Mensonges Reading Order

Mensonges (Lies, 1887) by Paul Bourget is his most socially panoramic novel, a portrait of Parisian literary and social life seen through the figure of René Vincy, a young poet who falls in love with Suzanne Moraines, a married woman whose apparent sincerity masks a systematic lying that pervades her entire social identity. Bourget uses 'lying' (le mensonge) as a central social concept: in the Paris of the 1880s, he argues, social convention has so thoroughly separated appearance from reality that lying — not deliberate deception but the automatic production of the social persona — has become the normal mode of human interaction. The title refers not to individual deception but to a systemic social condition: the world of the Parisian salon is a world in which appearance and reality are permanently disjoined, and the young man who loves sincerely in this world is necessarily the dupe of its conventions. Mensonges is the most directly sociological of Bourget's early novels and the most directly indebted to Balzac: the portrait of the literary world (the critic Jesserant, the literary salon of the Moraines, the publishing economy of the 1880s) is the most accurate document of its kind for the period. The novel belongs with Maupassant's Bel-Ami (1885) as the essential fictional portrait of the Third Republic literary and journalistic world.