Bel-Ami

Georges Duroy is handsome, penniless, and hungry — a discharged cavalryman scraping by as a railway clerk in a Paris full of pleasures he cannot afford. A chance meeting with an old army comrade opens a door at a newspaper, and Duroy discovers that he has one gift worth more than talent: a face and a manner that women cannot resist. From that moment his rise is almost unbroken.

Using the wife who writes his articles for him, the mistress who adores him, and the proprietor’s wife and daughter in turn, Duroy climbs from rung to rung — each woman a step, each affair a transaction, each betrayal a promotion. The nickname a child gives him, Bel-Ami, “handsome friend,” spreads from salon to salon and becomes the banner of his career, until he stands at last triumphant on the steps of a great Parisian church with all the city at his feet and not a flicker of remorse.

Drawing on the newspaper world he knew from the inside, Maupassant wrote one of the sharpest satires of the press, of ambition, and of the glittering, money-driven Belle Époque demimonde ever set down. He tells the whole story of a scoundrel’s success in the cool, exact, unmoralising prose he learned from his mentor Flaubert — and leaves the reader to decide whether the novel has shown the punishment of a villain or his coronation.

This edition presents the complete public-domain English translation of the 1885 novel in clean, readable typesetting prepared for the modern e-reader, with an editor’s foreword on the book’s making and lasting power, a biographical note on Guy de Maupassant, a guide to further reading, and questions for reflection.