are play-acting, their false humility being but one of several tactics in an artful seduction. Machiavellian to the quick, Duroy falls on his knees at Madame Walter's feet, gazes upon her "visage adoré" (p. 393), vows to respect her, promises his undying love for her, then takes her brutally, uses her to his own ends and casts her off with utter indifference when she begins to bore him. Duroy's insolence, his misogyny, his iconoclastic debasement of women mark him as an early hero who, his pride having been wounded by a woman (Madame Forestier), responds by building a wall of indifference around himself ("Toutes les femmes sont des filles. Il faut s'en donner et ne rien donner de soi," p. 358). This ruthless egotism would appear to render his likeness of Christ ludicrous; yet in the context of this novel it is not anomalous, for the Christ of Walter's painting is not a sympathetic figure, but a powerful one, not human, but superhuman. His disciples do not marvel at his feat; rather, they recoil in fear, "les figures … convulsées par la surprise" (p. 490). Christ's defiance of the laws of physical gravity as he walks upon the water, besides evoking Duroy's ability and willingness to trample upon women in his march to power, reflects the latter's contempt of social norms and prepares the reader for his final triumph, celebrated at the altar of the Madeleine: " … sur l'autel le sacrifice divin s'accomplissait; l'Homme-Dieu, à l'appel de son prêtre, descendait sur la terre pour consacrer le triomphe du baron Georges Du Roy" (p. 571). The bishop's farcical homily, addressed to Duroy, contains an implicit though unmistakable parallel: "Vous, Monsieur, que votre talent élève au-dessus des autres, vous qui écrivez, qui conseillez, qui dirigez le peuple, vous avez une belle mission à remplir, un bel exemple à donner" (p. 569). The irony, of course, is that Christ's mission led to the Crucifixion, whereas the only cross to be evoked in this novel is the crucifix that hangs on the wall of Georges's boyhood room. Duroy's is an infernal mission ("vous êtes l'être le plus vil que je connaisse," hisses Madame Walter, p. 568), and the priest's repetition of an adjective normally reserved for esthetic appreciation ("bel," "belle") suggests the true source of Duroy's success. Moreover, Walter's Jésus marchant sur les flots provides the central image. If, as Robert Artinian perceptively remarks ("Chacun son égout"), the sewers of the first chapter clearly symbolize the sordid milieu in which Duroy will rise to glory, the aquatic imagery of the final chapter presents us with an ironic Christ standing above the sea of well-wishers who have come to acclaim him. A "flot de soleil" (p. 562) inundates the church through its immense entrance; the invited guests inside the church hear from without, "vague comme le bruit d'une mer lointaine, le grouillement du peuple amassé devant l'église" (p. 565); this sound is in turn dominated by the music of the powerful organ, "des clameurs prolongées, énormes, enflées comme des vagues." And if, as he shakes hands and proffers banalities in the reception line, Duroy sees the crowd flow past him "comme un fleuve" (p. 572), his arrival at the threshold of the Madeleine reveals below him a dark sea of people, "une foule noire, bruissante, venue là pour lui, pour lui Georges Du Roy" (p. 573). This burlesque Christ, however, thinks only of himself, and in spite of his immense pride and his sense of superhuman power ("il lui sembla qu'il allait faire un bond du portique de la Madeleine au portique du Palais-Bourbon," p. 573), the only "miracle" performed by the all-too-human Duroy is the symbolic parting of the waters as he descends the steps of the church "entre deux haies de spectateurs" (p. 573).

The playful portrayal of an unscrupulous opportunist as a Christ-figure, although clearly ironic, is remarkably consistent with the early image of Christ in Maupassant's work, nearly always the symbol of victory, evoked with the tongue-in-cheek piety of a true skeptic. Aside from scattered allusions to the crucifix in descriptions of the décor in some stories (e.g., "Tribunaux rustiques"), the suffering Christ is not represented until 1886, when Christiane Andermatt compares her tribulations with His. There is, of course, some irony in this, for Christiane's equation fails to take into account the fact that Christ suffered for the sins of others, whereas she is expiating her own sin of infidelity. After 1886, however, and simultaneously with the growing anguish of Maupassant's male protagonists and their victimization by women, we find a far greater number of allusions to the suffering Christ, who is progressively transformed into a symbol for the martyrdom of the male.⁹ Concurrently, woman becomes equated with God the Father, who, in keeping with Sadian philosophy, is viewed as a supreme sadist. Let us examine the steps in this transformation.

The notion of love as sacrifice, hardly consistent with the Decadent¹⁰ view of love as mere submission to the instinct of self-preservation, is first elaborated in "Amour" (December 1886), where, as we have seen, the male teal's immolation is endowed with religious transcendence by the evocation of the cross. Two weeks after the appearance of this story, "Clochette," another story of sacrificial love, was published. This time it is a young woman who risks her life and sacrifices her beauty for her suitor when she jumps from a second-story window in the school attic to avoid compromising him. Badly crippled by her fall, she never marries, and the cause of her disfiguring limp is revealed only after she dies many decades later. While she is never explicitly presented as a Christ-figure, the bewhiskered old maid is clearly regarded as a martyr who looks upon her misfortune as a well-deserved punishment for the transgression she was about to commit. As such, she is to be contrasted with Christiane, who was her literary contemporary (Mont-Oriol was published the same year). It was in 1886 as well that Christ's suffering was explicitly evoked and compared to that of another old woman, the "être innommable" of "Misère humaine," who, stooped with age and barely ambulatory, is observed shuffling painfully through crowded streets: "Et quelle route douloureuse! Quel chemin de la croix plus effroyable que celui du Christ!" (II, 752).

