SOURCE: "Maupassant's Inhibited Narrators," in Neophilologus, Vol. 81, No. 1, January, 1997, pp. 35-47.

"Ça se fait, tout le monde le sait, mais ça ne se dit pas, sauf nécessité."

Hautot père et fils¹

Early in his writing career, Maupassant had (like Flaubert before him) difficulties with the public censorship of the written word at the time. His poem Une Fille had been threatened with prosecution for "outrage à la morale publique et religieuse et aux bonnes moeurs" in 1880, and in 1883 Hachette had briefly banned Une Vie from sale on railway bookstalls. It is therefore not surprising to find him expressing vigorously opposition to censorship in his correspondence and his chroniques. He may be ready, as a writer seeking to live from his works and adjusting accordingly, to adapt his expression to the different constraints of newspapers and the greater freedom of publication in volume, and to angle different stories to different outlets,² though without compromising his vision.³ Aware that the nouvelle L'Héritage might be a bit "vive" for the Figaro, Maupassant destined it otherwise for the Gil Blas⁴ (though in the event, for reasons of timing, it appeared in La Vie Militaire). But he remains implacably opposed to any censorship by newspaper editors,⁵ and in his chroniques frequently stresses the artist's duty to show the (brutal) truth, both as regards what is shown and how it is shown. He attacks the public's desire for a sentimental idealization and falsi-fication of reality in a literature that is "invraisemblable, sympathique et consolante" ("Autour d'un livre", Chroniques, I, 283), a literature that is ultimately hypo critical in that the reader knows that what it represents is not really the case.

L'écrivain [ … ] cesse d'être consciencieux et artiste, s'il s'efforce systématiquement de glorifier l'humanité, de la farder, d'atténuer les passions qu'il juge déshonnêtes au profit des passions qu'il juge honnêtes. [ … ] Il est indiscutable que les rapports sexuels entre hommes et femmes tiennent dans notre vie la plus grande place, qu'ils sont le motif déterminant de la plupart de nos actions.

La société moderne attache une idée de honte au fait brutal de l'accouplement [ … ]. Et voilà que l'hypocrisie mondaine nous veut forcer à l'enguirlander de sentiment pour en parler dans un livre.

("Les Audacieux", Chroniques, II, 280-81)

He attacks not just this falsification of "la chose", but also the equally hypocritical reluctance of society to talk about sex at all, the suppression of "le mot" (Chroniques, I, 356): "Le délit d'outrage aux bonnes moeurs ne vise guère que cet acte honorable et si naturel auquel tout le monde se livre régulièrement et sans lequel l'humanité n'existerait pas" ("Chez le ministre", Chroniques, II, 146).

Depuis quelques années les gens soi-disant honnêtes s'en prennent surtout à la littérature appelée pornographique. Nous n'avons plus le droit de parler franchement de l'accouplement des êtres, acte aussi utile à la race et aussi innocent en soi que celui de la nutrition, [ … ] sans exciter dans le public pudibond mais débauché un ouragan d'indignation.

("Fille de fille", Chroniques, II, 329)

This refusal to acknowledge and name known realities, which leads either to silence and evasions, or to euphemisms, is satirized in a humorous chronique of 1882, "Conflits pour rire" (Chroniques II, 45-9), prompted by the new law of 2 August 1882 which represented a first restriction of the law of press freedom of 1881, and was intended to counter "un déferlement de publications obscènes à bon marché".⁶ A village priest, shocked by the primitive sculpture of a naked Adam and Eve on his church porch, attempts to conceal the "groupe trop naturel" by putting trousers on Adam (fixed with sealing wax), then, assisted by his servante, is caught "en train d'amoindrir Adam" by night. The priest is attempting to suppress sight of la chose; and in his narrative, Maupassant refers to the offending genitalia only by oblique expressions: "notre père à tous se dressait dans le costume originel"; the priest plans to "[diminuer] un peu notre père Adam, rien qu'un peu"; "le morceau que venait de perdre le générateur du genre humain" is kept as evidence. Maupassant is satirizing false modesty, but his euphemistic language ironically affects the very hiding that he mocks.

Maupassant may express his preference for sexual explicitness at times, for the "cru", "chaud", explicit older language (Chroniques, I, 288), and even call for explicit poetry on sexual variations, "l'amour défendu, raffiné, inventif":

Moi je voudrais, et ce serait de la bonne pornographie, je voudrais qu'un poète, un vrai poète les chantât audacieusement, un jour, en des vers hardis et passionnés, ces choses qui font rougir les imbéciles. Il ne faudrait là ni gros mots, ni polissonneries, ni sous-entendus; mais une suite de petits poèmes simples et francs, bien sincères.

