Mont-Oriol

Maupassant’s third novel, Mont-Oriol first appeared as a serial in Gil Blas, from 23 December 1886 to 6 February 1887, before being published in book form the same year by Victor-Havard.

Maupassant sets his love story against the very contemporary background of an Auvergne spa town, modeled on Châtel-Guyon, where he had stayed several times to take the waters from 1883 onward. Beneath the appearance of a sentimental plot — Christiane Andermatt, who comes to take a cure with her husband William for a supposed infertility, finds love with Paul Brétigny — the novel unfolds a much harsher satire: of the medical profession, the exploitation of therapeutic beliefs, the condition of women, and land speculation at the end of the nineteenth century.

This financial dimension gives the novel a precise resonance in 1880s France: when Mont-Oriol appeared, the collapse of the Union Générale bank, which had occurred in January 1882, remained fresh in people’s minds. Maupassant himself had commented on this crash in Le Gaulois on 25 January 1882, denouncing the brutal fiction of speculative wealth: “Operations are fictitious, profits are fictitious, value is fictitious.” As in Mont-Oriol, everything there is bought, promised, valued and founded on the expectation of future profit — even love, threatened with becoming a mere currency of exchange.

A good copy with wide margins; spine restored.

Vicaire V, 617; Carteret II, p. 119; Talvart et Place, XIII, p. 257.