THE STORIES IN THIS SECTION WERE ALL WRITTEN AFTER 1881; they deal with the themes of terror, death, the occult, madness, and suicide, subjects common in the literature of the nineteenth century.
Several of these stories reflect an interest in the early stages of psychiatry and pseudoscientific beliefs such as Franz Anton Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism,” which posited that there was a natural transfer of energy between all animate and inanimate objects, and formed the basis of “mesmerism,” a popular practice associated with hypnotism, which we see in Le Horla. Another contemporary advocate of hypnotism was Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot, famous for his early work on neurology and hysteria. Charcot gave lectures and demonstrations at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, some of which Maupassant attended. One of the most famous doctors in Paris at the time, Dr. Emile Blanche, a specialist in mental illness, ran a clinic where he treated Maupassant and other well-known literary figures.
It has often been speculated that Maupassant’s interest in such macabre and supernatural themes after 1877 coincided with his discovery that he had contracted syphilis. He was suffering from hair loss, headaches, eye problems, and stomach pains, and his diagnosis meant a steady degradation of both mind and body, to incurable madness followed by certain death. Many have seen these supernatural stories as the possible expression of an addled brain suffering the effects of the disease.
In addition, Maupassant’s obsession with madness and death must have been intensified by the fact that his younger brother, Hervé, suffered from syphilis too, and by September 1887 was showing signs of the mental instability linked to the disease. Hervé was committed to an asylum near Paris for a month that year, but in January 1888 he had a nervous breakdown. The following year, Hervé was sent to another asylum near Lyon, where he died a few months later of syphilis.
By 1891, Maupassant’s own physical and mental state had become quite dire. At the start of 1892, shortly after New Year’s Day, he tried to commit suicide by slitting his own throat. A week later, he was taken to Paris—in a straitjacket—and interned in Dr. Blanche’s clinic, having obviously gone insane. He died there on July 6, 1893, at the age of forty-two.
I RENTED A LITTLE COUNTRY HOUSE ON THE BANKS OF THE SEINE last summer, several miles from Paris, where I would go to sleep every evening. After a few days, I made the acquaintance of one of my neighbors, a man of around thirty or forty who really was the oddest character I’d ever met. He was an old man, who was mad about boats—always near the water, always on the water, always in the water. He must have been born on a boat and he would surely be carried away on that final journey upriver.
One evening when we were strolling along the riverbank, I asked him to tell me some stories of his life on the river. All of a sudden the good man got so animated that his whole demeanor changed; he was transformed, became eloquent, almost poetic. In his heart he had one great, all-consuming, irresistible passion: the river.
“AH!” HE SAID, “I have so many memories of this river you see flowing beside us! You city dwellers, you don’t really know the river, but listen to a fisherman say that word. To him, it is the most mysterious thing; deep and strange: a fairy-tale world of mirages and specters, where you see things in the darkness that aren’t real, where you hear noises you cannot recognize, where you shake in fear without knowing why, as if you were walking through a cemetery: in fact, it is the most sinister of cemeteries: the kind with no tombstones.
Land confines the fisherman, but in the darkness on a moonless night, the river goes on forever. A sailor doesn’t feel the same way about the sea. It is often malicious and cruel, that’s true, but the great sea cries, it screams, it does not lie: it is trustworthy, whereas the river is silent and treacherous. It does not roar, it flows along without a sound, and it is this eternal movement of the river that is more terrifying to me than any of the highest waves created by the ocean.
Dreamers claim that the sea hides in its heart immense bluish waters where drowned men float amongst the slender fish, in the midst of strange forests and crystal caves. The river has nothing but black depths where you rot in the slime. Yet it is beautiful when it sparkles and shines in the light of the rising sun, when it softly laps against its banks covered in rustling reeds.
The poet speaks of the Ocean:
O waves, how many mournful stories you know!
Deep waters, feared by mothers on bended knee,
You tell your stories as you rise with the tides
And they become the despairing voices
We hear at night, as you come toward us1
Well, I think that the stories whispered by the slender reeds with their soft little voices are far more sinister than any of the tragedies told by the howling waves.
But since you’ve asked me for some of my memories, I will tell you of one strange experience that happened to me, right here, about ten years ago.
I was living in the house of Madame Lafon as I am now, with one of my closest friends, Louis Bernet, who had moved into a village2 seven miles further down the river. He doesn’t go boating any more: he gave up his sloppy clothes along with the glorious pleasures of the river to get into the Conseil d’Etat. We had dinner together every day, sometimes at his place, sometimes at mine.
One evening, I was coming home alone, somewhat tired, in my boat—a twelve-footer that I always took out at night—I stopped for a few seconds to catch my breath beside the reed-covered point as I’d been rowing with some difficulty; see, over there, about six hundred feet in front of the railway bridge. It was a beautiful night; the moon shone magnificently, the river shimmered and sparkled in its light, the air was calm and mild. This tranquility appealed to me; I thought it would be pleasant to smoke a pipe there, so I did just that. I took my anchor and cast it into the river.
The boat floated a little downstream with the current until its chain was taut, then stopped; and I sat in the stern on my sheepskin, trying to make myself as comfortable as possible. It was silent, absolutely silent: only occasionally I thought I could make out the sound of the water lapping on its banks, although I could barely hear it; and I could just glimpse the strange shapes the group of reeds made on the higher banks; every now and again, they seemed to flutter.