("Celles qui osent!", Chroniques, II, 335)

But the satire of "Conflits pour rire", shows paradoxically the advantages that lie in not naming the contentious parts. The jeu de cache-cache that is the subject of the article is operating on a linguistic level too. Maupassant can exploit the restraints that inevitably exist both in the language of society, and in print, in various ways, as he knew the writers of the past had done. In a chronique of 1888, "Le Style épistolaire", discussing the correspondence of the maréchal de Tessé published that year, he notes:

Les plaisanteries les plus osées sur les choses dont il semble que l'on doive le moins parler, les anecdotes les plus vives, dont M. de Rambuteau [the editor] a dû même supprimer quelquesunes, faisaient donc sourire, sans les fâcher, sans les choquer, les princesses les plus augustes. [ … ] Elles y sont contées, en effet, avec une adresse spirituelle, qu'on appelait alors un tour galant, et qui consistait à escamoter l'audace sous l'élégance piquante de la phrase. Tessé, comme la plupart des hommes et des femmes de ce siècle, avait acquis une ingéniosité spéciale, pour faire passer les plaisanteries les plus hardies, en attirant d'abord l'attention par des cabrioles de rhétorique.

(Chroniques, III, 355-6)

The argument points two ways: the scabrous subjects are both part of reality, but seemingly excessive and unmentionable; the language, with its "sous-entendus" (III, 356) both hides them and elaborates on them. Maupassant develops the idea with a sustained comparison between a transparent jupe de danseuse and the nudité it both hides and reveals: "la pensée s'égaye de ce tour, s'amuse de cette farce, et accepte de voir le dessous, à cause du dessus destiné, semblait-il, à le dissimuler" (Chroniques, III, 356).

Shock is an essential ingredient of Maupassant's stories, and not just simply on the level of the reader's reaction to the histoire in Genette's sense,⁷ of events and surprise endings. Insofar as a recurrent preoccupation is, as Sullivan has argued, the attempt "to lift the mask of appearance, to expose hypocrisy, to provide an unobstructed view of a piece of the world as it is, not as it is purported to be",⁸ it is perhaps natural that the characters whose blindness (due to complacency, habit, or reluctance to see), or inhibitions, or more conscious hypocrisy, are being exposed, should find this confrontation with reality shocking. Indeed, it has been argued that the only logical outcome for such an experience is suicide or madness.⁹

Shock can of course take many forms: a character in a heterodiegetic narrative discovers the shocking truth (Promenade); a character tells of his or her discovery of the shocking truth to someone else (Garçon, un bock!); a tale told by a character shocks the narratee(s) (La Chevelure, Miss Harriet). What is constant is Maupassant's construction of characters both inside stories and in frame narratives to intensify the effect, as much by stressing their conventionality, constraints, or blindness, as by insistence on the brutality of the truth they discover or the deliberate provocativeness of the narrator. Such character construction can range from the conventional Dufour family in Une Partie de campagne, whom the two canotiers "épouvantèrent [ … ] par le récit de leurs fatigues prodigieuses, de leurs bains pris en sueur, de leurs courses dans le brouillard des nuits" (I, 249), to the complacent bachelor in L'Ermite (II, 685), jolted out of his unawareness by his discovery of his unwitting incest. Likewise the situation or attitude of a frame narratee can be used to intensify the potential to shock of the embedded tale. In En voyage (I, 431), an anecdote of cruel and pointless death, chance, and helplessness in the face of nature (a boy has to watch his brother drown in a well in the countryside, unable to help him or to get help) is told to a female narratee distant and safe in a protected urban room. In La Veillée (I, 445) the children who read their dead mother's letters as they watch over her body, letters that reveal an unsuspected passionate affair, represent the respectability of law and religion: a magistrate "aux principes inflexibles" and a nun. Their response is condemnation and rejection: the letters are bundled back in a drawer. There is a similar response in La Confession (II, 371) when the family discover, this time with a posthumous reading of the testament of the universally respected M. Badon-Leremincé, a scandal of the past (the infanticide of his mistress's child): they burn the will. The shocked response of these narratees is in effect a desire not to hear, parallel to the desire of the mass of humanity (as Maupassant sees it) not to know, an "automatic hypocrisy":

Toute notre view, toute notre morale, tous nos sentiments, tous nos principes sont hypocrites; et nous le sommes inconsciemment, sans le savoir [ … ]. Tout ce qui n'est plus hypocrite nous blesse comme un outrage à notre honnêteté de parade, à nos conventions mondaines, à nos usages de fausses paroles, de fausses protestations, de faux visages.

