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[NABOKOV-LIST] [QUERY] Mlle Larivière and L a Parure: Maupassant
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A sentence, written by Guy de Maupassant, struck a familiar chord: "My eyes rested on the mirror reflection of my face and I lost the notion of who I was. My spirit became confused and I couldn't recognize myself[...] If this state should have lasted longer than a minute I'd have become totally mad."
I was not familiar with his dark tales a la Poe, nor the precision of his objective description of gestures and moods. Cf. "Un Fou" (1885); "Le Horla" (1887), "La Morte":
"I stopped short in front of that looking-glass in which she had so often been reflected--so often, so often, that it must have retained her reflection. I was standing there. trembling, with my eyes fixed on the glass--on that flat, profound, empty glass--which had contained her entirely, and had possessed her as much as I, as my passionate looks had. I felt as if I loved that glass. I touched it; it was cold.).
I was led to recollect a similiar kind of anguish in several of Nabokov's short-stories ("Revenge","Terror", "La Veneziana", "Ultima Thule","That in Aleppo Once...") although the intimated depersonalization came in sharp contrast with "Sign and Symbols" and the young man's peculiar "referential mania" ( this one might be closer to what is felt and interpreted in "Cloud,Castle, Lake"?).
I had always associated Maupassant to VN's "Ada,or Ardor" and its pathetic character, Mlle Larivière ( Mlle Larivière, Mlle La rivière de Diamants, Mlle Laparure, Mlle Ida Montparnasse, etc). When, later on, I picked up Nabokov's satirical references to Maupassant, I realized that although Mlle La Rivière's book had exactly the same plot as the French writer's, one detail was amiss: Mathilde Loiseau and her husband toiled for ten years to repay their debt to the jeweller , whereas VN wrote about "thirty or forty horrible years"...*
Why would he have altered only that little detail?
.........................................................................................................
* Finally Mlle Larivière read her La Rivière de Diamants, a story she had just typed out for The Quebec Quarterly[...] The pretty and refined wife of a seedy clerk borrows a necklace from a wealthy woman friend. On the way home from the office party she loses it. For thirty or forty horrible years the unfortunate husband and wife labor and economize to repay the debts they accumulated in the purchase of a half-million-franc necklace which they had secretly substituted for the lost one when returning the jewelbox to Mme F. Oh, how Mathilde's heart fluttered - would Jeanne open the box? She did not. When decrepit but victorious (he, half-paralyzed by a half-century of copie in their mansarde, she, unrecognizably coarsened by the washing of floors à grand eau), they confess everything to a white-haired but still young looking Mme F. the latter tells them, in the last phrase of the tale: 'But, my poor Mathilde, the necklace was false: it cost only five hundred francs!'
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I was not familiar with his dark tales a la Poe, nor the precision of his objective description of gestures and moods. Cf. "Un Fou" (1885); "Le Horla" (1887), "La Morte":
"I stopped short in front of that looking-glass in which she had so often been reflected--so often, so often, that it must have retained her reflection. I was standing there. trembling, with my eyes fixed on the glass--on that flat, profound, empty glass--which had contained her entirely, and had possessed her as much as I, as my passionate looks had. I felt as if I loved that glass. I touched it; it was cold.).
I was led to recollect a similiar kind of anguish in several of Nabokov's short-stories ("Revenge","Terror", "La Veneziana", "Ultima Thule","That in Aleppo Once...") although the intimated depersonalization came in sharp contrast with "Sign and Symbols" and the young man's peculiar "referential mania" ( this one might be closer to what is felt and interpreted in "Cloud,Castle, Lake"?).
I had always associated Maupassant to VN's "Ada,or Ardor" and its pathetic character, Mlle Larivière ( Mlle Larivière, Mlle La rivière de Diamants, Mlle Laparure, Mlle Ida Montparnasse, etc). When, later on, I picked up Nabokov's satirical references to Maupassant, I realized that although Mlle La Rivière's book had exactly the same plot as the French writer's, one detail was amiss: Mathilde Loiseau and her husband toiled for ten years to repay their debt to the jeweller , whereas VN wrote about "thirty or forty horrible years"...*
Why would he have altered only that little detail?
.........................................................................................................
* Finally Mlle Larivière read her La Rivière de Diamants, a story she had just typed out for The Quebec Quarterly[...] The pretty and refined wife of a seedy clerk borrows a necklace from a wealthy woman friend. On the way home from the office party she loses it. For thirty or forty horrible years the unfortunate husband and wife labor and economize to repay the debts they accumulated in the purchase of a half-million-franc necklace which they had secretly substituted for the lost one when returning the jewelbox to Mme F. Oh, how Mathilde's heart fluttered - would Jeanne open the box? She did not. When decrepit but victorious (he, half-paralyzed by a half-century of copie in their mansarde, she, unrecognizably coarsened by the washing of floors à grand eau), they confess everything to a white-haired but still young looking Mme F. the latter tells them, in the last phrase of the tale: 'But, my poor Mathilde, the necklace was false: it cost only five hundred francs!'
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/