Pierre et Jean by Guy de Maupassant

Read this several years ago; something about the novel stuck with me and provoked a rereading.

Pierre and Jean are brothers. Pierre the older is training to be a doctor; he is intelligent and "full of utopian and philosophical ideas." Jean, his younger brother, is getting ready to practice law; he is "as blond as his brother's was black... as calm as his brother was ardent... as well-mannered as his brother was sullen..."--at first sight, these two brothers are as different as can be.

They both love their mother (later on, Maupassant makes evident the Oedipal dimensions of their love, and the brothers' competitive jealousy); the mother is, as is common in many a Maupassant story, a Bovarian character, described as "frugal, middle-class, a little sentimental, and endowed with the tender soul of a cashier." ("...douée d'une âme tendre de cassière"--what a description!) She has suffered silently in her marriage to Roland, a vulgar man whose imagination fails to extend past the family boutique store. Now retired, they live in Havre where Roland can exercise his passion for fishing; Pierre and Jean are visiting them for their summer vacation.

One day, after fishing with their young, widowed neighbour, Mme Rosemilly, they receive news that lights these latent tensions into motion: a family friend--the rich, childless, bourgeois Marechal--passes away and makes Jean his sole inheritor. Maupassant takes this opportunity and performs a psychological examination of Pierre's mind; Pierre the Doctor makes precise incisions on his own psychological state, and "demasks the other that was in [him]" (p. 87).

Just as the other is unearthed in Pierre, Pierre starts to occupy the place of the other, the excluded, the bastard child in his family (a very common theme in Maupassant). As this happens, Pierre the doctor becomes Pierre the persecutor, and a minor suspicion of his mother's fidelity turns into a conviction, and once convicted, Pierre becomes her torturer.

His mother turns to Jean, and Jean, the bastard child, takes Pierre's place as the legitimate l'enfant d'amour. Pierre the bastard is eliminated, his familial ties cut, as he is cast away as the doctor on a transport ship--his is a social death, his "small marine bed, narrow and long like a coffin" (p. 210).

Really appreciate the French and their respect for literature. In this book, beyond Maupassant's masterpiece Pierre et Jean, there is Maupassant's famous essay, "The Novel," Bernard Pingaud's excellent critical essay, critical notes by Pingaud, and a dossier full of reviews by Henry James, Paul Bourget, and Anatole France. 

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