The river was perfectly calm, but I found myself moved by the extraordinary silence that surrounded me. The frogs, the toads, the water creatures that sing in the marshes at night made no sound. Suddenly, a frog croaked to my right. I shuddered: it went quiet; I heard nothing more, and decided to smoke a little to take my mind off it. But although I was well known as a pipe-smoking man, my stomach turned as soon as I took the second puff and I stopped; I just couldn’t. I began to sing, but the sound of my voice irritated me, so I lay down in my boat and watched the sky, and after a while, I calmed down. But soon the slight movements of the boat on the water began to worry me; it felt like it was swaying and rocking fiercely against the riverbanks, hitting each of them in turn. I thought that some invisible force or creature was slowly dragging my boat to the bottom of the river, then lifting it up just to let it fall back again. I was thrown about as if I were in a storm; I heard sounds all around me; I leapt up; the water was glistening, everything was calm.
I realized I was a little shaken and decided to leave. I pulled the chain of my anchor and the boat began to move a little, but then, I could feel it was stuck; I pulled harder, but the anchor didn’t move; it had caught on something at the bottom of the river and I couldn’t pull it free; I tried again, but in vain.
I used my oars to turn the boat around, hoping that it would change the position of the anchor. But again, it was in vain, it held fast; I flew into a rage and furiously rattled the chain. Nothing moved.
I sat down utterly discouraged and began to think about my situation. I couldn’t even consider breaking the chain or separating it from the boat because it was enormous and attached at the bows to a piece of wood larger and thicker than my arm; but as the weather was so fine, I thought that it surely couldn’t be long before some fisherman would come along and help me. My failed attempt had calmed me; I sat down and could finally smoke my pipe. I also had a bottle of rum, so I drank a few glasses and soon my situation began to make me laugh. It was very warm, so warm that I could spend the night quite comfortably sleeping under the stars if I had to.
All of a sudden, something hit my boat. I jumped; chills ran down my spine, from the top of my head to the tips of my toes. The sound had probably been made by some piece of wood floating past with the current, but still, it was enough to fill me once again with strange, overwhelming anxiety; I tensed my muscles, seized the chain and pulled in desperation. The anchor held firm. I sat down again, exhausted.
Meanwhile, the thick white fog was gradually settling low down onto the river, spreading softly across the water, so that even while standing I could no longer see the water, or my feet, or my boat. All I could make out was the tops of the reeds in the distance and the flat open country, very pale in the moonlight, filled with the long dark shadows of a cluster of Italian poplars ascending toward the sky. I felt buried to the waist in a soft cotton cloud of dazzling whiteness, and I began to imagine all sorts of supernatural things. I imagined that someone was trying to climb onto the boat—that I could no longer see—and that the river, hidden in this dense fog, was filled with strange beings swimming all around me. I felt horribly frightened, my head throbbed and my heart was beating so fast I thought I would die; panic-stricken, I thought of swimming away, of saving myself, but even that idea made me shake with terror. I could picture myself lost, drifting through the thick fog, struggling through the grass and reeds, gasping with fear, unable to escape, unable to see the riverbanks, unable to find my boat again; and I felt as if I would be dragged feet-first all the way down to the bottom of this endless, black water.
And since I would have had to swim against the current for at least five hundred yards before finding the gap in the grass and rushes where I could get a foothold, there was still only a one in ten chance that I would be able to navigate through that fog and swim to shore, regardless of how good a swimmer I was.
I tried to reason with myself. I felt a strong desire not to be afraid, but something besides this desire burned within me, and this other thing was afraid. I wondered what it was that I feared; the brave me mocked the cowardly me, and never so strongly as on this day did I feel the conflict between these two beings that live within us, one desiring, the other opposing, and each in turn winning over the other.
This ridiculous, inexplicable fear grew and grew until I was completely terrified. I stood absolutely still, eyes wide open, listening and waiting. For what? I had no idea, but it must surely be something horrible. I believe that if a fish had suddenly jumped out of the water, as often happens, that’s all it would have taken to make me drop down, unconscious.
Still, with extreme effort, I eventually managed to pull myself together. I grabbed my bottle of rum and took a couple of swigs. Then I had an idea, and I began to shout as loudly as possible in every direction. When my throat was absolutely dry, I listened. A dog was howling, far off in the distance.
I drank some more and stretched out at the bottom of my boat. I stayed like that for an hour or so, perhaps even two, without sleeping, eyes wide open, nightmares swirling around me. I didn’t dare get up, although I desperately wanted to; I put it off again and again. I told myself: “Come on, get up!” but I was too scared to move. I finally stood up very, very cautiously, as if making the slightest noise was a matter of life and death; I looked over the side.
I was dazzled by the most marvelous, most wondrous display imaginable. It was one of those apparitions from a fairy-tale world, one of those visions recounted by voyagers returning from afar that we listen to in disbelief.
The fog, which two hours earlier had covered the surface of the river, had ebbed away and settled on the riverbanks, leaving the water absolutely clear. It had formed a dense mound on each side, eighteen or twenty feet high, which shone in the moonlight with the dazzling brilliance of snow. You could see nothing but the river gleaming in a fiery light between those two white mountains; and far above my head sailed the great full moon, bright, luminous, amid a milky blue sky.
All the water creatures were now awake; the frogs croaked loudly, and every now and then, sometimes from the right, sometimes from the left, I could hear the short, sad notes of the toads, their coppery voices echoing up to the stars. The strange thing was, I was no longer afraid; I was in the heart of such an extraordinary landscape that even the most mysterious events would not have surprised me.
