Guy de Maupassant
I
I had been to a hypnotic séance and was on my way home across the Paris boulevards. The sirens of the trottoirs were sitting in front of the brightly-lit brasseries with their lords, drinking beer, while others were still wandering up and down under the wide awnings in front of the cafés. The thought occurred to me how much the type had altered during the last four years; it used to be the fashion to be as slim as a willow, with stays like a coat of mail, but now loose, negligent figures were to be seen under tight-fitting dresses, and where formerly people used to wear buds, they now decorated themselves with full-blown flowers. The rattling of the omnibuses mingled with the strident music of a Roumanian band in one of the neighbouring brasseries, and one’s eyes were dazzled by the glitter of real and false diamonds, and by the glances of their wearers, real or false as the case might be. The faces of the multitude as they swept past me were confounded in my mind with those I had just seen in the over-heated hall where the hypnotic séance had taken place. The perfumes that were wafted through the air were transformed in the memory of my olfactory nerves to the penetrating scents of musk, patchouli and poudre-de-riz, which the Parisian ladies carry with them into all theatres, omnibuses, and picture galleries whither they go, charging the atmosphere with a strong, oppressive, artificial odour, exquisitely compounded, and dry as the colours of the majority of modern French artists—a suspicious atmosphere, the excessive sensibility of which suggests sickness and hidden corruption. Again I seemed to see the faces of those who surrounded me in the close atmosphere of the small room where the newest fashionable pastime, a demonstration of the “magic circle,” had taken place—empty, weak, brutal, affected faces, such as form the larger portion of every popular assembly; and suddenly I realised, what my instinct had long since told me, the difference that exists between the expression on the faces of this race and the expression on the faces of that other race, to which I myself belonged, and which in its national varieties I had taken infinite trouble to understand, perhaps not altogether without success.
This séance of hypnotic, magnetic experiments was given by a new literary and theosophical set of young Frenchmen, called “the Adepts”; the people who assembled to witness the performance were members of the lower middle class, and ladies and gentlemen from all circles of society. The discovery of which I have spoken came upon me suddenly from under the giant roof of a straw hat trimmed with a wreath of roses, where I caught sight of a strange, death-like, glassy look in the eyes of a smiling beauty of uncertain age. I was struck by the number of cadaverous physiognomies which rendered it almost impossible to guess the age of Parisians, whether men or women. Young people wore the same expression as those of riper years, and even extreme youth had something ashen grey in the complexion, something that was like a breath of mildew, unpalpable, deceptive, as of premature old age. In the north everybody looks about as old as he is, not only according to the fixed sum of his years, but also according to the varying life-limit which is determined by a person’s vitality. There we have old and young and middle-aged. But here the majority are neither old nor young, and for the women there is no middle age. What is the reason? Is it entirely owing to the art of dress? Or is it due to that memento mori of an ancient civilisation—a counterfeit susceptibility? When we compare the French fashion papers with the faces of young Frenchwomen, the former might be taken for portraits. Here and there the same sweet smile which renders the mouth small and pointed, the same studied charm, the same artificial personality and excessive caution which mask the woman’s real nature until all that is spontaneous about her—age, soul, instinct—is for ever lost. It is perfectly true that these expressionless faces are to be met with everywhere. In Germany there is a large percentage of ladies in good society whose faces look like copies of the illustrations in magazines provided for family reading. But beneath it all there is something else, something absolutely different, a kind of broad, and as yet unspoilt, natural foundation in the Teutonic race, which compares favourably with the more and more narrowed, almost extinct nature in the Gallic race.
That which struck me most about these restless, expressionless eyes, was not the absence of soul in them which one notices in the German who broods over his beer and toddy, but an empty look such as you find in the eyes of a dead animal—an absence of feeling, a vacant stare, the Narcissus-look of self-reflecting satisfaction....
The omnibus for which I was waiting had not arrived, and I remained standing in front of a bookseller’s table where the newest publications were displayed. There in a row, side by side, lay Flirt, by Paul Hervieux; L’Amour Artificiel, by Jules Cazes; L’Inutile Beauté and Notre Cœur, by Guy de Maupassant. They lay there like a continuation of my thoughts, confirming the truth of those observations of which I had as yet hardly convinced myself. I came nearer and examined Notre Cœur, and meditated on the new element which this book contains, and on the old element which caused it to run through three editions in a fortnight. Old mingled with new, boldness with conventionality, there you have the secret of the best and most critical of modern French romance writers, Guy de Maupassant, Paul Bourget, and J. K. Huysmans, combined with that unsurpassable art of telling a story, that short, simple clearness of diction which renders Guy de Maupassant the greatest of the three.
An open carriage came driving out of a side street. A pretty little woman in a light-coloured dress lay back with her head resting against the cushions as though exhausted with lassitude and ecstasy, and under her large, yellow straw hat, pressed against her face, was the face of a man dressed in black who was sitting beside her, kissing her like one possessed, without ever raising his head, oblivious of all else....
It looked like the old French love, the love of Heloïse and Manon Lescaut and George Sand. The French women of to-day have ceased to love like that; it is only paid love that loves in that fashion now. The ladies of the bourgeoisie and the hautes mondaines do not love any more, and cannot love any more. That is exactly what those three books, lying side by side on the bookseller’s table, have to tell: Flirt, L’Amour Artificiel, and Notre Cœur.