Male martyrs are ubiquitous as well, and the Romantic compassion for and interest in society's pariahs clearly survive in Maupassant's works. But the martyrdom of the lover is especially tragic and offers numerous insights into the mutations of the male-female relationship. One must wait until 1889 before the male-as-Christ motif is fully crystallized. We encounter the lover-martyr in "Le Rendez-vous" (February-23, 1889), although the symbolism is susceptible to a pluralistic reading because of the story's ironic mode. Here Madame Haggan, exasperated by the tedium of her weekly rendez-vous d'amour, "punishes" her lover by keeping him waiting. One day, just as she is about to take a carriage to his apartment, she encounters an attractive male friend, who easily persuades her to visit his "collections japonaises" (II, 1123). With thinly masked relief she dashes off a telegram to her lover, using illness as a pretext and asking him to come to dinner the following evening "pour que je me fasse pardonner" (II, 1124). The heroine looks upon herself as a martyr, upon her rencontres amoureuses as painful steps in her personal Calvary. She has long forgotten the ephemeral emotion that allowed her to abandon herself to her lover in the first place, but her memory of the countless meetings is vivid: "elle n'avait pas oublié … ce chapelet de rendez-vous, ce chemin de croix de l'amour, aux stations si fatigantes, si monotones, si pareilles …" (II, 1120). Her self-pity transforms her into a figure of ridicule, and her annoyance, which focuses upon the 120 dressings and undressings without a chambermaid, is frankly derisive. Clearly, the real victim here is not Madame Haggan (à gants?),. but her lover, the vicomte de Martelet, whose name evokes first martelé, but also martyr. His constant disappointments, his tolerance, his forgiveness of his mistress's repeated cruelties, his unfailing love and above all his patience identify him with the sufferer, the patient. The religious metaphors must thus be understood in an ironic sense. Madame Haggan is le bourreau, the traitor, and it is not mere coincidence that she bides her time in the park of Trinity Church while her lover anxiously awaits her.

Fort comme la mort, published the same year, presents similar ambiguities. Any de Guilleroy and her look-alike daughter Annette, heroines of Maupassant's penultimate novel, play an innocently diabolical role. Any has her own Calvary—aging—and she addresses an ardent prayer to "Celui qui avait aussi tant souffert" (p. 316), begging him to spare her the horror of a physical decline for at least a few more years. Although her anguish is very real, it is difficult not to see irony in this passage. After feverishly begging "le martyr divin" to preserve her beauty, she sits before her mirror carefully applying her man-made creams and powders "avec une tension de pensée aussi ardente que pour la prière" (p. 316). Furthermore, Maupassant had set the tone of her egotistical relationship with the Divinity in an earlier passage, asserting that when she doubted Olivier's constancy, she prayed for divine help, taking care not to reveal to God the shameful cause of her supplication, "traitant Dieu avec la même hypocrisie naïve qu'un mari" (p. 239). As was the case in "Le Rendez-vous," it is not the heroine, but the hero who is to be identified with a tortured Christ, whence his name, Olivier, which evokes the olive grove of Christ's Passion. Any's acute jealousy of her daughter's fresh beauty leads her to the conviction that her lover is drawn to Annette not by paternal affection, but by passionate love. And while there is a grain of truth in this (Olivier is indeed troubled and confused by the emotions, long dormant, that this replica of a younger Any awakens in him), Any's accusation, together with her watchful, suspicious behavior, serves only to exacerbate the situation and cause Olivier untold mental anguish. Her egotism, her self-pity and her useless efforts to rival her daughter's youthful beauty show her relationship with the Divine in a properly ludicrous light (she calls upon God, "comme elle avait appelé un médecin, le matin même," p. 240) and make a mockery of her apparent concern for her lover's welfare.

"Le Champ d'Oliviers," which provides a much more dense treatment of the lover-as-Christ motif, was published almost exactly one year after "Le Rendez-vous" (February 19–23, 1890). The title itself evokes Christ's suffering, and the protagonist's name, l'abbé Vilbois, alludes quite obviously to the cross. Having met a pretty actress in his youth, the innocent Vilbois became violently enamored of this perverse young woman, who "sut le conquérir complètement, faire de lui un de ces délirants forcenés, un de ces déments en extase qu'un regard ou qu'une jupe de femme brûle sur le bûcher des Passions Mortelles" (II, 1182). The capitalization of the word Passions offers the reader a foreglimpse of Vilbois's eventual fate: he will indeed suffer at the hands of what he soon discovers to be his unfaithful mistress. Leaving her pregnant (she convinces him that the child she is carrying is not his), he joins the priesthood, offering to the church "une vie brisée qu'il avait failli lui donner vierge" (II, 1184). It is not until many years later that his past comes to haunt him in the form of his illegitimate son, a vulgar criminal sent by his mother on her deathbed. Anguished by the resemblance between himself and this sordid vagabond, the priest turns his eyes skyward and sees "tremblotant sur le ciel, le petit feuillage grisâtre de l'arbre sacré qui avait abrité sous son ombre frêle la plus grande douleur, la seule défaillance du Christ" (II, 1190). The symbolism is prophetic. Like Christ, the priest dies for the sins of others. That his death is a suicide could perhaps be seen as a not-so-subtle commentary on Christ's refusal to save Himself, and, given Maupassant's other playful distortions of Scripture ("Le Père Judas," "Nos Anglais," etc.), a reading of this story as parody would certainly not be unwarranted. The fact remains, however, that from the perspective of the increasingly polarized male-female relationships, the priest's suffering at the hands of a woman typifies that of later heroes and cannot be discounted. Significantly, the cleric's coarse young son begins to resemble his mother as he boasts of past crimes:

C'était à sa mère que l'enfant, à présent, ressemblait le plus, non par les traits du visage, mais par le regard captivant et faux et surtout par la séduction du sourire menteur qui semblait ouvrir la porte de la bouche à toutes les infamies du dedans. (II, 1196)

The resemblance has a metaphorical dimension: the young hoodlum is a messenger from his mother, who, having died three years previously, continues to torment her former lover from beyond the grave. Her sadistic cruelty has thus been immortalized.

If from very early in Maupassant's literary production his heroines have identified themselves with the Divinity, the identification is largely facilitated thanks to the precious "relics" provided by the lovers themselves in the form of love letters: "Ces petits papiers qui portent notre nom et nous caressent avec de douces choses, sont des reliques, et nous adorons les chapelles, nous autres, surtout les chapelles dont nous sommes les saintes" (II, 1030). The self-love of such heroines is innocent enough and does not necessarily exclude the capacity to love others. However, a progression through time reveals an increasing number of frigid heroines whose absolute egotism entails a growing inability to love others and hence a widening disjunction from the male. The continuing identification of such women with the Divine seems at first blush incompatible with their changing role. Quite the opposite is true, and an examination of the epithets attributed to God Himself from the early works to the last illustrates that the metamorphosis undergone by the fictional women is in fact closely paralleled by the striking changes wrought in Maupassant's view of the Creator. As Author of the Universe, Maupassant's God had been associated with nature and biological reproduction—and hence with women—right from the beginning. However, whereas in the very early work He is merely accused of having been "trop … trop naturaliste" ("Le Verrou," I, 491) in inventing the reproductive act, it is not long before the image of a deliberately malicious Divinity comes to the fore. In "Les Caresses" (August 14, 1883) a young woman, revolted by her suitor's demands, speculates that God, in whom she believes, was consciously malevolent when He fashioned the "sense" which in her eyes are "ignobles, sales, révoltants, brutaux … mêlés aux ordures du corps," a mockery of love, "la plus douce chose qui soit au monde" (I, 952). The lover, who responds with an impassioned plea for artificiality and excess, is a typical product of the Decadent sensibility, which, as we noted earlier, saw "refinements" on the acte génésique as a vehicle for outsmarting Nature.

