Historical Fiction Maupassant, Guy de: Bel Ami (Abridged), v1, 30 June 2015

[AlexBell]

Henri Rene Albert Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy in 1850. After serving in the Franco-Prussian war he became a civil servant, and in 1878 became a contributing editor to several newspapers. After the publication of Boule de Suif in 1880 he became a full time writer. Over the next eleven years he wrote about 300 short stories, 200 newspaper articles, eight novels, three travel books, a collection of poetry, and some plays. He was diagnosed with syphilis late in the decade, attempted suicide in 1892, was admitted to an asylum, and died of tertiary syphilis in 1893.

Bel Ami was his second novel, and was published in 1885. The first English translation in 1903 was subtitled 'The History of a Scoundrel'. The book tells the story of a poverty-stricken ex-soldier who becomes a journalist and rises to a position of riches and power through relationships with a series of wealthy and influential mistresses. The last scene of the story describes him wearing his Legion of Honour, leaving the altar with his bride and passing the bride's mother whom he had seduced some months before, and setting up a meeting with a previous mistress.

The text source was files from Wikimedia and the University of Adelaide ebook centre. I have not been able to identify the original source nor the name of the translator. The source files were checked against a French language version from the Edition du groupe and the Oxford Classics translation, and it is clear that they form an abridged and somewhat sanitised version of the original book.

I have curled quotation marks, silently corrected typos and mistranslations, italicised newspaper and book names, replaced diacritics in French words, set off documents and letters as blockquotes, used British English, and made changes to hyphenation and spelling according to ww.oxforddictionaries.com.

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