(Chroniques, I, 285)

Jean Rousset has noted how a fictional narratee can react defensively to an embedded tale, showing "réticences", or interrupting "pour se protéger de la fascination du récit par une mise en distance thérapeutique."¹⁰ The response of Maupassant's narratees frequently goes further in the desire not to know as a sign of wilful social, sexual or moral blindness. The audience in La Rempailleuse (I, 546) is initially reluctant to hear the tale because of the social status of the heroine: a situation echoed in the story itself where the chemist and his wife are indignant at the devotion of the rempailleuse. At the end of Une Ruse (I, 560),¹¹ the female narratee is shocked by the doctor's tale of how he was faced with and solved the problem of getting the body of a woman's lover out of the house before the husband returns: "La jeune femme crispée demanda: / 'Pourquoi m'avezvous raconté cette épouvantable histoire?'" (II, 565). On a more frivolous level, narratees can manifest a superficial and hypocritical pretence of not wanting to know in ritual gestures and exclamations of shock to preserve appearances, as in Joseph (II, 506), where the successive stages of the baronne's revelation of her manipulation and seduction of the manservant are punctuated by the repeated shocked reactions of her (equally tipsy) narratee to her defiance of the conventions of marriage, class, and male initiative: "—Oh! ma chère! …" and "—Oh! Andrée".

Where the situation can produce more complex narrative interest is when limited and conventional moral or social attitudes produce, not just a narratee who does not want to hear, or know, but a narrator who does not want to tell (in both cases paradoxically reversing the expected norm of a narrative situation). This is arguably the case in some heterodiegetic narratives, where Maupassant echoes the characters' hypocritical reluctance to confront and express certain realities (both la chose and le mot) by a récit that teasingly refuses to say or show things. The narrator of Boule de Suif echoes the euphemisms ("Ces dames surtout trouvaient des délicatesses de tournures, des subtilités d'expression charmantes, pour dire les choses les plus scabreuses") and hypocrisy ("Elles s'épanouissaient dans cette aventure polissonne") (I, 111) of the characters by playing with focalization and ellipsis. The narrator keeps us largely with the group of travellers; all the exchanges between Boule de Suif and the Prussian take place "off stage". The dialogue between Cornudet and Boule de Suif in the corridor, when (we suppose) he too seeks her favours, is filtered through the eyes and ears of Loiseau, so that we have to guess Cornudet's request, and the return of Loiseau to his room and his wife is cut short at a testing point. During the celebratory dinner, Loiseau makes jokes "d'un goût déplorable" (I, 116) about the implied activities of Boule de Suif and the Prussian; Maupassant's humour is less coarse, but just as Loiseau appeals to the group's awareness of what is going on upstairs, so too the narrator appeals to the reader's awareness of what keeps the passengers awake:

Et toute la nuit, dans l'obscurité du corridor coururent comme des frémissements, des bruits légers, à peine sensibles, pareils à des souffles, des effleurements de pieds nus, d'imperceptibles craquements. Et l'on ne dormit que très tard, assurément, car des filets de lumière glissèrent longtemps sous les portes. Le champagne a de ces effets-là; il trouble, dit-on, le sommeil. (I, 117)

In such a story (as in the more marked grivoiserie and double entendre of L'Héritage (II, 3), where the innuendos of a testing narrator match dishonest and salacious characters) narrators don't (quite) tell so that their euphemisms and evasions ironically highlight hypocrisy on the level of events. Other tales however accept the necessary inhibitions and constraints of language in society, without indignation, and derive a certain detached amusement from the incongruities that they throw up, and in particular with the complexities they offer for spinning tales and constructing a formally coherent short story. The frankness of the histoire (and critics from Lemaitre to Forestier have commented on his directness when talking about sex)¹² is filtered through and intensified by an awareness, by narrators as much as by the characters, of what cannot be said. These stories may seem slight in comparison to Boule de Suif; the use of allusion, double-entendre, euphemism, elision and restricted focalization can no doubt descend into a rather facile naughtiness appealing to the readership of Gil Blas but demanding little of them, and can represent just a way of subverting the required constraints imposed on published language by suggesting rather than stating, and relying on the imagination of the reader. Maupassant can however exploit the inhibitions of his characters to spin a tale out of minimal material, using the narratorial evasions and euphemisms to echo the hesitations and embarrassment of the characters.