In a somewhat different vein, the sadistic magistrate in "Un Fou" (1885) engages in an implicit rivalry with God by destroying His creatures. Yes, he reasons, killing must be "une volupté, la plus grande de toutes peut-être; car tuer n'est-il pas ce qui ressemble le plus à créer?" (II, 540). As representative of the Law, "Etat civil, glorieuse Divinité" (II, 543) who judges men and condemns the guilty to death, the venerable magistrate is an avatar of God right from the start. His hidden identity as pathological killer who derives intense excitement from his murders can thus be interpreted as the other side of the Divinity.

A year later the Divine Being comes under explicit attack when the madman of "Un Cas de Divorce" rails against the monotony of the created universe: "Comme tout est triste et laid, toujours pareil, toujours odieux…. Comme elle serait pauvre l'imagination de leur Dieu, si leur Dieu existait ou s'il n'avait pas créé d'autres choses, ailleurs" (II, 778). His cerebral lechery permitting him to escape from the dégoût of the human condition, the diarist-narrator no longer needs woman, whom he sees as an instrument of nature.

The diatribes against the Creator attain the status of "respectability" early in 1887 ("Madame Hermet"), when a doctor, recounting the tale of a female mental patient's obsession, reasons that it was her horror of aging that brought about her "crise," in which she abdicated maternal responsibility and refused to visit her dying son for fear of contracting the smallpox that was killing him. In the physician-narrator's view, God, "I'Inflexible Inconnu" (II, 878), is a sadistic "lender," lending youth in order to make old age more painful, lending beauty only to snatch it quickly back. The notion of a cruel God only sketched here is more completely fleshed out in "Moiron" (September 1887), but once again the distance established between narrator and reader by virtue of the former's insanity should not be overlooked. In a deathbed confession to the judge who spared his life many years previously, the schoolmaster Moiron avows that he had indeed poisoned several of his pupils in an attempt to get revenge upon God, who had allowed his three children to fall ill and die. This tragedy had enlightened Moiron as to the "true" nature of the Divine as spectator of a macabre comedy for which he is responsible:

"Pourquoi avait-il tué mes enfants? J'ouvris les yeux, et je vis qu'il aime tuer…. Dieu, monsieur, est un massacreur. Il lui faut tous les jours des morts. Il en fait de toutes les façons pour mieux s'amuser. Il a inventé les maladies, les accidents … et puis, quand il s'ennuie, il a les épidémies, la peste, le choléra …#x0022; (II, 989)

Reminiscent of the Old Testament Moloch (the loathsome god to whom the Ammonites sacrificed their children), this diabolical Divinity (Moiron refers to him as a reptile) is in fact mirrored in Moiron himself. Indeed, the troubled schoolmaster admits to having engaged in a rivalry with the Divine: "j'en ai tué aussi, des enfants. Je lui a joué le tour. Ce n'est pas lui qui les a eus, ceux-là!" (II, 989). If the philosophical content of Moiron's invective is somewhat undermined by his naïve and perverse reaction to his own misfortune, the story nonetheless serves as a provocative introduction to the God-as-Sadist motif, which, after a three-year hiatus, finds eloquent expression in the mouths of two narrators somewhat more credible than Moiron, Roger de Salins of "L'Inutile Beauté" and Dr. Paturel of the unfinished novel, Angélus.

For Salins, God, "créateur économe" (II, 1216) who made each sense organ serve two purposes, was deliberately perverse in his creation of man's sexuality, entrusting the sacred mission of reproduction to organs that are "malpropres et souillés" (II, 1216). A cynic of the highest order, Salins's God tried to prevent man from idealizing his sexual encounter with woman. But man, undaunted, invented love. Echoing the sentiments of an earlier hero, Henri, the épistolier of "Les Caresses" (1883), Salins sings the praises of vice, asserting that refined debauchery is the best means of turning the tables on the Divinity. In Paul Brétigny's tradition, Salins looks upon procreation as bestial and the pregnant woman as ugly. God, an ignorant Creator, is pictured as a gigantic phallus: "Sais-tu comment je conçois Dieu … comme un monstrueux organe créateur inconnu de nous, qui sème par l'espace des milliards de mondes, ainsi qu'un poisson unique pondrait des Œufs dans la mer" (II, 1217). The reduction of God to the bestial implicit in this (comic?) passage, the view of an androgynous Creator taking a peculiar, onanistic pleasure in solitary reproduction, appears to be a departure from the theme of a sadistic Deity. Here God is not held responsible for His creation: "stupidement prolifique," He is ignorant of the consequences of His activities. Human intelligence is an accident of nature unforeseen by the Divinity, whose created universe, "cet inconfortable petit parc à bestioles, ce champ à salades, ce potager sylvestre" (II, 1218), is clearly not intended for Man, who has risen above the caveman status God intended. Although Salins makes no mention of the Bible, the reader familiar with the New Testament will not fail to draw a parallel between this passage and the Sermon on the Mount, in which man is told to forget his concerns for a terrestrial future:

Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are ye not much better than they? … And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin. And yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. (Matthew 6: 26, 28–29)

In Salins's view God provided for lesser creation only; man was obliged to work, to invent, to use his talent and ingenuity in order to make livable "ce sol de racines et de pierres" (II, 1219). It is thus man, not God, who is the true creator, who has idealized and poeticized the world, and Salins's panegyric on artifice has a distinctly Baudelairean ring to it. It is fitting that Salins's extemporization should take place within the confines of the Opera during an intermission of "Robert le diable." Salins, with an air of great theatricality, seems to be playing the devil's advocate and enjoying every moment of it. It is hardly coincidental, moreover, that his name is associated with sin through the story of Sodom and Gomorrha, in which Lot's wife was changed into a pillar of salt. Salins's friend Grandin, accustomed to "les surprises éclatantes de sa fantaisie" (II, 1218), is entertained by his ideas; and his somewhat amused condescension is amply justified by the parlor-talk style of Salins's remarks, full of flourishes, redundancies and contradictions (at one point Salins refers to biological reproduction as "cet abominable loi," II, 1216, at another as "la plus noble et la plus exaltante des fonctions humaines").

