A haunting end to a society affair

This tale of seduction is the reason Proust loved Guy de Maupassant.

Like Death by Guy de Maupassant 240pp, NYRB, £9.99, ebook £9.02

The 19th-century French writer Guy de Maupassant is best remembered for his 300 short stories, particularly The Necklace, a chillingly Faustian fable. He was an acolyte of Flaubert, who was a close friend of Maupassant’s mother: the great master introduced the young Maupassant to Parisian high society and the salon world of the fin de siècle.

Like Death ( Fort comme la mort) is the fifth of six novels that Maupassant wrote before his untimely death from syphilis at the age of 42. It concerns a great painter, Olivier Bertin, toast of discerning hostesses and magnificent, even as he goes grey. His mistress is the Countess de Guilleroy, likewise still lovely as she approaches middle age, “like one of those rose bushes that keep blooming all season until, in an hour, they fall to pieces”. Their affair has lasted for 12 happy years: it is more conjugal than piercingly romantic.

Into this cosy scene comes Annette, the countess’s daughter, back from her country upbringing. The lovely young girl forcibly reminds Bertin of her mother, so that he finds himself mingling the two in his mind with “the sensation of a hand stirring the vase of his memory”. There is, too, in the daughter, a wildness lacking in the mother, a woman “grown pretty in the shade of walls and not in the sunshine of Heaven”. Bertin finds himself drawn to Annette – and the countess notices this growing attraction with despair, and eventually tragic but unpredictable consequences.

Maupassant’s characterisation is deft and vivid: a doctor is “one of those grave and fashionable physicians”; a woman “was deemed to have a grand manner because nothing disconcerted her”. He would be a great influence on Proust and this novel explains why: it is a story in which the past continually encroaches on – and haunts – the present; and the novel similarly lingers in the mind.