In La Serre (I, 855),¹³ the dormant love-life of the Lerebours is rejuvenated by their discovery (and watching) of their maid's rendez-vous in the greenhouse. Focalization and narrative ellipses are crucial in setting the tone. Having heard nocturnal noises in the house, interpreted as burglars, Mme Lerebour dispatches her husband to investigate: and we stay with her in the bedroom as her husband leaves (and is absent for 45 minutes), and she is gripped with fears, and have only his account, punctuated by the characteristic points of suspension of the inhibited narrator, when he returns: "C'était … c'était … Céleste qui avait un … un … rendezvous dans la serre … Si tu savais ce que … ce que … ce que j'ai vu … '"; and the following events are cut short by an ellipsis: "Mais lui, la tenant à pleins bras, l'entraînait document vers le lit …": followed by a blanc (I, 859) and a cut to the next morning. Likewise at the end as we see the couple, in an iterative present, revisiting the greenhouse:

Par les nuits claires quelquefois, les deux époux vont, à pas furtifs, le long des massifs et des platesbandes jusqu'à la petite serre au bout du jardin. Et ils restent là blottis l'un près de l'autre contre le vitrage comme s'ils regardaient dedans une chose étrange et pleine d'intérêt. (I, 860)

Here it is not so much that the elided scenes or the spectacles cut off by the restricted focalization are imagined by a reader left free to his (or her) own devices; rather that they are provided by what Eco would argue is the reader's repertory of "intertextual scenarios",¹⁴ of ready-made erotic memories or scenes.

It is however at the level of framed narration, or with clearly homodiegetic narrators, when an explicit fictional narrator (and generally a fictional narratee) are both present, that the potential of inhibited narrators for creating effects of tension or of comedy can be most fully exploited. Particularly, as one might expect, when the narratee is a woman. It is true that Maupassant can sometimes merely set up female narrators and narratees in such a way that their supposed inhibitions merely serve as a way of calling attention to sous-entendus, and that their euphemisms just highlight what is evaded, without any real thematic link with the story. In Sauvée (II, 651), for instance, the marquise de Rennedon gives a gleeful account to her friend the baronne de Grangerie of how she has hired a maid to set up her husband's capture in flagrante delicto in order to obtain a divorce. Maupassant here multiplies possible occasions of inhibition and embarrassment, and consequently of sous-entendus, evasions, and euphemisms, by exploiting situations of dialogue: either between narrator and narratee, as when Rennedon tells Grangerie of the shady intermediary approached to find a suitable maid: '"Comment dirais-je … [ … ] tu sais … de ces hommes qui font des affaires de toute … de toute nature …'" (II, 652); or with the discovery of the flagrant délit: '"J'ouvre la porte toute grande … Ah! ah! ah! ça y était en plein … en plein … ma chère … '" (II, 656); or between the narrator and a character in her story: as when she outlines tentatively to the intermediary the plan of finding a maid, or when Renndedon first meets the maid, or when the maid announces success "d'un air timide": '"Je fus un peu surprise, un rien émue même, non de la chose, mais plutôt de la manière dont elle me l'avait dite. Je balbutiai: "Et … et … ça s'est bien passé? … /—Oh! très bien, madame." '" (II, 655) But when Rennedon is reporting to Grangerie any such embarrassed encounter, she herself no longer shows any embarrassment before her narratee: the contrivance is clearly just to highlight the naughtiness; and one is above all aware, as Forestier notes of "la narration de ces secrets entre femmes", that they are for male consumers (II, 1491, about the similar La Confidence).

In other stories, however, there is a link between on the one hand the inhibitions of characters and the delays of the narration, and on the other, the themes and the point of the histoire. In La Bûche (I, 352), the narrator is explaining to a woman friend why he has never married; he relates being left alone after dinner with his friend's wife, a prey to her advances; a falling log in the fire saves him from yielding and being caught by the husband's unexpected and premature return: blazing log saves from flagrant délit. He dwells on the "gêne singulière" of the evening, his vain attempts to fill the "silences embarrassants" of the conversation, to fend off her advances (I, 354). When the climax comes, the narrator finds the narration of events increasingly difficult: he can't explain to his female narratee what would have happened any more than his younger self was able to find a way of responding decisively to his friend's wife: should he betray his friend? or play the role of Joseph (with a clearly dangerous Potiphar's wife)?

… Enfin, une minute de plus … vous comprenez, n'est-ce pas? Une minute de plus et … j'étais … non, elle était … pardon, c'est lui qui l'était! … ou plutôt qui l'aurait été, quand voilà qu'un bruit terrible nous fit bondir. (I, 356)

And the narration resumes without further hesitation, with both problems solved: his young self is saved by the log and the husband's return, his narration can return to that of unembarrassing events. Similarly in La Fenêtre (I, 896), the narrator hesitates before revealing the full horror of his blunder at the climax of the tale (he mistakes from behind the respectable widow he is courting for her maid, whom he has seduced), and likewise intensifies the suspense of the moment and the awfulness of his act by reminding us at this point of the female narratee:¹⁵

Je la reconnus aussitôt, pleine, fraîche, grasse et douce, la face secrète de ma maîtresse, et j'y jetai, pardon, madame, j'y jetai un tendre baiser, un baiser d'amant qui peut tout oser. (I, 901)