I don’t know how long this lasted, for I finally drifted off to sleep, and when I opened my eyes again, the moon was low on the horizon, the sky full of clouds. The water lapped mournfully, the wind sighed, it was cold: darkness reigned.
I drank what was left of the rum and listened, shivering, to the rustling of the reeds and the sinister sounds of the river. I tried to see, but I couldn’t even make out my boat or my hands as I raised them toward my face.
Little by little, however, the cloud of darkness began to disperse. Suddenly, I thought I could sense a shadow gliding by me; I let out a cry, a voice replied; it was a fisherman. I called out, he came over and I told him about my terrible night. He stopped his boat next to mine and both of us pulled on the anchor. It stood firm. It was dawn, a somber, gray, rainy, icy day, one of those sad, melancholic days. I spotted another boat and we flagged it down. Then the three of us pulled at the chain together and gradually the anchor began to give way. It rose slowly, ever so slowly, loaded down by a considerable weight. Finally, we could make out a black mass, and pulled it on board:
It was the body of an old woman with a large stone around her neck.”
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* Translated by Sandra Smith in collaboration with Eleanor Hill of Sarah Lawrence College.
1 Verses from Victor Hugo’s poem Oceano nox, translated by Sandra Smith.
2 The original French has “village de C. . . .” The village alluded to is either Chatou or Croissy.
AFTER DINNER, WE CLIMBED BACK UP ONTO THE DECK. IN front of us shone the Mediterranean, not a ripple anywhere; its entire surface mirrored the shimmering, full moon. The vast ship sailed, sending a great serpent of black fumes billowing up toward the sky scattered with stars; and behind us, the water, clear and white, whisked by the rapid passage of the heavy vessel and its propeller, foamed, frothed, seemed to twist and turn, shedding so much light that it seemed as if the moon was bubbling over.
There were six or eight of us, silent, admiring, eyes turned toward distant Africa, where we were headed. The Captain, who had joined us and was smoking a cigar, suddenly continued the conversation we’d started at dinner.
“Yes, I was afraid that day. The sea had battered my boat; there was damage from a rock to the hold and we stayed aboard for six hours. But luckily we were picked up by an English coal merchant who’d spotted us.”
A big man with a tanned face and a serious expression spoke for the first time. He was one of those men you can tell had traveled to unknown, distant lands and faced constant danger, someone you know had seen strange, mysterious wonders that are carefully kept secret but that you can occasionally glimpse when you look directly into his eyes, one of those men with steely courage.
“You say, Captain, that you felt fear that day; I don’t believe you. You are not using the right word, and you are mistaken about what you really felt. An active man is never afraid in the face of imminent danger. He is agitated, aroused, anxious; but fear is something else entirely.”
The Captain laughed and replied:
“Ha! I swear to you, it was fear.”
Then the man with the tanned complexion began speaking, in a slow steady voice:
“LET ME EXPLAIN! Fear is something truly horrifying (and the bravest of men sometimes experience it); it is a terrible feeling, like the rotting of a soul. It stops hearts and thoughts dead, and even thinking about it leaves you shivering in anguish. But when you’re brave, you don’t feel it when facing an attack, or inevitable death, or even the more common forms of danger; you only feel it in certain, unusual circumstances, under certain mysterious influences and in the face of some vague menace. Real fear is a recollection of fantastical terrors from long ago. A man who believes in ghosts and who thinks he sees one in the dead of night must feel this kind of fear in all its terrifying horror.
I felt that fear in broad daylight, it must be ten years ago now, and I felt it again this past winter, on a cold December night.
And yet, I have lived through many dangers, many events that seemed lethal. I have often had to fight for my life. In America, thieves left me for dead; I have been condemned as an insurgent to be hanged; and on the coast of China, I was thrown into the sea from the deck of a ship. Every time I thought I was doomed, I immediately accepted my fate, with no self-pity and even without regrets.
But true fear is entirely different.
I felt it in Africa. And yet, fear is the child of the North; the sun banishes it like the morning mist. Think about this, gentlemen. In Eastern countries, life counts for nothing; you are resigned at once; the nights are clear and devoid of legends, and souls are devoid of those dark worries that haunt the mind in colder countries. In the East, they may know panic but they have never experienced fear.
Well, then, this is what happened to me in Africa:
I was crossing the great sand dunes to the south of Ouargla,1 one of the strangest places in the world. You’ve seen the long, smooth sands of the endless ocean beaches. Well! Imagine the ocean itself turning to sand in the middle of a storm; imagine a silent tempest of unmoving yellow waves of dust as high as mountains, waves as unequal and unique as the waves unleashed in floods, but even higher and striated like watered silk. And the still, silent desert sun pours its remorseless flames straight down onto this furious sea. You have to climb up and down those waves of golden ash, over and over again, without stopping, without resting and without any shade. Horses gasp, sink to their knees and slide down the slopes of those unpredictable hills.
It was just me and my friend, followed by eight Spahis2 and four camels with their drivers. We were overwhelmed by the heat: exhausted, dehydrated, totally unable to speak any more. Suddenly one of the men let out a kind of scream; we all stopped dead in our tracks, surprised by an inexplicable phenomenon known to travelers in these lost lands.
Somewhere near us, though I couldn’t tell where, a drum sounded: the mysterious beat of the dunes. It beat distinctively, sometimes loudly, sometimes quietly, then stopped, only to continue its haunting sound again.