One is not surprised to learn that the entire scene, which forms Part III of "L'Inutile Beauté," has often been regarded as a gratuitous digression, a major flaw in the story.¹¹ However, this judgment seems seriously out of step with Maupassant's own evaluation: "L'Inutile Beauté est la nouvelle la plus rare que j'aie jamais faite. Ce n'est qu'un symbole" (quoted by Forestier, II, 1709). Although Maupassant's remark may strike the reader as a trifle too self-indulgent, the judgment of the critics seems equally misguided, based upon only a superficial reading of the story. Viewed from the perspective of woman's role in the later work, Part III of this four-part story no longer seems merely a heavy-handed attempt at philosophical enrichment, but rather an integral part of the whole story. Salins, who begins and ends his diatribe with an allusion to the beauty of the countess de Mascaret, the story's heroine, expresses his anti-God, anti-Nature principles with a vocabulary very similar to hers. Grandin, on the other hand, is more fatalistic ("Que veux-tu? c'est la nature," p. 1216) and is to be identified rather with the comte de Mascaret, "un homme d'instinct, un homme d'autrefois" (p. 1221). Through her revenge upon her possessive husband (after bearing for him seven children in eleven years, she tells him that one of her children is not his, a lie that drives him from her bed for six years and causes him great mental anguish), the countess is identified as an enemy of Creation, she who had once been its victim. Now deliberately and obstinately non-productive, she is at the center of what Albert-marie Schmidt terms "une litanie de la femme stérile" (p. 70). Moreover, the sacrilege she commits when she perversely and consciously takes God as witness to her falsehood (in the church of St. Philippe du Roule!) is proof positive that the countess is a new breed in Maupassant's fiction. As such, she becomes the porte-parole of her sex, expressing with regard to the procreative role a disgust that had previously been the prerogative of the male: "Je suis, nous sommes des femmes du monde civilisé…. Nous ne sommes plus et nous refusons d'être de simples femelles qui repeuplent la terre" (II, 1223). Despite this attitude, her maternal sentiments are strong and durable; she is a rare creature who "réalise le phénomène de la famille dans le monde" (II, 1225). Indeed, Gabrielle de Mascaret, whose first name, not coincidentally, evokes the archangel Gabriel, divine messenger, is herself a phenomenon. Her loveliness is indestructible: time has not aged her (at 36, she appears 25). Her repeated pregnancies have not deformed her: she is described as "svelte" (II, 1205). Her emotional tribulations have not left their mark, and her "éclatante beauté" and ivory complexion give her "un air de statue" (II, 1215). It takes no great insight to realize that this heavenly creature whose tiara glistens in her dark hair, its diamonds "pareils à une voie lactée" (II, 1223), has replaced the King of Kings, rising to the realm of the Ideal just as surely as Salins's wisdom has dethroned the traditional God, equating Him with blind instinct. The celestial imagery (her gray eyes are "des ciels froids," her hair "cette nuit opaque," II, 1223) brings to mind Diana, the moon goddess, symbol of purity, a fitting emblem of the chaste mother represented by Gabrielle de Mascaret, untouchable, immortal femme angélique. Her husband's almost spiritual "conversion," his sudden recognition in his wife of a mystical being, the mysterious product of human desire, would have been quite impossible fifteen years earlier. One notes with some irony that Dr. Heraclius Gloss, who thought for a moment that he had found philosophical truth in a woman's beauty, was sorely mocked by his friend the rector: "Ce pauvre docteur! si la vérité lui apparaît comme la femme aimée, il sera bien I'homme le plus trompé que la terre ait jamais porté" (I, 15). The count and countess de Mascaret, whose cosmic roles are implicit in their family name (meaning tidal wave), have indeed changed the face of Maupassant's fictional universe. Woman, free from phallocracy, rises to new heights of power in this story, and she does it without sacrificing either her femininity or her maternity. The final image with which the reader is left is that of a beautiful woman who, after having been victimized by her father (for he arranged her marriage) and her jealous husband, has thrown off the chains of her slavery, has become a self-determining being, an inutile beauté who refuses to remain an instrument of nature. An esthetic object (whence her likeness to a statue), she exists only to be admired, pure icon, cold, unfeeling. Mascaret himself, a revised and updated Pygmalion, no longer prays that life be breathed into the woman he loves. Truly representative of the spirit of the late 19th century, he accepts her as objet d'art, seeming to prefer, like Baudelaire, the Goncourts and his fictional elder Des Esseintes, "I'artifice de I'homme à la production du Créateur."¹²

