num_pages: 479
description: Maupassant's second novel, Bel-Ami (1885) is the story of a ruthlessly ambitious young man (Georges Duroy, christened "Bel-Ami" by his female admirers) making it to the top in fin-de-sihcle Paris. It is a novel about money, sex, and power, set against the background of the politics of the French colonization of North Africa. It explores the dynamics of an urban society uncomfortably close to our own and is a devastating satire of the sleaziness of contemporary journalism. Bel-Ami enjoys the status of an authentic record of the apotheosis of bourgeois capitalism under the Third Republic. But the creative tension between its analysis of modern behavior and its identifiably late nineteenth-century fabric is one of the reasons why Bel-Ami remains one of the finest French novels of its time, as well as being recognized as Maupassant's greatest achievement as a novelist. This new translation is complemented by fullest introduction and notes of any edition currently available.
language: French
title: Bel Ami
titlecomplete: Bel Ami
characters: Comte de Vaudrec, Clotilde de Marelle, Suzanne Walter, Monsieur Laroche-Mathieu, Rachel, Monsieur Walter, Charles Forestier, Madeleine Forestier (Du Roy), Georges Duroy (Du Roy), Laurine de Marelle, Jacques Rival, Norbert de Varenne, Virginie Walter
genres: Fiction, France, French Literature, School, Romance, Literature, Classics, Novels, 19th Century, Historical Fiction
ratings_count: 40074
places: Paris
publisher: Larousse