Terrified, the Arabs looked at each other. “Death is with us,” one of them said in their language. Suddenly, my companion, my closest friend, whom I thought of as almost my brother, fell straight off his horse, headfirst, unconscious with sunstroke.
For two hours, while I was trying in vain to save him, the strange, sporadic, regular beating of the drums filled my ears; and fear, real fear, monstrous fear, gripped me, right down to my bones as I sat by my best friend’s dead body, in that horrible place, scorched by the blazing sun, between four mountains of sand while the mysterious echo of the drum continued to beat furiously, two hundred miles from any French camp, plunging us all deeper into fear.
That day I understood what it felt like to be afraid, but I felt it even more on another occasion . . .”
The Captain interrupted him:
“Excuse me, Monsieur, but what was the drum?”
The traveler replied:
“I have no idea. Nobody knows. Our officers, who often hear this strange noise, generally believe it is a rising echo, intensified and heightened by the undulation of the dunes, caused by a sandstorm when grains of sand are carried along by the wind and crash into tufts of dry grass; we’ve noticed that the phenomenon only happens in areas with little plants that are as tough and dry as parchment, completely burnt by the sun.
This drum is perhaps a kind of sound mirage. Nothing more, nothing less. But I didn’t learn that until much later.
Here is my other story about my experience with fear.
It was last winter, in a forest in northeastern France. The sky was so gray that it got dark two hours earlier than usual. A local farmer was my guide; he walked beside me on the narrow road under the canopy of fir trees, beneath a sharp, howling wind. In between the tops of the trees, I watched the clouds, frenzied, frantic, as if fleeing from something terrible. Sometimes, under a huge gust of wind, the whole forest groaned in anguish and bowed in the same direction; and the cold rushed through me, despite our quick pace and my heavy coat.
We were going to get some food and sleep in a cabin belonging to a gamekeeper; it wasn’t very far away. I was going there to hunt.
Every now and then, my guide looked up and murmured: “Godawful weather!” He then told me about the people we would be staying with at the cabin. The father had killed a poacher two years before and since then he seemed tormented, as if haunted by a memory. His two sons were married and lived with him.
It was pitch-black; I couldn’t see anything in front or around me, and the thick branches of the trees brushed against each other, filling the night with an endless murmur. Finally, I saw a light, and soon my companion knocked on a door. Piercing female shrieks rang out. Then a man’s voice, somewhat choked, demanded: “Who’s there?” My guide gave his name. We went inside; the scene we saw was unforgettable.
Waiting for us in the middle of the kitchen was an old man with white hair, a wild look in his eyes and a loaded shotgun. Two large, burly men, armed with axes, guarded the door, and I could just make out two women kneeling in the dark corners of the room, their faces hidden, pressed against the wall.
He explained. The old man put his gun back on the wall and gave an order to prepare my room; then, as the women hadn’t moved, he suddenly said:
“The thing is, Monsieur, I killed a man exactly two years ago tonight. Last year, he came back to haunt me. I’m expecting him again tonight.”
Then, in a tone that made me smile, he added:
“So we’re a little nervous.”
I reassured him as best I could, happy to have arrived that evening and to see this spectacle of terrified superstition. I told them stories to pass the time and slowly began to calm everyone’s nerves.
Near the fireplace, an old dog with long whiskers, almost blind—one of those dogs that looks like someone you know—slept with his nose in his paws.
Outside, the raging storm shook the cabin, and through a small, square pane of glass, a sort of spyhole placed near the door, I suddenly saw a flash of lightning illuminate the night sky, revealing a huge mass of trees twisting, turning and thrashing in the wind.
“Despite my efforts, I could clearly see these people were deathly afraid, and every time I stopped speaking, they listened intently for the faintest sound. Weary of being in the presence of such silly superstition, I was about to ask to be shown to my bedroom when suddenly the old gamekeeper leapt off his chair, seized his shotgun and spluttered wildly: “He’s come, he’s come! I can hear him!” The two women fell to their knees and hid their faces in the corner; the two sons grabbed their axes again. I was going to try and calm them down again when the sleeping dog suddenly woke up, raised his head, tensed his neck, looked toward the fire with his dull eyes and let out a long, mournful howl, one of those howls that makes travelers shudder at night in vast, shadowy woodlands.
Everyone turned to stare at him; he didn’t move, as still as if haunted by a vision, and then, his fur bristling with fear, he began howling at something invisible, something strange, something truly horrible. The gamekeeper, deathly pale, cried: “He can sense him! He can sense him! He was there when I killed him!” Both the women, overwhelmed with fear, went mad and began howling along with the dog.
In spite of myself, an intense shiver ran down my spine. The spectacle of that animal in that place, at that time, with these panic-stricken people, was absolutely terrifying.
For an entire hour, the dog stood dead still and howled; he howled as if tortured by a dream; and fear, that terrible, horrifying fear, rushed through me. Fear of what, though? How can I explain it? It was quite simply fear.
We stood there, motionless, white as sheets, our ears straining, our hearts pounding every time we heard the slightest sound, waiting for something terrible to happen. Then the dog began to walk around the room, sniffing the walls, whimpering the whole time. This beast was driving us mad! In a fit of furious terror, the man who’d brought me there grabbed the dog, opened the door and flung the animal outside, into a little courtyard.
He stopped howling at once; and we were plunged into an even more terrifying silence. Suddenly we all jumped; something glided past the outside wall on the forest side; then it came to the door, feeling it tentatively with its hand; for two minutes we didn’t hear a sound—it drove us mad; then it came back, scraping against the wall, slowly scratching it like a child would with its nails; then suddenly, a face appeared at the spyhole, a white face with the gleaming eyes of a wild beast. It let out a sound: an agonized, mournful moan.