This characteristic is to be found again, even more dominant, in the countess de Brémontal, the last of Maupassant's ideal women. Because L'Angélus (the novel of which she was to be the heroine) remained unfinished, it is quite impossible to draw any definitive conclusion relative to her role. What we know is this: she was to have been a "demi-fervente" ([Œuvres posthumes (OP II)], 217) who, although not "ardemment croyante" (OP II, 215) and never dominated by religious laws and practices, was moved by "la si touchante légende chrétienne" (OP II, 217). Like the countess de Mascaret, she was unafraid of confrontation with those "higher authorities" who were in a position to brutalize her (in this case the Prussians); like her, she was extremely attractive; like her, she was a mother, and her all-engulfing maternal love left no room for the passions of the flesh. For her husband she felt only a fondness: "Germaine … l'aimait bien, sans grande passion, mais en compagne fidèle et dévouée, bien plus mère que femme …" (OP II, 217). Her quiet affection for her husband stands in sharp contrast to the intensity of her maternal passion, "cet amour qui est le seul indestructible, qui n'a point d'égal et de rival" (OP II, 201). Taking her small son into her arms one winter night, she kisses him on the top of his head, on his eyelids, on his mouth, trembling all the while "de cette joie délicieuse dont tressaillent les fibres des vraies mères" (OP II, 201). This countess does not become a symbol of human triumph over Divine will, as had the countess de Mascaret; however, she is hardly an "ordinary" woman, and the imagery indicates clearly that she is to be identified with the Virgin Mother, to whom she prays for a daughter. The child to whom she does give birth, a son, is crippled for life by damages incurred in utero when his mother was struck by the Prussian soldiers. Clearly a Christ-figure, born in a stable as church bells were pealing in the distance, the child is destined to suffer the pain of rejection, his infirmity rendering sexual normality impossible. Even his mother's love is insufficient to compensate for this sad fate: "partout, et toujours, il devait voir passer devant ses yeux, jusqu'au jour où il les fermait à la lumière, ce fantôme charmant dont il n'approcherait jamais, jamais … une jeune fille" (OP II, 235). This contemporization of Christ's Passion is indeed remarkable. Moreover, the remaining fragments of this unfinished work contain passages about both Christ and God the Father that suggest once again a profound sympathy for the Son of God and an ever-growing hatred of God Himself, sentiments that are echoed throughout the literature of the period (cf. Sagnes, pp. 423–74). Maupassant's personal tragedy—the absence of his father during his formative years and his feeling of disdain for this irresponsible womanizer—bears mentioning here as well. From the image of Father as phallus who has badly provided for His creatures and has condemned them to a destructive sexuality (IB) to this pathetic portrait of a child whose deformity can be attributed to the Absent Father, the work is obviously nourished as much by life as by literary tradition.

In L'Angélus it is a priest, l'abbé Marvaux, who reflects upon the role of Christ. As opposed to earlier representatives of the clergy, who are often portrayed as fanatical, Marvaux is clearly a credible, respectable character whose ideas are not to be dismissed lightly. He is cast in the same mold as Father Vilbois ("Champ d'Oliviers"): vigorous, courageous, intelligent, he took Holy Orders not as a virginal young lad, but as a man who had come to know life and who sought refuge from its sorrows. Decorated for heroism in one of Napoleon III's wars, he had married, then fathered a daughter. But the child had died, as had his wife, of typhoid fever. The reader is led to believe that it was this double tragedy that drove him into religious exile. Content to remain a country cleric, unwilling to compromise his integrity in order to rise in the hierarchy of the Church, he is known for "l'indépendance de son caractère, la hardiesse de sa parole" (OP II, 206). For him God is an empty word, incomprehensible to the mind of man, which can attain knowledge only through the senses. Christ, on the other hand, tangible and visible, is the true God. In response to the young Dr. Paturel's diatribe against a God who appears to condone suffering, the priest speculates that Christ, too, may have been deceived by God, as men are:

Oui … le Christ doit être aussi une victime de Dieu. Il en a reçu une fausse mission, celle de nous illusionner par une nouvelle religion. Mais le divine Envoyé l'a accomplie si belle, cette mission, si magnifique, si dévouée, si douloureuse, si inimaginablement grande et attendrissante, qu'il a pris pour nous la place de son Inspirateur. (OP II, 229–30)

The priest expresses his compassion for Christ's suffering and speaks movingly of Him as a personal God whom he loves "de tout mon céur d'homme et de toute mon âme de prêtre" (OP II, 229). His insistence upon the crucified Christ, Christ as symbol of a suffering humanity, betrayed by an impersonal God, clearly owes something to the Jean-Paul tradition.¹³ But it is also important in the context of Maupassant's work, for it is his last word on the subject. The priest is silenced by a sigh from the handicapped child at his side. It is the countess's second son, who has been moved to tears by the priest's words. The latter turns to the boy:

Pauvre petit, toi aussi tu as reçu de l'impitoyable destinée un triste sort. Mais tu auras au moins, je crois, en compensation de toutes les joies physiques, les seules belles choses qui soient permises aux hommes, le rêve, l'intelligence et la pensée. (OP II, 230)

This mise en valeur of the joys of the mind to the detriment of sensual pleasures is consistent with the mounting wave of nausea with which sexual intercourse is regarded and an increasingly violent rebellion against the Creator who endowed His creatures with physical needs not for their pleasure, but for His own ends. In the last lines that he was to write before insanity struck, Maupassant again returned to Sade's philosophy of a cruel God, using another character, the young Dr. Paturel, to renew Moiron's fulminations against God, "destructeur infatigable" (OP II, 232). Sadistic spectator, God is "embusqué dans l'Espace" (OP II, 232), from where he gleefully satisfies his insatiable need for death and destruction. Only the animals, happily copulating with no sense of their mortality, are unaware of His ferocity. The passage ends with an unfinished sentence which alludes, like a haunting refrain, to the reproductive instinct that dictates the behavior of horses, goats, pigeons and nightingales.¹⁴ The obsessive identification of sexuality as the instrument of divine malice thus persists to the very end.

How does the woman of the final works fit into the scheme of things? We have already seen that there is a distance established between heroes and heroines, an idealization of the woman who, having acceeded to the sacred station of motherhood, becomes suddenly resentful of her biological destiny. Her refusal to serve out her sexual term has two results: on the one hand, it makes her inaccessible to the male, transferring her to the realm of the ideal (IB); on the other, it transforms her from a seductive mistress into a tender mother, that most beloved of all women in Maupassant's fiction. Yet even in this most benevolent of roles she is as powerless to protect her child from suffering as was the Mother of Christ.

The heroes, for their part, find little relief from their pain, and the frequency with which we find allusion to the Crucified Christ in the last works suggests that the roles of hero-victim and suffering Christ were becoming increasingly assimilated. If André, the handicapped child of L'Angélus, was martyred by his solitude and his forced celibacy, his namesake André Mariolle of Notre Cœur suffered a similar fate through an emotional (rather than a physical) handicap. So, too, did Olivier Bertin of Fort comme la mort. In these cases, as in many others, it is ultimately because of their desperate need for women that the men of the later works become sacrificial victims.

