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much their draughtsmen prided themselves on their objectivity. "There but for the grace of God go I" stilled the pen and calmed the pencil's most clinical detachment. Before Photography, the classicizing nude was a hope; after the revelations of the camera eye, that hope became a lie.

p 83

Bel-Ami by Guy de Maupassant - 1885 (age 35)

Trans by Douglas Parméc - penguin books 1975

and they started discussing this case of adultery involving the extra complication of blackmail. They did not talk about it in the way you might comment, in a family conversation on something published in the press, but in the way doctors talk of a disease or greengrocers talk about vegetables. There was no indignation or suprise; with professional curiosity and complete unconcern for the crime itself, they

111

looked for its hidden, deeper causes. They tried to fathom the motives and investigate the mental reactions that had led to the tragedy as being the scientific results of a particular state of mind. The women were equally absorbed in this analysis and examination. And then other recent events were analyzed and commented on, turned this way and that and weighed up exactly with the practised eye and special approach of people who deal in news, who retail every aspect of the human scene at so much per line, just as tradesmen examine and turn over and weigh up the articles they are going to supply to the public. p 48-49

p 63 ... had turned him into a sort of box with several false bottoms, in which you could find bits of practically everything.

p 108 They had reached the stage of witty suggestiveness, of words, veiled yet reveal-