A dreadful noise exploded in the kitchen; the old gamekeeper had fired his rifle. The two sons immediately rushed over to the spyhole and covered it up with the large dining table, reinforcing it with the sideboard.
And I swear to you that at the explosion of that gun, which took me completely by surprise, my heart, my body and my soul filled with such dread that I thought I would collapse, on the point of dying of fright.
We stayed there until dawn, unable to move or to speak, completely paralyzed by an overwhelming sense of fear.
We didn’t dare take the barricade down until a slim ray of sunlight appeared through a crack in the shutters.
And at the foot of the wall, against the door, the old dog lay dying, his face ripped apart by a bullet.
He’d escaped from the courtyard by digging a hole under the fence.”
THE MAN WITH THE tanned face fell silent. After a moment, he added:
“Although I wasn’t in any danger that night, I would prefer to relive each and every moment of terrible danger I’ve ever faced than that one minute when the gunshot was fired at the bearded face in the window.”
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* Translated by Sandra Smith in collaboration with Eleanor Hill of Sarah Lawrence College.
1 Ouargla, or Wargla, is a town and oasis in northeast Algeria.
2 Locally recruited soldiers in the Cavalry corps of the French army in North Africa.
PEOPLE WERE TALKING ABOUT A RECENT TRIAL, A CASE WHERE someone had been committed to an asylum illegally. It was toward the end of a small gathering of friends one evening on the Rue de Grenelle, in a very old private house, and everyone had a story to tell, a story each person affirmed was true.
Then the elderly Marquis de La Tour-Samuel, who was eighty-two years old, stood up and went to lean against the fireplace. He told his story in a trembling voice:
“I ALSO KNOW OF SOMETHING strange, something so strange that it has been the prime obsession of my life. It has been fifty-six years since it happened to me, and not a month goes by without my reliving it again in a dream. From the day that it happened, I was marked, marked by fear, do you understand what I’m saying? Yes, for ten minutes I was overcome by horrific terror, and it was so strong that ever since that moment, a kind of endless dread lingers in my soul. Unexpected sounds make me shudder deep inside; objects I can barely make out in the darkness of evening fill me with a mad desire to escape. I am actually afraid at night.
Oh! I would never have admitted this until now, having reached the age I am. Now I can tell you about it. It is acceptable to be fearful when faced with imaginary dangers when you’re eighty-two years old. However, when faced with real danger, Mesdames, I have always stood my ground.
This event distressed me so deeply, spread such horrific, mysterious and extreme anxiety within me that I have never told it to anyone. I kept it hidden in the most private corner of my heart, the place where we bury our painful secrets, shameful secrets, all the moments of weakness that we have experienced and that we cannot bring ourselves to admit.
I am going to tell you what happened without any explanation. There certainly is an explanation, unless I experienced a moment of madness. No, I was not mad, and I will prove it to you. Think what you will. Here are the simple facts.
It happened in July of 1827. I was then stationed in Rouen.
One day, while I was walking along the quayside, I came across a man whom I thought I recognized, but without being able to place him. I instinctively hesitated for a moment. The stranger noticed, looked at me and threw his arms around me.
He was a childhood friend whom I had liked a great deal. In the five years since I’d last seen him, he looked as if he had aged by half a century. His hair was completely white, and he walked bent over, as if he were exhausted. He could see my surprise and he told me what had happened. A terrible misfortune had shattered his life.
He had fallen madly in love with a young woman and married her in a kind of rapture of happiness. After one year of extraordinary bliss and unabated passion, she had died suddenly of a heart condition, killed by love itself, most likely.
He left his château as soon as the funeral was over and went to live in his house in Rouen. He lived there alone, in despair, tormented by grief, so unhappy that all he could think about was suicide.
“Since I’ve run into you like this,” he said, “I’m going to ask you to do me a great favor: to go to my château and get me some papers I need urgently; they’re in the writing desk in my bedroom, in our bedroom. I can’t ask a subordinate or a businessman to take care of this for I require the utmost prudence and absolute discretion. As far as I’m concerned, nothing in the world could make me return to that house.
I’ll give you the key to the bedroom that I locked myself when I left, and the key to my desk. And I’ll write you a note for you to give to my gardener who will open the château for you.
But come and have breakfast with me tomorrow, and we can discuss it.”
I promised to do this simple favor for him.
Besides, it would just be an outing for me as his estate was located a few miles away, on the outskirts of Rouen. It would only take about an hour on horseback.
I was at his house at ten o’clock the next morning. We had breakfast alone, but he barely spoke. He asked me to forgive him. The thought that I was going to go into his bedroom, where his happiness had died, moved him deeply, he said. He did, in fact, seem unusually upset, preoccupied, as if a mysterious battle were taking place within his soul.
He finally explained exactly what I had to do. It was very simple. I had to take two packets of letters and a bundle of papers locked in the first drawer to the right of his writing desk, to which I had the key.
“I suppose I don’t need to ask you not to look at any of them,” he added.
I was hurt by his words and told him so, a little angrily.
“Forgive me,” he muttered. “I’m in so much pain.”
And he began to cry.
I left him about one o’clock to carry out my task.
The weather was beautiful, and I galloped along at a fast pace across the meadows, listening to the singing skylarks and the rhythmic sound of my saber against my boot.
