A Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

united, and that in our moral being we each of us remain forever alone throughout our lives' (p. 64). Likewise later in the novel, when Jeanne is returning from Yport with her father and observes the lights in the scattered farmhouses, she is filled with 'an acute sense of the isolation in which all creatures live, of how everything conspires to separate them and keep them apart, to remove them far away from that which otherwise they might love' (p. 91).
    She who had looked forward to a perfect union with 'Him' comes to have a deeply pessimistic outlook on the world which owes much to her creator's nihilism and the philosophy of Schopenhauer (17881860), whose recently translated writings had struck such a chord in him. Keeping vigil over her mother's corpse, Jeanne reflects on the meaning of life and the conundrum that is death:
    So there was nothing, then, but sorrow, grief, misfortune, and death. It was all just deceit and lies, things to make one suffer and weep. Where was there a little respite and joy to be found? In another life no doubt! When the soul had been delivered from its ordeal upon earth! The soul! She began to reflect on this unfathomable mystery . . . Where, then, was her mother's soul at this precise moment . . . ? Far, far away, perhaps. Somewhere in space? But where? . . . Recalled to God? Or scattered, randomly assumed into the process of new creation, mingling with the seeds that were about to spring into life? (p. 152)
    Compare Maupassant's remarks in a letter to Flaubert on 5 July 1878: 'From time to time I have such a clear perception of the pointlessness of everything, of the unthinking malice of creation, of the emptiness that lies ahead (whatever form the future may take) that I am filled with a sad indifference towards all things and I just want to sit in a corner and stay there, devoid of hope and free from all vexation.'
    Some such thoughts appear to be going through Jeanne's mind at the end of the novel, as she remains for days on end seated by the fire in her sitting-room, 'not moving, her eyes fixed on the flames, letting her sorry thoughts wander where they pleased and observing the sad procession of her miseries' (p. 229). Desperately she tries to make sense of what has gone before, and her obsessive attempts to spell the name of her son in the air suggest that writing may be the means to such an understanding, as if she were anticipating the task of Maupassant himself. For as she wanders down the via dolorosa that is memory lane, circling round the calendars in her living-room as if they were prints representing the (fourteen) Stations of the Cross, so here, in the fourteenth and final chapter, the novelist brings his story full circle and may seem to offer both hope and meaning in his ending. Jeanne has reached her Calvary in the house at Batteville, forsaken not by God but by the son whose birth had been her heart's salvation ('she realized that she had been saved, secured against all despair, that she now held in her arms something she could love to the ultimate exclusion of all else': p. 123). But Rosalie departs for Paris and returns, on the third day (p. 238)with the means of her heart's resurrection, the unnamed baby girl  whose warmth penetrates her flesh. For A Life is thus entitled not so much because it recounts the life of Jeanne de Lamare (since her life, far from ending with the novel, is seen to begin anew), but because the one ray of hope in the midst of despair is provided by 'a life', that simple, biological cog in the great wheel of Creation, to which human beings may respond with a sense of purpose and the instinct to protect. A life becomes a reason for living.
    The banality of Rosalie's closing remark: 'You see, life's never as good or as bad as we think', which is no less banal for having been proclaimed to Maupassant by Flaubert in a letter at the end of December 1878recalls the banality of the exchange between Jeanne and her father as they return home