Bel-Ami

George Duroy known to his admirers as Bel-Ami is young beautiful and highly ambitious. He is offered a job as a journalist on La Vie Francaise and quickly succeeds in his new field. But he also encounters the sleazy coworkers manipulative mistresses and cunning financiers that make up the corrupt culture in which he lives. He quickly learns to become an arch-seducer blackmailer and social climber in a society where love is only a means to an end. Bel-Ami a book by Maupassant that was written at the height of his skills is a work of remarkable frankness and cynicism but it is also filled with the simple joy of life and captures the events and people of Paris in the belle epoque with humor sensitivity and humanity.