More elaborately, in Enragée? (I, 939) the narratee has (conventionally) prompted the narrative ("Tu me demandes de te raconter mon voyage de noces") (I, 939). The subject as much as the narratee inhibits the narrator ("Comment veux-tu que j'ose?"; "Je prends du courage en écrivant et je me décide à tout dire" (I, 939). Her tale is one of comic misapprehensions: she cannot understand her husband's advances in bed, thinks that he is going mad and is going to kill her; she mistakes sexual pleasure for the onset of rabies. The mistakes spring from her ignorance. She has not been informed about sexual realities, first by her family, then by her husband, who assumes she is mischievously feigning ignorance (a lack of information that Maupassant treats elsewhere seriously, in Une Vie).¹⁶ The reasons they have not told her are precisely the fears and inhibitions that constrain her as she gives the account of events to her friend: "Oh! ma chère, comment dire ça? Enfin voici" (I, 941). It is only obliquely and allusively that she can evoke her experiences, bringing out the rabies/orgasm parallel ("Les irritantes obsessions de mon mari déterminèrent un nouvel accès, qui fut plus long que le premier. J'avais envie de déchirer, de mordre, de hurler [ … ]") (I, 945). As Maupassant develops the story, it is permeated by a network of references to telling/not telling that draw out the protagonist's anxieties. Not only has her mother not dared to "effleurer ce sujet délicat" of sex (I, 939), her parents do not write to her about her pet dog, which had bitten her before she left, increasing her anxieties about rabies. She is of course reluctant to express her fears on this score to her husband: "Pour rien au monde je n'aurais voulu avouer la pensée qui me torturait" (I, 943); "Vingt fois je faillis lui dire mon abominable secret, mais je me tus" (I, 943). She hides her fears of rabies, they anxiously hide the realities of sex, and even her husband's tardy explanations are "sommaires" (I, 942) and do not prepare her to understand her physical sensations. Hence the confusions and misunderstandings, intensified by her vivid imagination.

The exploitation of inhibited narrators (teasing, suspense, emphasis, thematic complexity) is even more evident, when Maupassant underscores the problem of telling by a proliferation of retellings. The problem in La Rouille (I, 539), and the driving force behind events, is not so much male impotence, as the title might obliquely suggest,¹⁷ but the reluctance of the male characters to face it openly and talk about it seriously. The baron Hector de Coutelier, now over 50, has a sole and "inapaisable passion": hunting, his only activity and subject of conversation: "dès qu'on parlait d'autre chose, il n'écoutait plus et s'essayait tout seul à fredonner des fanfares" (I, 540). His friend M. de Courville and his family plan to marry the baron to a widow. Having been won over by Mme Berthe de Vilers at her first erratic but successful shots, and apparently on the verge of committing himself, he puts off making his proposal without giving a reason to his friend: "Le baron se troubla soudain, et balbutiant: 'Non … non … il faut d'abord que je fasse un petit voyage … un petit voyage … à Paris'" (I, 542-3). It is his anxieties about his sexual competence (after sixteen years of inaction) that lead to this experimental trip to Paris, but its purpose remains undisclosed to M. de Courville, and to the reader. On his return, "changé, vieilli", he calls his friend in secret to a meeting, and "visiblement embarrassé", mysteriously declares to his friend: '"Je voulais vous dire … tout de suite … que cette … cette affaire … vous savez bien … est manquée'", refusing further explanation: '"Ce serait trop pénible à dire.'" The mystery prompts speculation in the friend's family: illegitimate children? an old affair? But three months later, drink helping, he reveals more of the situation, but still hesitantly:

"Depuis le temps que j'avais perdu l'habitude de … de … de l'amour, enfin, je ne savais plus si je serais encore capable de … de …, vous savez bien … Songez donc? voici maintenant seize ans exactement que … que … que … pour la dernière fois, vous comprenez. Dans ce pays ce n'est pas facile de … de … vous y êtes. Et puis j'avais autre chose à faire. J'aime mieux tirer un coup de fusil. Bref, au moment de m'engager devant le maire et le prêtre à … à … ce que vous savez, j'ai eu peur. Je me suis dit: Bigre, mais si … si …j'allais rater. [ … ] Enfin, pour en avoir le coeur net, je me suis promis d'aller passer huit jours à Paris." (I, 544)

