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effect of dreariness' which Henry James considered to be the essential
    'subject' of the novel. 6 But there are more surreptitious patterns of repetition, which suggest that the author of A Life wished to instil a strong sense of cyclicity in his reader. Our final view of Jeanne at the end of the novel is of her being driven off to a new life, cradling a baby in her arms; and we may be reminded of the first journey in the novel when, as the Le Perthuis des Vauds set off for their new life at Les Peuples, 'Jeanne felt as though she were coming back to life', while beside her sits Rosalie, 'nursing a parcel on her knees' (p. 7). The conveyance has changed from an expensive private carriage to a peasant's cart, and the identity of the person in the driving seat has changed (with the sociological significance noted above), but the message remains the same: 'plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.' Superficial mutations serve to throw into relief the fundamental constants of universal experience.
    Narrative and the Novel
    This tension between sameness and difference, between stasis and change, is central to A Life , and not least because this is the first novel of a writer whose narrative skills were particularly suited to the form of the short story. It has traditionally been held that the distinguishing feature of a novel is its capacity to follow the evolution of an individual, or a group of individuals, or even a society, through time: to account for change, to chart a sequence of cause and effect, whether psychological or socio-historical, to document a process. In the short story, on the other hand, the focus is more usually, for reasons of brevity, on a single event, on some unique moment upon which a human destiny may depend (which is why the genre of the short story has sometimes been compared to drama). The difference in length can therefore be seen to entail two potentially quite different moral universes: briefly stated, in the novel people do things, in the short story things happen to people. In these terms one might argue that while A Life has the appearance of being a novel, both its
    6 Henry James, 'Guy de Maupassant' (1888), in Selected Literary Criticism , ed. Morris Shapira (London, 1963), 106. narrative structure and its moral universe owe more to the short story.
    As regards narrative structure, it is plain that the novel is constructed predominantly as a series of quasi-theatrical scenes interspersed with succinctly summarized and for the most part indeterminate blanks of time. Homecoming, visit to Yport, boat-trip, 'baptism' of new boat, wedding-night, honeymoon in Corsica, Rosalie in childbirth, Jeanne's discovery of Julien and Rosalie, suicidal dash through the snow, fishing by torchlight, death of Mama, slaughter of litter, slaughter of Julien and Gilberte, return of Rosalie, moving house, trip to Paris, last visit to Les Peuples . . . Each episode is narrated with a minimum of secondary detail and a maximum of dialogue and 'visual aids', permitting the reader to experience each 'hammer-blow' of fate with the immediacy of Jeanne herself. Indeed, such is the discrete status of each episode that several had already served, or were later reworked, as short stories in their own right ( An Evening in Spring, The Bed, The Vigil, Old Things, A Tale of Corsica, Shepherd's Leap, A Meeting, A Humble Drama ). Time slows or accelerates as the subject demands: moments of high drama occupy several pages while for the transformation of Paul from infant into ungrateful son (so that the hammer-blows can continue) over some twenty-two years are covered in a single chapter (Ch. XI).
    As to moral universe, is this the story of a free agent or of a series of events passively undergone? On the one hand, this is assuredly the story of a life, of Jeanne de Lamare, who leaves school, falls in love, marries, is deceived by her husband, has a son who abandons her, and is finally saddled, and blessed, with a grandchild to