A Life: The Humble Truth

“After all, life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think.”

About this book

What is a life when romantic education meets ordinary cruelty? Maupassant's first novel follows Jeanne from a Normandy convent to Les Peuples, through marriage to Viscount Julien de Lamare, a Corsican honeymoon, stinginess and betrayal (including the servant Rosalie), motherhood, further adultery with the Countess de Fourville, violent deaths, a ruinous son, and Rosalie's late return. The close rests on a grandchild's warmth and Rosalie's plain sentence that life is never so jolly or so miserable as people seem to think. This BookBite telling uses the public-domain 1888 English A Woman's Life (Emory/Vizetelly-era), not modern Oxford World's Classics wording sold under the Humble Truth title.