His attempt to explain his predicament, with euphemisms (l'amour), periphrases ("ce que vous savez"), ellipses, appeals to his listener, conveys his inhibitions; he is only at ease and specific with a hunting vocabulary (which is not without generating appropriate double entendres, given the sexual sense of "tirer un coup"). His friend only superficially maintains an appearance of seriousness and sympathy: "M. de Courville se tordait pour ne pas rire"; and then retells the tale to his wife, "en suffoquant de gaieté" (I, 545). His wife does not laugh, but just proposes "avec un grand sérieux" to recall the planned bride. Maupassant has presented the baron's predicament in a series of different lights. Initially it is a puzzle (about the reasons for the trip to Paris, the cancelled proposal), created both by the baron (not telling his friend) and by the heterodiegetic narrator (who does not tell us); a puzzle that prompts the friend to seek a secret that would explain it. It then comes out successively as a source of private embarrassment to the baron, as male joke at the expense of another male's misfortune (as told by Courville to his wife), and is finally dismissed by her as a minor difficulty: '"Bah! Quand on aime sa femma, entendezvous, cette chose-là … revient toujours'". This silences Courville, "un peu confus lui-même" (I, 545), and brings to a close a story generated not so much by an intimate problem, but by the problem and avatars of its disclosure to others.

Un Sage (I, 1087) in the same way exploits the combination of narration and inhibition to give interest to what would otherwise be little more than a mildly salacious story. Blérot, a childhood friend of the narrator, after the initial delights of marriage, finds his health being destroyed by the innocent but exhausting sexual demands of his wife; he follows his friend's blunt advice: "'Donne-lui des amants plutôt que de te laisser tuer ainsi'" (I, 1091), and is restored to health; he celebrates (on meeting his friend again) by a visit to the brothel. In terms of narrative content there is an obvious pattern: health → ill-health → health restored, reinforced by the appropriately named René Blérot saying at the end, of his refound friendship: "'Il me semble que je renais'" (I, 1092). But this surface pattern (Blérot's histoire) is echoed by a less obvious one (the narrator's histoire): intimacy with friend → lost intimacy → intimacy restored.

What provides the narrative interest is the multiple roles of the friend and initial homodiegetic narrator. He has been cut off from his previous open and intimate relationship with Blérot by his marriage. Before, "nous n'avions rien de secret"; now "c'est à peine si nous trouvions quelque chose à nous dire" (I, 1088). When he first meets the ill Blérot, he is puzzled by this mysterious transformation of his barely recognizable friend, and (in a pattern similar to La Rouille) forces the secret out of him in spite of his reluctance: "Il balbutia: 'Mais je n'ai rien à te dire'" (I, 1089). Embarrassed, Blérot reveals his secret through hints, allusions, evasions, a delaying suspense (which sustains the reader's and narratee's curiosity). The second time he meets Blérot, six months later, a transformation in his health as total as the one that had prompted his initial questions makes him again demand an explanation, and again leads to Blérot's embarrassment ("cramoisi"). The friend's comments on his healthy appearance are as unwelcome as were those on his ill-health: "Il balbutia très vite [ … ] " (I, 1091). Blérot's invitation to dinner and presentation of the lover, "un grand garçon [ … ] avec des joues velues et un aspect d'hercule mondain', explain all without Blérot having this time to say anything more (since the friend still pesters him with questions) than just: "'C'était trop bête de se laisser crever comme ça, à la fin'" (I, 1093). So the initial narrator/friend has become narratee to Blérot, but has not only become the means of forcing the confessions out of him, but also has a key role as active participant in saving his life (and his marriage?) with his blunt suggestion.¹⁸ Their intimacy is now restored: "René ne cessait de me parler, familièrement, cordialement, franchement, comme autrefois" (I, 1092). Blérot's private sexual predicament, caused by "l'intimité du lit" (I, 1087), had cut Blérot off from intimacy with his friend. As Maupassant has developed the narrative, the story is perhaps less about restoring his health than about restoring that link between Blérot and his gynophobic friend (who formulates explicitly his anger, not just at Blérot's wife, but at "la femme, [ … ] cet être inconscient, charmant, terrible": I, 1091), and their ability to talk freely. The final proposed visit to the brothel provides a revenge on the female, and seals their refound intimacy, as well as providing a paradoxical twist for the end. Perhaps the story should be called not so much Un Sage as Deux amis.

Le Remplaçant (I, 700) is again, at the level of histoire, a simple tale: a respectable, dévote widow hires the regular sexual services of a soldier; when he cannot make the appointment one week, he sends a friend as a substitute; this prompts an initial quarrel over the sharing of the proceeds, then a resolution when both are taken on, providing the service twice a week. This could be summarized schematically: an arrangement is set up; → it is threatened (Silballe's absence); → substitute arrangement; → new threat (quarrel Silballe/friend); → new arrangement. At the centre might seem to be the point that shocks the narratee in the frame narrative: the false respectability of Mme Bonderoi.