Then I entered the forest and slowed my horse down to a trot. The branches from the trees caressed my face, and every now and again, I would catch a leaf with my teeth and chew on it greedily, experiencing one of those joyous moments in life that, for no particular reason, fills you with intense happiness, an almost fleeting happiness, a kind of surge of power.
As I approached the château, I took the letter I’d been given for the gardener out of my pocket and noticed, with astonishment, that it was sealed. I was so surprised and annoyed that I nearly turned back without carrying out my task. Then I thought that doing so would be to admit I was unnecessarily touchy, which was in bad taste. And besides, my friend must have sealed the note without realizing it, given the emotional state he was in.
The manor house looked as if it had been deserted for twenty years. The gate was open; it was so rotten that it was impossible to tell how it remained standing. The pathways were overrun with grass; you couldn’t even see the flowerbeds on the lawns.
I banged my foot against one of the shutters and, hearing the sound, an old man came out of a side door; he was astonished to see me. I leapt off my horse and handed him the letter. He read it, reread it, turned it over, gave me a suspicious look and put the paper in his pocket.
“Well! What do you want?” he asked.
“You should know,” I replied bluntly, “since you’ve read your master’s orders in that letter. I want to go inside the château.”
He seemed appalled. “So, you’re going to go into . . . into his bedroom?” he asked.
I was beginning to get annoyed. “Good heavens! Are you really going to stand there and interrogate me?”
“No . . . Monsieur,” he stammered. “It’s just that it . . . it hasn’t been opened since . . . since the . . . death. If you would wait for me for five minutes, I’ll go . . . go and see if . . .”
I cut in. “Really now, do you take me for a fool?” I asked angrily. “You can’t go in there because I have the key right here.”
He didn’t know what to say.
“Well, then, Monsieur, I’ll show you the way.”
“Just show me the staircase and then go. I’ll find it very easily without you.”
“But Monsieur . . . all the same . . .”
This time, I got very angry.
“Not another word, now, understand? Or you’ll have to answer to me.”
I pushed him hard, out of my way, and went inside the house.
I walked through the kitchen, then two smaller rooms where the gardener lived with his wife. Then I crossed a large entrance hall, went up the stairs and found the door my friend had described to me.
I opened it without difficulty and went inside.
The room was so dark that at first, I couldn’t make out a thing. I stopped, overwhelmed by that moldy, sickly smell you find in rooms where no one has lived and that have been locked up, funereal rooms. Then, little by little, my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could clearly see a very large bedroom in total chaos; the bed had no sheets, just a mattress and pillows. One of the pillows had the deep impression of an elbow or a head, as if someone had just lain on it.
The armchairs looked as if they’d collapsed. I noticed that one door, from the wardrobe no doubt, had been left ajar.
I went over to the window to open it, to let some light in, but the hinges on the shutter were so rusty that I couldn’t get them to budge.
I even tried to break them with my sword, without success. I was getting annoyed by these fruitless attempts, and as my eyes had now completely adjusted to the dim light, I gave up hope of seeing any better and walked over to the writing desk.
I sat down in an armchair, raised the flap and opened the appropriate drawer. It was full to bursting. I needed only three bundles of papers that I knew how to recognize, so I started to look for them.
I opened my eyes wide to see better, and as I was trying to make out the addresses, I thought I heard, or rather felt, something rustling behind me. I didn’t think anything was wrong: I just thought it was a draft blowing against a piece of fabric. But a minute later, another movement, almost imperceptible, caused an unpleasant shiver to run through my body. It seemed so ridiculous to be afraid, even a little afraid, that I didn’t want to turn around, out of a sense of self-respect. I had just found the second bundle of papers I needed, and as soon as I found the third one, a long, painful sigh coming from right behind my shoulder made me start like a madman and jump six feet away. As I leapt, I turned around, my hand on the hilt of my sword, and if I hadn’t felt it right by my side, I surely would have fled like a coward.
A tall woman dressed all in white stood watching me, behind the armchair where I had been sitting just a second before.
A shock ran through my arms and legs so powerfully that I nearly fell backwards and collapsed! Oh! No one can understand such terrifying and astounding horrors unless they have experienced them. Your soul fades away, you can’t feel your heart beating any more, your entire body feels as limp as a sponge. It felt like everything inside me was caving in.
I do not believe in ghosts; well, I weakened in the face of the hideous fear of the dead, and I suffered, oh! in those few moments, I suffered more than in all the rest of my life, caught in the spellbinding anguish of supernatural horror.
If she hadn’t spoken, I might well have died! But she did speak; she spoke in a soft, mournful voice that made me tremble. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I got control of myself again, or that I was thinking rationally. No. I was so frantic that I didn’t know what I was doing any more, but my innate sense of pride as well as a touch of ego that comes from my profession forced me to maintain a semblance of dignity, almost in spite of myself. I stood tall out of self-respect, and for her, of course, for her, whatever she might have been, a real woman or a ghost. I only became aware of all this later on, for I can assure you that the very moment I saw that apparition, my mind was a complete blank. I was quite simply afraid.
“Oh, Monsieur,” she said, “I would be so grateful if you could help me!”
I wanted to reply but I couldn’t manage to utter a single word. A kind of vague sound came from deep inside my throat.
“Will you?” she continued. “You can save me, make me better. I am suffering so terribly. Suffering . . . oh I am suffering so much!”
She gently sat down in my armchair.
“Will you?” she asked, looking at me.
I nodded, still totally unable to speak.
