A Selection of the Chroniques (1881-87) (review)

Prior to 1971, scholars interested in the journalistic production of Guy de Maupassant had to ferret out his articles by searching through the newspapers with which he collaborated, notably Le Gaulois, Gil Blas, and Le Figaro. Under such conditions, his newspaper essays were largely ignored. Finally published in Pascal Pia's edition of the Œuvres complètes (1971), Maupassant's journalism became even more accessible in 1980 when Hubert Juin published a three-volume paperback edition in the Collection 1018. Despite the availability of such editions, Adrian Ritchie's volume of selected chroniques - the second one he has produced - is not redundant, for its abundant textual notes distinguish this edition from previous ones. Unlike scholarly editions of the past, which promised simply to deliver an authoritative version of a text, accompanied by a preface, textual variants, and notes that furnished information only about highly esoteric allusions, Professor Ritchie's edition of thirty newspaper articles selected from some two hundred of Maupassant's journalistic pieces conforms to more recent editorial practices, with footnotes so abundant that they sometimes take up more space on the page than the text itself.

In fact, the articles selected here invite this format, since without contextualization, many of them would be, if not incomprehensible, at least puzzling to the twenty-first century reader. Arranged chronologically and dealing with personalities as varied as Sarah Bernhardt and Léon Gambetta and topics as diverse as academic discourse, opera, les vespasiennes, the military draft, the Eiffel Tower, and democracy, the essays assembled here are studded with allusions to relatively minor contemporary events and literary or political figures who have passed into obscurity. While few academic readers need to have the Code Napoléon explained to them, or to be told who Alphonse Daudet, le général Boulanger or Jules Grévy were, the names Francesco Crispi and le lieutenant Chapuis (for example) are less widely known. Furthermore, the notes, although typically informational rather than analytical, are not limited to the identification of proper names, but engage the reader by discussing journalistic strategies, paradoxes, current cultural practices, etc.

The essays presented here are not connected in any obvious way, and one might reproach Professor Ritchie for failing to explain the reasons for his selection. It is of course true that all of them reflect in one way or another the preoccupations of the French citizenry of Maupassant's day and that they reveal Maupassant's opinions on a wide variety of contemporary issues, opinions that scholars familiar only with his fiction may sometimes find surprising. Because Maupassant was an intensely private person and because few of his personal letters have found their way into the public domain, readers interested in the "real" Maupassant have tended to turn to the fiction for revelations about the author. Professor Ritchie believes that such an enterprise is problematical and regards the journalistic articles as a more accurate means of access to Maupassant's thoughts. While some scholars might dispute this opinion, pointing to the fact that the author may be less guarded when he is able to disguise his opinions under the mantle of fiction, it is certainly not without interest to examine the persona that Maupassant projects when narrator and author coalesce, as they do in the journalism.

The Maupassant who emerges from a reading of these pages, although not always likable, is invariably provocative. His elitest denigration of parliamentary democracy (which, in his view, breeds mediocrity); his belief that artists and writers should be exempted from military service; his mockery of what passes for "respect," "honor" and "enthusiasm"; his well-known conviction that love and marriage are incompatible; his defense of a woman's right to be unfaithful to her husband - these and similar opinions are expressed forcefully and defended with wit and verve, in the best journalistic tradition.

Given the amount of research that went into the production of this volume, it is unfortunate...