Conversely, the female of the final works who has not been redeemed by motherhood is identified with a sadistic divinity. Indifferent to sexual needs, she is free to exploit her beauty for her own egotistical purposes, and in so doing she robs the male of his selfhood, victimizes him, crucifies him. Michèle de Burne [Notre Cœur (NC)] provides a perfect example of this type of woman. Mariolle's love for her is a perpetual martyrdom in which she takes a visible pleasure: "Elle l'avait cloué sur une croix; il y saignait de tous ses membres, et elle le regardait agoniser sans comprendre sa souffrance, contente même d'avoir fait ça" (NC, 202). Mariolle, an unwilling Christ, is determined to wrench himself from this cross, even if it means leaving upon it "des morceaux de son corps, des lambeaux de sa chair et tout son cœur déchiqueté" (NC, 202). Fragmented and mutilated by this cruel mistress, Mariolle is the archetypal victim of the last works, bearing the cross of an unrequited love. Michèle de Burne, a frigid mistress who is more drawn to women than to men, is representative of a large group of later heroines in whom sexual appetite is absent, who find pleasure only in the company of members of their own sex.¹⁵ Despite her indifference to sexual love, however, this society woman needs a man, needs his adoring words, his presence, his loving looks, "comme une idole, pour devenir vrai dieu, a besoin de prière et de foi" (p. 167). By the same token, one worshipper is hardly sufficient, and her divinity depends upon her ability to attract many "believers" to her sanctuary: "Elle était bien cette sorte de déesse humaine, délicate, dédaigneuse, exigeante et hautaine, que le culte amoureux des mâles enorgueillit et divinise comme un encens" (NC, 168). Mariolle is tormented by Michèle's insatiable greed for male admirers, but even more than this he is tortured by her inability to love. A feminine Narcissus, she encloses herself daily in a three-paneled mirror, surrounding herself with a triple image of her own beauty. Childless, coquette, an egotistical hunter for whom "love" is nothing more than the sport of conquest, she pursues prospective lovers "comme le chasseur poursuit le gibier, rien que pour les voir tomber" (pp. 39–40). Like the God of the last works, she is a spectator of the destruction that she herself has wrought, and she gloats over each new triumph: "Cela l'amusait tant de les sentir envahis peu à peu, conquis, dominés par sa puissance invincible de femme, de devenir pour eux l'Unique, l'Idole capricieuse et souveraine" (p. 39). As was the case with the countess de Mascaret, Michèle de Burne had suffered at the hands of her husband. Delivered from her slavery by his sudden death, she seems determined to get revenge on all males. If her "fidèles," who had slowly formed "une sorte de petite église … [dont] elle … était la madone" (p. 12), were her victims, it was precisely because of their devotion to her, a devotion which in its most extreme form kills artistic creativity. She scorns men who are unwilling to spend all their energy upon winning her love (e.g., the sculptor Prédolé) and demands total sacrifice, total submission of will. Celebrated in Mariolle's love letters, she becomes the unique object of his cult, an esthetic object replacing all others, possessing him completely. Although somewhat of a dilettante, Mariolle had achieved a measure of recognition for his musical abilities and for a sculpture entitled "Masseur tunisien" before meeting Madame de Burne. Rather than help him to develop his talents, Michèle de Burne had robbed him of what little inclination he had previously displayed toward the fine arts: "Elle a tout remplacé pour moi, car je n'aspire plus à rien, je n'ai plus besoin, envie ni souci de rien" (NC, 237). A jealous deity, Michèle de Burne tolerates no departure from the "straight and narrow" path that leads to her. Whereas Any and Annette and many women before them (Fort) had inspired Bertin to great artistic achievement and had in fact been the source of his success as a portraitist, Michèle de Burne is more demon than muse,¹⁶ and the venomous descriptions of la mondaine that spill from the pen of the fictional novelist Gaston de Lamarthe are offered to the world as a revenge against this cold socialite and her ilk. In the badly smitten Mariolle she inspires no more than florid love letters intended for her eyes only; another hopelessly entangled admirer, the musician Massival, "avait subi cette espèce d'arrêt qui semble frapper la plupart des artistes contemporains comme une paralysie précoce" (NC, 19). Although it is true that the love-trap into which Bertin falls eventually results in an artistic sterility, such a fate is not willed by his mistress. With Michèle de Burne, on the other hand, Maupassant has realized a new feminine type, the deliberately destructive, sadistic goddess who is associated not with the procreative laws of a fertile universe, but with sterility, both biological and artistic. The resigned submission of her lover is that of a worshipper before his god: "Il lui dit lentement, avec des mots presque solennels, qu'il lui avait donné sa vie pour toujours, afin qu'elle en fît ce qu'il lui plairait" (NC, 118). Mariolle's idolatry—his solemn sacrifice of self to a woman—and the resultant disintegration of his personality point to the nefarious role played by the femme du monde in the later work. Although the religious terms used to describe the love relationship suggest the divinization of a profane love, the very fact that the affair is destructive and the mistress diabolical (she is explicitly likened to her friend, the baronne de Frémires, a young woman "inventée et créée par le diable luimême pour la damnation des grands enfants à barbe," p. 132) hints at an evolution in Maupassant's heroine which parallels that of Maupassant's God.

The characterization of God as a force of evil that we find in the last few years of Maupassant's creative life is founded upon a pessimistic view of the world as inferno, "bagne pour les âmes tourmentées de savoir, et pour les corps en mauvaise santé" (L'Angélus, OP II, 230). The image is apt: man is imprisoned in the world (just as, in a Manichean sense, the soul is imprisoned in the body), suffering both morally and physically and in so doing providing pleasure and entertainment for a sadistic Keeper. Whether transcoded in the hunting idiom or that of war, the theme of cruelty had been treated with an unrelieved pessimism from the earliest stories on. However, whereas in the pre-1889 work the tormentors are numerous and varied—ranging from the Prussian officer ("Mademoiselle Fifi," "Deux Amis"), the vengeful farm boy ("Coco") and the vulgar pillagers ("L'Ane") to the dignified judge ("Un Fou"), the newspaper columnist (B-A) and the doctor [Pierre et Jean (P et J)]—the writings of the last few years offer evidence of a convergence of all these various types into two quintessential sadists: God and Woman. Not surprisingly, when searching for metaphors to characterize their destructive powers, Maupassant digs into his storehouse of fictional sadists from which he draws such images as a God "embusqué dans l'espace" (L'Angélus, OP II, 232) or a femme-amazone: "comme un pays dont on s'empare, elle accapara sa vie peu à peu par une succession de petits envahissements plus nombreux chaque jour" (NC, 66). With Any de Guilleroy the domination had been represented as a solid chain ("elle en refaisait les anneaux à mesure qu'ils s'usaient," Fort, 61). In either case, what is important is the characteristic joy the women feel at the spectacle of their lovers' suffering. If Any is not fully aware of her true emotions (she is "engourdie dans un chagrin cruel de le voir souffrir, et ce chagrin était presque du bonheur," Fort, 40), Michèle de Burne is fully cognizant of the pain she is inflicting upon her lover, and she savors her victory "comme est heureux un épervier dont le vol s'abat sur une prioe fascinée" (NC, 290).

