Bel-Ami

A throw-back read to the days of cuckolding, meaning cheating on your spouse and trying to get away with it, desire for success, and doing whatever it is to succeed for money!  Bel-Ami was written by author Guy de Maupassant and was set in Paris in the late 1880s.  The protagonist, George Duroy, comes back from war service in Algeria and meets an acquaintance who encourages him to write about his experience in Algeria.  Once he has a taste of the life of a journalist, he determines that nothing will stop him!  And so goes the life of Duroy, using other people in an effort to get where he wants to be, the richest and most popular person in the city of Paris.  He gets much help along the way from the wife of Charles Forestier, the publisher of the local paper who gives him a chance to share his stories.  It is Madame Forestier, whom he falls in love and has an affair, who helps rewrite his initial work and introduces him to local politicians.  He meets other influential politicians and the wives of leaders in the business sector, one in particular whom he begins an illicit affair.  Duroy’s work at the local paper begins to take off and the husband of Madame Foresteir dies, which leads to a marriage between the two.  This allows Duroy to begin to “taste the good life,” wining and dining all over town!  Duroy and Forestier have a strange relationship where Foresteir wants to be in the elite crowd so she has Duroy change his name.  On the work front, he continues to move up the ladder.  Duroy continues his conquests of other men’s wives on the side.  Duroy gets involved in an investing opportunity that allows him to make money based on government investments in the war, which he learns through one of the women he is bedding down.  Duroy always wants more and believes that he can choose his woman and is invincible.  This becomes even more true when he turns on his wife, who is also in the “cuckolding business,” and turns her over to the police while she is bedding down with the most affluent man in the city.  Both are arrested and Duroy gets his wife’s big purse!  What a swine, huh?  Duroy is almost caught himself, but instead he always finds some way to get more and more prestige and money.  The story ends after Duroy gets his biggest prize, the daughter of the woman he initially had an affair.  Being rebuffed by her, he takes away her young daughter, who was the one who started the nickname of Duroy, Bel-Ami.  Who says losers can’t come in first?  Not Duroy!  What an interesting journey into the life of the French in the late 1800s where power, sex, money, and wanting it all no matter what the cost can be exists.  Who says that is 1880 and not 2011?  Hummm.  OK, not bad.  Not on my top ten, but very readable.