The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [265]
Mme Forestier is then herself left a large legacy by a man who turns out to have been her long-established lover. Du Roy insists that, to prevent scandal, it should be announced that the money was left to them both, making him a franc millionaire. But this is nothing to the immense fortune made by his editor Walter from his financial coup on the Morocco affair, who has now bought himself a palatial mansion in the heart of Paris. Discovering that the Foreign Minister is now his wife's lover, Du Roy conceives his final coup. He arranges for the Commissioner of Police to catch his wife and her lover in the act of adultery, so he can divorce her; thus leaving him free to woo Suzanne, as heiress to one of the richest men in France. He uses the knowledge of how her father had come by his fortune to ensure his agreement to the match, to the horror of Suzanne's mother. As the climax approaches, 'Bel Ami' seems to have won every worldly prize life has to offer. M. Walter makes him editor-in-chief of La Vie Francaise, which Walter's wealth has now made the leading newspaper in France. He is rich. He is ennobled as the Baron Du Roy. And the story culminates in a spectacular wedding in the most fashionable church in Paris, attended by the cream of Parisian society. But at this very moment, having imagined that the `Man-God' Christ himself `was descending to earth to consecrate' his triumph and how it might only be a matter of time before he became President of the French Republic, Du Roy's inmost thoughts are only of one person in that vast congregation, with whom he has enjoyed a pregnant exchange of glances. Before his eyes, as he walks down the aisle into the brilliant sunlight, `there floated the image of Mme de Marelle', looking into the mirror as she always did before getting out of the bed where they made love. It would not be long before he saw that sight again.
The story is a complete outward projection of the Rags to Riches archetype. In worldly terms, Duroy has won the hand of his `Princess' and succeeded to the `kingdom'. He has achieved all the external trappings of Self-realisation, seemingly sanctified by all the solemnities of religion itself. But, as in The Scarlet and the Black, this has all been presented in only the most relentlessly superficial fashion, centred on a wholly self-centred, unscrupulous cardboard hero to whom every prize - women, money, position, fashionable acclaim - falls with the relentless, mechanical ease of a wish-fulfilment daydream; although admittedly in a world in which everyone else is shown to be as self-centred and amoral as himself. There is not the slightest pretence that Duroy has grown up into a mature man. Inwardly he remains wholly unchanged, the `boy hero who cannot grow up, caught between `Mother, represented by the succession of adoring married women who are his mistresses, and the infantile anima figures of the child Laurine and his eventual bride Suzanne. As the daughter of the richest and most powerful man in France, Suzanne is almost a carbon copy of Sorel's Mathilde; except that here the outward show of the happy ending is complete, as the wedding finally takes place, while `Mother, the married mistress, is still waiting faithfully in the shadows. But this leaves us in no doubt that the archetypal resolution of the story is only a hollow sham. We have not really arrived at a happy ending at all.
A similar example of the `lesser dark version' of the Rags to Riches plot was Budd Schulberg's Hollywood novel What Makes Sammy Run. This centres on the dizzying upward climb, first in the world of New York gossip journalism, then in Hollywood, of the ruthlessly ego-driven Sammy Glick (although, unlike Stendhal and de Maupassant, Schulberg did not identify with his hero but with his story's narrator, a fellow writer who observes Glick's remorseless rise with wry dismay). Like Bel Ami, this outwardly echoes the fairy-tale pattern, not least in its climax where the