It is, however, not really just a story of "unmasking" of hypocrisy, with a playful element of gender role reversal (as the narrator suggests, we would not be surprised by the male version of what we see: the pursuit of youth of the other sex, sexual exploitation at work (Mme Bonderoi uses her husband's clercs while he is alive), or the prostitutes supporting their families on the proceeds, as the soldiers do their parents). Her "vices secrets" (I, 700) imply secrecy; but this secret is told; in fact, has to be told (to the appropriate persons) at various points if the supply of lovers is to be maintained. This creates a paradoxical pattern where characters are recurrently sworn to secrecy, then told something, and then themselves tell the forbidden story. Moreover the characters may want to tell, but circumstances and conventions place inhibitions on what they can say: neither Mme Bonderoi nor the soldiers can mention sex directly, which leads to a series of euphemisms and suggestions.

The initial frame sets up a conventional conversation in which the narratee's surprise prompts the second narrator to reveal "tous les détails" about some as yet unspecified surprising information about Mme Bonderoi. But rather than giving a direct account of "l'aventure invraisemblable arrivée jeudi dernier", the second narrator reveals that he has heard it from a friend, captain Jean d'Anglemare, who in turn had heard it from one of the soldiers in question: so that before we reach the embedded tale, the first-hand oral narration by Siballe (with its humorously contrasting style), we are aware of the story passing through a succession of narrators. Siballe relates his first encounter with Mme Bonderoi from the point of view of his innocent self at the time, initially unaware of what she is proposing (unlike the reader who has been told already: "Elle aimait les beaux garçons", and can guess). She swears him to secrecy: '"Alors ell' se fit comprendre ouvertement par des manifestations. Quand j'vis de quoi il s'agissait, je posai mon casque sur une chaise; et je lui montrai que dans les dragons on ne recule jamais, mon cap'taine'". He too, rather than saying explicitly, uses allusions and military metaphors.¹⁹ The remplaçant is treated similarly: "'Elle le regarde, lui fait aussi jurer le secret.'" After the soldiers' quarrel and duel, Siballe now tells the captain, who tells his friend (the second narrator), "ria[nt] aux larmes"; and the friend repeats all this to his narratee: "Mais il [d'Anglemare] m'a fait aussi jurer le secret qu'il avait garanti aux deux soldats. 'Surtout, n'allez pas me trahir, gardez ça pour vous, vous me le promettez?'": and of course the friend both promises and tells his narratee of the promise to d'Anglemare … which he is now breaking: "'Oh! ne craignex rien'" (I, 703). So if on one level the story may seem to have at its centre the joke about the remplaçant (as Forestier notes, singularly appropri ate for soldiers: I, 1502), or the revelation of "vices secrets" in bourgeois women, the récit is largely constructed around attempts to swear to secrecy (by Mme Bonderoi to both soldiers, by Siballe to the captain, by the captain to his friend) and their failure, without which there would be not only no story-telling, but no histoire, had not Siballe told his friend, desperate not to "lose" Mme Bonderoi.

The stories of sous-entendus and allusions that Maupassant wrote in this vein for Gil Blas tend to attract relatively little critical esteem and attention. For Marie-Claire Bancquart, the clin d'oeil of author to reader "agace facilement [ … ] le lecteur un peu exigeant".²⁰ Though some may deserve this, in many others what is interesting is Maupassant's ability to exploit the paradoxical narrative possibilities of inhibition. If a narrator's main aim is to get an idea across to a narratee whatever her (or his) resistance, it may be necessary to write "brutalement, sans ménagements galants", as does the narrator of Les Caresses (I, 952), when he attempts to overcome the woman's physiological revulsion at sex. But this produces in the event a tale lacking in tension and in narrative interest, and which concentrates simply and didactically on the ideas. Many other stories show that shockable narratees and inhibited narrators are more effective in generating thematic echoes, narrative complexity, and verbal play, out of a minimal anecdotal content—not to mention humour.

Notes

¹ Maupassant, Contes et nouvelles, ed. Louis Forestier, 2 vols, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (Paris: Gallimard, 1988-89 (first edition 1974-79)), II, 1060. References in the text are to volume and page of this edition, and to Chroniques, Préface d'Hubert Juin, 3 volumes (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1980).

² On the tone of different newspapers, see La Parure et autres contes parisiens, ed. M.-C. Bancquart (Paris: Garnier, 1984), pp. 22-24; Mary Donaldson-Evans, "Nuit de Noël and Conte de Noël: Ironic Diptych in Maupassant's Work", French Review, 54 (1980-81), 66-77; and on Gil Blas, Contes et nouvelles, I, 1379, and Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral and Fernand Terrou (editors), Histoire générale de la presse française, 3 vols (Paris: PUF, 1969-1976), III (1972), 380-1.