Instruments of man's damnation, such women bear no resemblance to the young woman of "Le Mariage du lieutenant Lauré" (1878) who delivers a troop of French soldiers from certain death. Moreover, the fact that the variants of this early story ("Souvenir," 1882, and "Les Idées du colonel," 1884) became progressively more satirical testifies to a breakdown in this optimistic image of the feminine role. I do not wish to suggest that la femme inspiratrice was a major theme in the early work or that all late heroines are femmes fatales. One must beware of oversimplification in the complex labyrinth of Maupassant's creative universe: the cruel women have antecedents going right back to 1880; similarly, one can find a current of angelism right through to the end. The paradox is only apparent: "angels"—when they are not represented as la femme rêvée, either imagined ("A vendre," "Un Portrait") or met only fleetingly ("La Mère Sauvage," "Rencontre"), but never possessed—are for the most part those heroines who have been "purified" by maternity (and not infrequently by suffering as well) and who have shed their sexuality like a second skin.¹⁷ They extend from Jeanne de Lamare through Christiane Andermatt to the countess de Brémontal—without forgetting that complex and problematical heroine, Gabrielle de Mascaret, who appears to bridge to gap between these Untouchable Madonnas and the Unfeeling Idols.

Of this latter group, a phenomenon of the later work only, Michèle de Burne is the archetype. Unnatural, ignorant of both sexual and maternal instincts, such a woman exists only to be admired; many are the men who are sacrificed upon the altar of her egotism. Satan incarnate, she coils around her victims, ensnaring them with the caress, "lien redoutable, le plus fort de tous, le seul dont on ne se délivre jamais quand il a bien enlacé et quand il serre jusqu'au sang la chair d'un homme" (NC, 127–28). Yet, although her victims are absorbed, mutilated, in short, destroyed by her, she remains impassive, uninvolved, "incapable … d'amour" (NC, 143–44).

As monstrous an aberration as she is, however, the society woman is not alone in Maupassant's gallery of satanic women. There is another group, alluded to earlier, which is equally well represented. This group consists of the cruel mothers, women who, unwilling to forgo personal aspirations for the good of their offspring, continue to seek the love and adulation of men. From the "innocent" perfidy of Madame Roland (P et J) and the compulsive behavior of Madame Hermet to the cold-blooded torture inflicted upon her unborn babies by "la mère aux monstres" (who is known in her village as "la diable"), mothers who violate the sanctity of the maternal bond are condemned as unnatural. Once again it is a mondaine who serves as supreme target for the author's wrath, who represents the truly satanic mother. The ignorant peasant woman of "La Mère aux monstres," "demi-brute et demi-femme" (I, 843) who stumbled upon a sordid recipe for producing deformed children and who continues to do so at will for her own financial gain (she sells them to side-show promoters), is evil, to be sure; but it is precisely because she is so grotesque and animalistic that she does not represent the insidious threat of a real she-devil. The elegant mondaine described in the story's epilogue, on the other hand, slim, attractive, surrounded by admiring men, is equally contemptible and far more dangerous. Just a few yards away from where she is holding court on a popular beach, the narrator's eyes come to rest upon her children, deformed, crippled, "les résultats des tailles restées fines jusqu'au dernier jour" (I, 847). Vanity, both the root of all evil and the source of untold suffering [Fort comme la mort (Fort)], is the most characteristic vice insofar as Maupassant's femmes fatales are concerned.

Even if one excluded such "transitory" she-devils as the blacksmith's wife of "Conte de Noël" (who is devil-possessed) and La Rapet of "Le Diable" (who disguises herself as Satan), excluding also the innumerable heroines who exercise a "pouvoir fatal et souverain" ("La Femme de Paul," I, 299) over the male through the seduction of their accursed flesh, it is clear that there is an ever-growing tendency to identify women as inherently evil, "ces êtres dangereux et perfides qui ont pour mission d'entraîner les hommes en des abîmes inconnus" ("L'Inconnue," II, 447). Treated ironically in the early work (Une Vie, "Clair de lune," "Une Surprise") as the warped idea of celibate priests, the notion of woman's infernal mission is no laughing matter after 1885. We have seen that, like madness and death, women are represented as parasitic creatures, feeding upon their unwilling host-victims in what now seems a cruel perversion of Holy Communion. The Sadian mockery of Christ as a "juif lépreux … né d'une catin et d'un soldat"¹⁸ is conspicuously absent from Maupassant's vision;¹⁹ and if, like Sade, he repeatedly vilified and derided the Creator, nowhere after 1885 does his satire seem to be directed against the Son of God. The fact that in his madness he was said to have claimed to be Christ²⁰ lends more weight to the hypothesis of a profound sympathy for the crucified Christ in the last works; and Cogny's statement regarding Maupassant's attitude vis-à-vis believers ("s'ils sont sincères, ce sont des sots et s'ils ne le sont pas, des canailles," Maupassant, 49) does not seem altogether justified in view of such late heroes as l'abbé Vilbois and l'abbé Marvaux (not to mention l'abbé Mauduit, the priest of "Après," who is treated with sensitivity and compassion).²¹

If the suffering heroes of the final works are portrayed as modern Christs, if the callous, degrading heroines are Wickedness Incarnate, it seems only natural that the relationship between the two would be represented as a variation upon the struggle between Good and Evil or that the Feminine Power of Darkness should be identified with the infernal fires of her kingdom, Hades….

Notes

¹ See [Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1933)] for a faithful chronicle of the forms taken by this pathological interest.

² For a sensitive treatment of this story see E. D. Sullivan, Maupassant: The Short Stories (Great Neck, N.Y.: Barren's Educational Series, 1962), 23–25.

