Mont-Oriol: A New Translation

By Guy de Maupassant

Book Overview

A banker sees mineral springs. A young woman sees freedom. A man recovering from one love affair finds himself in another. And a peasant who has spent his life being underestimated by people who should know better watches them all and waits.

Mont-Oriol is Guy de Maupassant's third novel, published in 1887 after serialization in the newspaper Gil Blas, and it is one of his most fully achieved. Set in the thermal spa country of Auvergne - modeled on Ch tel-Guyon, where Maupassant himself took cures in the 1880s - the novel follows the convergence of a love affair and a business scheme in the volcanic landscape of central France, where ancient springs and cheap land have caught the attention of Parisian capital.

Christiane Andermatt has come to Enval with her husband William - a banker who processes everything through financial categories, including his wife - in hopes that the thermal baths will cure her presumed sterility. Her brother Gontran has come because he is always somewhere, doing nothing, spending money he doesn't have. Paul Br tigny has come to recover from one disappointment and finds another waiting for him, in a form he doesn't recognize until it's too late. And Father Oriol, the canny local peasant on whose land a spring happens to erupt, is about to become considerably richer and considerably more interesting to everybody.

The love story and the business story are inseparable, which is Maupassant's point. The Auvergne landscape - its gorges and volcanic hillsides and particular quality of summer light - creates the conditions for the affair between Christiane and Paul; Paris, and the return to ordinary life, will end it. Andermatt's scheme to build a rival spa gathers momentum alongside the affair, their parallel development one of the novel's organizing ironies. The doctors who certify the new spring's medicinal properties, the negotiations between Andermatt and the sharp-eyed Oriol, the charity lottery, the founding ceremony with its three springs named for a banker's wife and a peasant's daughters: all of it is observed with the cool, affectionate savagery that was Maupassant's greatest gift.

He was thirty-seven when he wrote this novel. He had less than five years of productive writing left, and he seemed to know it. Mont-Oriol is the work of a writer fully in command of the form he had mastered - precise, unsentimental, and, beneath its social comedy, quietly devastating.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0DWRQ237G
• ISBN13: 9798310081345
• Release Date: February 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 300 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Plus ça change...

Excellente lecture, Maupassant se surpasse dans ce roman, très près de notre réalité malgré les années d'écart entre l'action du livre et nos jours. C'est fou comme les époques ne changent rien aux comportements des hommes (au sens masculin du terme). Très belles images de l'Auvergne, on s'y croirait.Excellente représentation de la médecine et des médecins, malgré nos avancées technologiques, si peu de choses ont changées...Je ne vous en dis pas plus...

A good satire

If I hadn't been forced to read this book for my French course, it is likely I would have enjoyed my first reading a lot more (although if I had bought it sooner I probably would not have had to stay up all night in order to finish it on time). But at any rate, I have to admit it is a pretty good novel. There is a love story, well several loves stories actually, and all of them are rather harsh and cynical. Maupassant did not believe in love, and you can tell from "Mont-Oriol". But there is more to this novel than a mere love story. It is also a great satire of doctors and medical science. The action takes place in a spa in the nineteenth century. Throughout the story, we come across half-a-dozen doctors, all hilariously portrayed and stereotyped: there's the old-fashioned one, the hyper-modern one, the religious one, the Don Juan, etc. There are descriptions of "breakthrough" medical techniques of that time, such as auto-gymnastics, in which machines make your limbs move for you, so that you don't have to rely on your will-power. True anecdote, too! Also, I read the book in French, and I have to admit I do like Maupassant's style. It's very fluid and easy to read, surprisingly modern, very cynical and downright mean sometimes, but also containing very touching and beautiful passages. All in all, I definetely recommend it.