Thoroughly interesting ...

... Julian Barnes on Guy de Maupassant: On we sail. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

At Saint-Raphaël he goes ashore and comes across a wedding – ‘that solemn, carnal and comical act which causes such agitation in mankind’. This is a toxic combination for a man who hates marriage, distrusts happiness, writes as if he has never been in love and, further, loathes the crowd. He stands there, waiting for the bride to come out of the church – a normal human reaction for most of us, but not for Maupassant, who deduces that his individual will has been subsumed into the powerful and dangerous force of mass desire. And so: ‘I stood on tiptoe to look – and I really did have the vile, repugnant, vulgar desire to take a look.’

The disgust here has reached pathological proportions. At every turn the darker or more pessimistic option or interpretation is chosen. France’s sunny, idyllic coastline and its immediate hinterland are at times rendered as tormentedly as van Gogh’s Provence. Death is everywhere, even if the rest of us fail to spot it. For Maupassant, Menton means a hecatomb of juvenile TB cases.