Then she handed me a tortoiseshell comb.
“Comb my hair, oh! comb my hair,” she murmured, “that will make me all better. I need someone to comb my hair. Look at my head . . . I’m suffering so much, and my hair, my hair, it hurts so much!”
Her hair fell loose, and it was very long, very dark, and seemed to hang all the way down the back of the chair and touch the floor.
Why did I do it? Even though I was shaking, why did I let her hand me the comb, and why did I hold her long hair in my hands? It gave me the horrendous feeling I was touching cold snakes. I don’t know why.
That feeling remains in my fingers still and makes me shudder every time I think of it.
I combed her hair. Somehow, I took her icy mane of hair in my hands. I twisted it, put it up, let it down again, braided it the way you set a horse’s mane. She sighed, tilted her head to one side, looked happy.
Suddenly she said, “Thank you!” grabbed the comb from my hand, and ran out through the door I’d noticed was ajar.
For several minutes after I was alone again, I experienced the terror you feel just after you wake up from a nightmare. Then I finally calmed down. I rushed over to the window and angrily broke the shutter open.
A flood of light filled the room. I threw myself against the door where that creature had gone. It was locked and immovable.
Then I was filled with a desperate urge to flee, a panic, the kind of panic you feel in battle. I quickly grabbed the three bundles of letters from the open writing desk, ran through the rooms, leapt down the stairs four at a time, found myself outside, I really don’t know how, and spotting my horse a few feet away, I jumped into the saddle in a single bound and galloped away.
I didn’t stop until I was in front of my house in Rouen. After throwing the reins to my orderly, I ran to my room and locked myself in so I could think.
For an hour, I anxiously wondered if I hadn’t been the victim of a hallucination. I surely must have had one of those incomprehensible nervous attacks, one of those panics in the mind that are the source of miracles, moments that endow the Supernatural with so much power.
And I was about to believe it had all been just a hallucination, a trick of the senses, until I walked over to the window. My eyes happened to wander down to my chest. The jacket of my uniform was covered in long hairs—a woman’s long hair—that had got caught in the buttons!
I picked them off one by one, and with trembling hands, I threw them out the window.
Then I called for my orderly. I feel too overwrought, too upset, to go to see my friend the same day. And I also wanted to think about what I should tell him.
I had his letters taken to him and he gave my orderly a receipt. He asked about me in detail. He was told that I wasn’t feeling well, that I was suffering from sunstroke, something like that. He had seemed concerned.
I went to see him the next day, just after dawn, determined to tell him the truth. He had gone out the night before and had not returned.
I went back that afternoon but he was still nowhere in sight. I waited a week. He never returned. So I went to the police. They looked everywhere for him but without finding a trace of where he had been or where he was.
A meticulous examination of the deserted château was carried out. Nothing suspicious was found.
There were no indications that a woman had ever been hidden there.
The investigation revealed nothing; the search was abandoned.
And fifty-six years have passed and I still have learned nothing. I still know nothing more.”
EVERYONE GATHERED AROUND THE JUDGE, MONSIEUR BERMUTIER, who was giving his opinion about the mysterious case that had happened in Saint-Cloud. This inexplicable crime had thrown all of Paris into a panic for the past month. No one understood a thing about it.
Monsieur Bermutier stood, leaning against the fireplace as he talked; he brought up evidence and discussed various opinions on the case but came to no conclusion.
Several women got up and went to stand closer to him, concentrating on the judge’s clean-shaven face as he spoke in a serious tone of voice. They shuddered and trembled, gripped by fear and curiosity, by a keen, insatiable need to feel terror: it haunted their souls and tormented them like the need for food.
One of the women, paler than the others, broke the silence:
“It’s horrible. It’s almost ‘supernatural.’ No one will ever know what really happened.”
The judge turned toward her:
“Yes, Madame, it is very likely that we’ll never know what happened. But the ‘supernatural’ as you call it has nothing to do with this case. We are faced with a crime that was very cleverly conceived, very skillfully carried out and so shrouded in mystery that we cannot disentangle it from the enigmatic circumstances surrounding it. However, I did once, long ago, know of a case where something truly inexplicable seemed to be involved. The case had to be dropped, though, as there was simply no explanation for it.”
“Oh! Do tell us about it,” several ladies urged, all at once.
Monsieur Bermutier smiled, but still looked serious, as was befitting a judge.
“Please do not think, even for a moment, that I assumed something supernatural happened during this case,” he continued. “I only believe in natural causes. However, if instead of using the word ‘supernatural’ to explain things we do not understand, we simply spoke of ‘the inexplicable,’ that would be more appropriate. In any case, in the story I am about to tell you, it was the external, preliminary circumstances that disturbed me the most. Here are the facts.”
“AT THE TIME, I was a judge in Ajaccio,1 a small white city nestled at the edge of a beautiful bay and surrounded on all sides by high mountains.
Most of my cases were to do with murderous vendettas. Some of them were extraordinary, impossibly dramatic, vicious or heroic. Ajaccio is the place where you can find the most amazing motives for revenge you could ever imagine: local feuds that die down for a while but are never forgotten, abominable cunning, assassinations that turn into massacres, acts that could almost be described as noble. For two years, all I heard people talk about was vengeance, the terrible Corsican prejudice that demands revenge for any insult on the offending party, his descendants and his family. I had seen elderly people, children and cousins have their throats slit; my mind was full of such stories.