³ See David Bryant, The Rhetoric of Pessimism and Strategies of Containment in the Short Stories of Guy de Maupassant (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen, 1993), p. 34.

⁴Correspondance inédite, ed. A. Artinian and E. Maynial (Paris: Wapler, 1951), p. 177.

⁵ "Tous les directeurs des journaux où j'ai écrit savent également que je n'ai jamais toléré qu'on supprimàt un seul mot. J'ai cessé ma collaboration régulière au Gaulois après une modification, ou plutôt une coupure faite en mon absence, à un article sur Manon Lescaut, cet article ayant paru un peu vif (Correspondance inédite, p. 228; see also p. 231).

⁶Histoire générale de la presse française, III, 24. The effect was to make "outrages aux bonnes moeurs" in newspapers and posters punishable by a tribunal correctionnel; books still went before a jury.

⁷ I use the distinction histoire/récit, and also homodiegetic/heterodiegetic, of Gérard Genette, "Discours du récit", in Figures III (Paris, Seuil, 1972).

⁸ Edward D. Sullivan, Maupassant: The Short Stories (London: Edward Arnold, 1962), p. 57.

⁹ Charlotte Schapira, "La Folie—thème et outil narratif dans les contes de Maupassant", Neophilologus, 74 (1990), 30-43.

¹⁰ Jean Rousset, Le Lecteur intime, Paris, Corti, 1986, p. 63. On the role of the narratee generally, see notably Gerald Prince, "Introduction à l'étude du narrataire", Poétique, 4 (1973), 178-196; Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984). Recent studies on narrator and narratee in Maupassant include Andrea Calí, Figures narratologigues dans 'La Maison Tellier' (Lecce: Adriatica, 1981); Carmen Licari, "Le Lecteur des contes de Maupassant", Francofonia, 3 (1982), 91-103; Jaap Lintveldt, "Pour une analyse narratologique des Contes et nouvelles de Guy de Maupassant", in Fiction, narratologie, texte, genre, ed. Jean Bessière (New York: Lang, 1989); Tuula Lehman, Transitions savantes et dissimulées: une étude structurelle des contes et nouvelles de Guy de Maupassant (Helsinki: Societas Scientiarum Finnica, 1990). The emphasis tends to be on classification of technique rather than defining of effect.

¹¹ On the function of the frame and narrator/narratee relationships here, see Angela Moger, "That Obscure Object of Narration", Yale French Studies, 63 (1982), 129-138.

¹² Forestier in I, xlviii; Jules Lemaitre refers to "la franchise du récit, [ … ] la sensualité de l'artiste, laquelle au moins nous épargne la grivoiserie", in an article originally published in the Revue Bleue, which paradoxically obliged him to be euphemistic himself: "voulant les relire [les contes] en bonne compagnie [ … ] je passerai vite où il faudra" ("Guy de Maupassant", Les Contemporains, lre série (Paris: Boivin, s.d.), pp. 285-310). The Pléiade notes (I, 1351-7) illustrate the extensive nature of the cuts necessary for Histoire d'une fille de ferme to be published in the Revue Bleue: nearly all the explicit sexual passages are deleted, even between cocks and hens.

¹³ Compare Le Crime au père Boniface (II, 168) for another tale of inadvertent discovery that depends on picking up hints and double entendres, and where the reader has to guess what Boniface has failed to realize (he has heard, not a crime, but sounds of lovemaking), and where the narrator elides the explicit revelations (only alluding to the gestures of the brigadier and reducing what he finally says to a whisper that we are not allowed to hear).

¹⁴ See Umberto Eco, Lector in fabula. Le rôle du lecteur, traduit de l'italien par Myriem Bouzaher (Paris: Livre de poche, 1990), pp. 101-105.

¹⁵ In the original version of the story (Gil Blas), an introductory frame established the narratee as a woman who demands the story from a reluctant narrator. The final version cuts the frame; the two unexpected reminders of this narratee towards the close are thus odd (as Forestier notes: I, 1566), but all the more revealing of Maupassant's tactics.

¹⁶ As Forestier notes (I, 1576).

¹⁷ Given that se dérouiller could have the sense of 'to wanton: after a period of abstention' (John S. Farmer, Vocabula Amatoria [New York: University Books, 1966; first published anonymously, 1896].

¹⁸ Compare the similar role of narrator/narratee who becomes agent in Mademoiselle Perle, albeit more destructively.

¹⁹ With possible salacious overtones: 'Quand la corvée a été faite, mon cap'taine, je me suis mis en position de me retirer' (I, 702).

²⁰La Parure et autres contes parisiens, p. 54.