In Ghostly Japan Book

In Maupassant's second collection of stories - most originally published in Gil Blas during 1882, under the pseudonym of 'Maufrigneuse' - he returns to some of the key themes that made him famous, namely prostitution and the Franco-Prussian War. Although his prose remains as limpid as ever, there is a blustery, man-of-the-world quality to the writing here that I found slightly dispiriting when compared with Maupassant at his light, ironic best - a sense that he is taking his own settled opinions on (especially) the opposite sex more seriously than one might like.

Indeed the collection might well have been titled Women: Their Appeal and Utility. Maupassant's view of women here is, broadly, that they are an indispensable though irritating accessory to a man's life, with the sexes in a permanent state of inequality and conflict:

Voyez-vous, madame, quel que soit l'amour qui les soude l'un à l'autre, l'homme et la femme sont toujours étrangers d'âme, d'intelligence ; ils restent deux belligérants ; ils sont d'une race différente ; il faut qu'il y ait toujours un dompteur et un dompté, un maître et un esclave ; tantôt l'un, tantôt l'autre ; ils ne sont jamais deux égaux.

You see, madam, despite the love that binds them together, man and woman are always strangers in their souls and their intelligence; they remain two belligerents; they are of different races; there must always be a tamer and a tamed, a master and a slave; sometimes one, sometimes the other; they are never equals.

The stories play this dynamic out in a variety of ways. Often, the woman is portrayed as sexually predatory to a degree that seems to alarm the writer: so in 'Marroca', the narrator has a fling with a married Moroccan woman and is shocked by her willingness to kill her husband over the affair; in 'La Bûche' he is shocked by a friend's wife coming on to him; in 'Le Remplaçant' he is shocked by a woman's willingness to sleep with his friend if he himself is unavailable for a tryst. One extraordinary story, 'Fou ?', concerns a woman's crypto-erotic relationship with her horse, which the narrator ends up killing in a fit of jealousy.

Women's desire for sex is laughed at clubbishly; their desire for love, though, is derided outright. In 'Mots d'amour', for instance, we read the correspondence between an over-affectionate girl for her beau - je t'adore, je t'adore, je t'adore, ô mon beau coq - and his reply, immediately breaking up with her in disgust:

Ce que je ne comprends pas, par exemple, c'est que certaines femmes qui connaissent si bien l'irrésistible séduction des bas de soie fins et brodés, et le charme exquis des nuances, et l'ensorcellement des précieuses dentelles cachées dans la profondeur des toilettes intimes, et la troublante saveur du luxe secret, des dessous raffinées, toutes les subtiles délicatesses des élégances féminines, ne comprennent jamais l'irrésistible dégoût que nous inspirent les paroles déplacées ou niaisement tendres.

What I fail to understand is the way that certain women, who have such a good understanding of the seductive irresistibility of fine embroidered silk stockings, the exquisite charm of nuance, the bewitchment of precious lace hidden in the depths of one's intimate clothing, the disturbing appeal of concealed luxuriousness, of expensive underwear, all the subtle delicacies of feminine elegance - never understand the irresistible disgust inspired in us by inappropriate, lovey-dovey talk.

(This reminds me of the letter Flaubert wrote to his mistress after she got too saccharine for him - 'that perpetual confusion between panties and heart makes me vomit. All I want from you as a woman is your body; leave the sentimentality to the old folks.') Maupassant's portrait of this attitude is fascinating, though hardly upbeat. Certainly it might take you by surprise if you only know him from 'Boule de Suif', a story that was specifically about seeing beyond a woman's sexualisation to the common humanity beneath. That's not the mood he was in in 1882.

Of the war stories, 'Mademoiselle Fifi' itself is little more than an entertaining anecdote. 'Deux amis', set during the Siege of Paris, and full of wistful descriptions of Parisian landscapes and idealised sketches of the French character, is more successful, and has found a place in most Maupassant anthologies.