³ His misinterpretation of Scripture is blatant: he sees in Christ's statement to his mother, made at the wedding feast of Cana—"Femme, qu'y a-t-il de commun entre vous et moi?" (John 2: 4)—evidence of God's dissatisfaction with this creature. Biblical commentaries, while conceding that Christ's remark represents a gentle rebuke, generally interpret it to mean that not even his mother should presume to control his course of action now that his ministry has started. See J. R. Dummelow, ed., A Commentary on the Holy Bible (London: Macmillan, 1952).

⁴ Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal, mémoires de la vie littéraire, 1851–1896 (Paris: Fasquelle-Flammarion, 1956), I, 400.

⁵ On the relationship between the two maisons see Michel Crouzet, "Une Rhétorique de Maupassant?" Revue d'Histoire Littéraire de la France, 80 (1980), 233–61.

⁶ André Vial regards "Le Saut du berger" as "un tirage anticipé" of Une Vie, "conçu à des fins strictement alimentaires" (p. 487).

⁷ The term narrataire, coined by Gerald Prince, "Introduction à l'étude du narrataire," Poétique, 14 (1973), 178–96, refers to the fictional receiver (explicit or implicit) of the narrative message.

⁸ See [Louis Forestier, ed. Contes et nouvelles, by Guy de Maupassant, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1974–1979)] I, 1434, and Vial, 435–507.

⁹ In Maupassant's peculiar Christology we find no mention of the Resurrection; and the emphasis, particularly in the later work, is clearly upon the Christ of Gethsemane. Such a restricted view distinguishes Maupassant from writers of the Romantic period, for whom, as Frank Paul Bowman reports in Le Christ Romantique (Geneva: Droz, 1973), Christ was often an image of revolutionary fervor, particularly in 1848. Some saw Woman as a Christ: "Tout comme la France, la femme a connu son Calvaire et va maintenant descendre de sa croix et ressusciter à la liberté" (Bowman, 106).

¹⁰ I use this slippery term (in its generally accepted sense) as a convenience only and not without some hesitation—cf. Robert L. Mitchell's caveats in "The Deliquescence of Decadence: Floupette's Eclectic Target," Nineteenth-Century French Studies, 9 (1981), 247–56.

¹¹ Cf. André Vial, 434: "Toute une partie, la troisième, n'est que dissertation abstraite: à ce morceau de bravoure, le prétexte de lieu et de temps confère une justification illusoire,—et une situation privilégiée, dans un enchâssement d'épisodes, un relief démesuré."

¹² Guy Sagnes, L'Ennui dans la littérature française de Flaubert à Laforgue (1848–1884) (Paris: Colin, 1969), 332. See also Villiers de I'Isle-Adam, L'Eve future.

¹³ The German novelist Jean-Paul Richter was known in France largely through faulty and incomplete translations. A single part of his novel Siebenkas, "Le Discours du Christ mort," in which Christ proclaims the death of God, given undue prominence in France, served as inspiration (directly or indirectly) for two generations of French writers. In fact, as Claude Pichois amply demonstrates in his L'Image de Jean-Paul Richter dans les lettres françaises (Paris: Corti, 1963), the passage in question was most unrepresentative of Richter's thought.

¹⁴ "Le cheval qui bondit au soleil dans une prairie, la chèvre qui grimpe sur les roches de son allure légère et souple, suivie du bouc qui la poursuit, les pigeons qui recoulent sur les toits, les colombes le bec dans le bec sous la verdure des arbres, pareils à des amants qui se disent leur tendresse, et le rossignol qui chante au clair de lune auprès de sa femelle qui couve ne savent pas l'éternel massacre de ce Dieu qui les a créés. Le mouton qui …" (op. 11 [Œuvres posthumes] 232).

¹⁵ Also representative are the Baronne de Grangerie and the Marquise de Rennedon, heroines of "La Confidence" (August 1885), "Sauvée" (December 1885) and "Le Signe" (April 1886).

¹⁶ My view is thus diametrically opposed to that of Chantal Jennings in "La Dualité de Maupassant: son attitude envers la femme," Revue des Sciences Humaines, 35 (1970), 565, who sees in Michèle de Burne "l'inspiratrice de l'artiste, une sorte de muse du poète."

¹⁷ A detailed analysis of those stories in which la femme rêvée is evoked would surely prove revealing from a psychoanalytical viewpoint, for nearly all bear witness either on the surface level or symbolically to a preoccupation with maternity.

¹⁸ D. A. F. Sade, Justine ou les malheurs de la vertu, in Œuvres complètes, II (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1955), 89.

¹⁹ This is not to deny the existence in the early work of veiled allusions to the strange circumstances of Christ's birth (cf. "Nuit de Noël," which features a burlesque "Nativity").

²⁰ Lanoux (p. 405) reports that on January 14, 1893, Maupassant announced, "Dieu a proclamé du haut de la Tour Eiffel … que Monsieur de Maupassant est le fils de Dieu et de Jésus-Christ!" Some time later he offered the following variant, the Oedipal implications of which are plain: "Jésus-Christ a couché avec ma mère. Je suis le fils de Dieu."

²¹ The work, although undated, is similar enough in perspective and subject to suggest that it was written near the end of the ten-year period that marked Maupassant's literary life. In this regard see Antonio Fratangelo, Guy de Maupassant, scrittore moderno (Florence: Olschki, 1976), 108. See also Forestier's remark (II, 1719) regarding the desacralization of the priest.

Select Bibliography

1. Maupassant's Works

Contes et nouvelles. Ed. Louis Forestier. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. 2 vols. Paris: Gallimard, 1974–1979.

Œuvres complètes de Guy de Maupassant. 29 vols. Paris: Conard, 1907–1910.

2. Critical Works on Maupassant

…..

Artinian, Robert. "Chacun son égout: A Metaphoric Structure in Bel-Ami."

Nassau Review (Nassau, N.Y., Community College), 2 (1973), 15–20….

Cogny, Pierre. Maupassant, l'homme sans dieu. Brussels: La Renaissance du Livre, 1968….

Lanoux, Armand. Maupassant le bel-ami. Paris: Fayard, 1967….

Pierrot, Jean. L'Imaginaire décadent. Paris: PUF, 1977….

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

3. Other Works

…..

Sagnes, Guy. L'Ennui dans la littérature française de Flaubert à Laforgue (1848–1884). Paris: Colin, 1969….