Bel-Ami Reading Order

Bel-Ami (1885) by Guy de Maupassant is his most ambitious and most celebrated novel — the story of Georges Duroy ('Bel-Ami'), the handsome, ambitious, and fundamentally amoral Norman who arrives in Paris from North Africa with ten francs and rises to wealth and political influence through a series of sexual relationships with well-connected women. The novel is a ferocious study in the social mechanisms of Third Republic France — the newspaper world, the colonial policy debates, the political marriages — and Duroy's ruthless ascent is both a personal character study and an analysis of how the Third Republic had turned the Second Empire's open corruption into a more hypocritical version of the same game. Maupassant's style is at its most controlled here, and the final image — Duroy ascending the Madeleine's steps to his society marriage as the crowd outside stares at him — is one of the most devastating endings in French fiction.