Arrival (Part One, Chapters 1–2)

When the cashier had given him the change from his five-franc piece, Georges Duroy left the restaurant.

He was a handsome fellow, and knew it, and carried himself like the soldier he had been: chest out, twisting his moustache with an automatic gesture, he swept the late diners with one of those glances that handsome young men cast about them like a hawk's. The women looked up at him: three little seamstresses; a music teacher, of uncertain age; two shopkeepers' wives with their husbands.

It was the twenty-eighth of June, and he had three francs forty left in his pocket to last him till the end of the month. That meant two dinners and no lunches, or two lunches and no dinners. He had served two years in the hussars in Algeria, and had come to Paris to make his fortune; he was now a clerk in the offices of the Northern Railway, at fifteen hundred francs a year, and he hated it. He walked down the boulevards in the hot summer night, thirsty, looking at the people drinking at the café tables, at the women, at the money all around him, and longed for all of it.

He lived in a mean furnished room on the sixth floor of a lodging-house in the Batignolles, whose single window looked down over the deep cutting of the Western Railway, where the trains came and went all night with their shrieks and their smoke. He came home to it that night, and leaned out over the tracks, and thought of the officers he had seen, the rich men, the carriages, the women; and he swore to himself that he would have them too. In Algeria he had learned that the strong took what they wanted; he had seen soldiers rob and kill Arabs and laugh about it afterwards. Paris, he thought, was not so different: you had only to be bolder than the others, and less scrupulous.

And then, outside a café, he ran into an old comrade from the regiment, Charles Forestier — grown stout and pale and coughing, but well dressed, and prosperous. Forestier was now a political editor on a big newspaper, La Vie Française. He looked Duroy over, heard his story, and said: "Why don't you try journalism?" He lent him two gold louis — forty francs — and invited him to dinner the next evening; and he took him, that same night, to the Folies-Bergère, where Duroy, under the great glittering hall, among the crowd of women who walked up and down the promenade, felt the whole city offer itself to him. One of the women, a dark girl named Rachel, took a fancy to him, and he spent the night with her.

The next evening, in a dress suit hired for the occasion, he climbed the stairs to Forestier's apartment, terrified; and on the landing he saw, in a great mirror, a gentleman in evening dress, elegant and handsome, coming towards him — and realised that it was himself. He looked at his reflection with delight, smiled at it, bowed to it; and went in with more confidence.

The company at dinner was the world of the paper. There was the owner and editor, Monsieur Walter, a small, fat, shrewd man, a deputy and a financier, who used his paper for his business and his politics; and Madame Walter, a calm, handsome, respectable woman in her forties. There was Jacques Rival, a dashing chronicler and famous duellist; Norbert de Varenne, a poet, grey-haired and melancholy; and Madame de Marelle, a little dark, lively woman, with a laughing face, a cousin of sorts of Madame Forestier, and her little daughter Laurine. And there was the hostess, Madeleine Forestier: fair, slim, with grey-blue eyes and a calm, intelligent smile, who missed nothing.

Duroy, nervous at first, found his feet when they began to talk of Algeria, and of the colonies, which were in the news; he told stories of his soldiering among the Arabs, and they listened; the women liked him. Walter, interested, asked him to write a series of articles on his memories of Africa for the paper. Duroy went home walking on air. He had his start.

Forestier, walking him to the door, gave him some advice: he must be bold; he must never seem to need anything; and he must make the women like him, for in Paris it was the women who made a man's career. "With the women," he said, "you'll get on faster than with all the talent in the world." Duroy did not forget it.