Now one day, I learned that an Englishman had just taken a long-term lease on a small villa at the end of the bay. He had brought a French servant with him, someone he had found while passing through Marseille.
Everyone was soon talking about this unusual man who lived alone in his house and only went out to go hunting or fishing. He spoke to no one, never went into town, and, every morning, practiced shooting his pistol and rifle for an hour or two.
People started inventing stories about him. Some said he was an important person who had run away from his country for political reasons; others claimed he was in hiding after committing a horrible crime. They even gave particularly gruesome details of the circumstances.
As a judge, I wanted to see if I could get some more information about this man but it proved impossible. He called himself Sir John Rowell.
So all I could do was keep an eye on him from up close, but to tell the truth, there was nothing at all suspicious about him.
Meanwhile, rumors about him continued to spread; they became more and more exaggerated and accepted, so I decided to try to see this foreigner myself, and I started to go hunting regularly in the area near his property.
An opportunity only arose after a long wait. It happened when I shot and killed a partridge right in front of the Englishman. My dog brought it to me; but I immediately took the partridge and went to apologize for my inappropriate behavior and ask Sir John Rowell to accept the dead bird.
He was a big man with red hair and a red beard; he was very tall, very broad, a kind of polite, placid Hercules. He had none of the so-called British reserve and he thanked me warmly for my sensitivity in his broken French, with a thick British accent. By the end of the month, we had chatted together five or six times.
One evening, when I was walking past his house, I saw him in the garden, straddling a chair and smoking his pipe. I greeted him and he invited me to come and have a glass of beer. I accepted at once.
He received me with all the scrupulous courtesy of the English, and spoke in glowing terms of France and Corsica, saying how much he loved this “countryscape” and this “riveredge.”
Then, taking the utmost care and under the pretext of being terribly interested, I asked him a few questions about his life and plans. He replied openly, told me he had traveled a lot, in Africa, India and America.
“Oh! Yes, I’ve had many adventures!” he added, laughing.
Then I started talking about hunting again and he told me the strangest details of the way he had hunted hippopotamus, tigers, elephants and even gorillas.
“All those animals are dangerous,” I said.
He smiled: “Oh, no! The worst is man.”
Then he started to laugh, the hearty laugh of a big, contented Englishman:
“I also hunted men a lot too, I did.”
Then he began to talk about weapons, and invited me to come inside to show me all his different rifles.
His drawing room had black drapes, black silk drapes embroidered with gold. Large yellow flowers ran across the dark material, as brilliant as fire.
“It’s Japanese fabric,” he said.
But in the middle of the widest panel, something strange drew my attention. A black object stood out on a square of red velvet. I walked over to it: it was a hand, a man’s hand. It wasn’t the clean, white hand from a skeleton, but a shriveled-up black hand with long yellow nails, its muscles exposed and traces of old, dried-up blood on the bones, the kind of blood you find on some piece of debris. And the bones looked as if they had been cleanly cut off by an ax, just in the middle of the forearm.
Around the wrist, an enormous iron chain was riveted and soldered to this filthy hand, pinning it to the wall by a ring that was strong enough to keep an elephant in check.
“What is that?” I asked.
“That was my best enemy,” the Englishman replied calmly. “It came from America. It has been cut off with a sword and the skin peeled off with a stone, then dried in the sun for a week. Oh . . . very good, it is.”
I touched the human remains that must have belonged to a giant. The fingers were unbelievably long and attached by enormous tendons that still had some shredded skin attached in places. The hand was horrible to look at, flayed the way it was, and naturally made you think of some kind of vicious vengeance.
“The man must have been very strong,” I said.
“Ah, yes, but I’m stronger than him. I put him on that chain to hold him,” the Englishman replied quietly.
I thought he was making a joke.
“That chain is quite pointless now,” I said; “the hand isn’t going to run away.”
“It always tries to escape,” Sir John Rowell replied in all seriousness, “that chain is necessary.”
I glanced quickly over at him to look at his face. “Is he mad?” I wondered, “or just making it up?”
But it was impossible to read his expression; he remained calm and kindly. I changed the subject, admiring his rifles.
I did, however, notice that there were three loaded revolvers sitting on several pieces of furniture, as if he lived in constant fear of being attacked.
I went back to his house several times. Then I stopped going. People had got used to him; no one cared about him any more.
A YEAR PASSED. Then one morning, toward the end of November, my valet woke me up and told me that Sir John Rowell had been murdered during the night.
Half an hour later, I went into the Englishman’s house with the chief of police and the Captain. Sir John’s valet, distraught and in despair, was crying in front of the house. At first I suspected him, but he was innocent.
The person responsible was never found.
As soon as I walked into the reception room, I saw Sir John’s body. He was stretched out on his back, in the middle of the room.
His vest was torn and one of the sleeves of his jacket ripped off; everything indicated there had been a terrible struggle.
The Englishman had been strangled! His dark, swollen face was horrible, and his contorted features meant he had seen something utterly terrifying. His neck was covered in blood and had five puncture marks that looked as if they’d been made with iron spikes. There was something between his clenched teeth.
He examined the finger marks on the neck for a long time and then said something truly strange:
“You’d think he’d been strangled by a skeleton.”
A shudder ran down my spine, and I glanced over at the wall, at the spot where I’d seen the horrible flayed hand. It was gone. Its chain hung there, broken.
I leaned over the dead man and saw one of the fingers of the missing hand in his closed mouth. It had been cut, or rather bitten off just above the knuckle.
Then we began investigating. Nothing was found. Not a single door or window had been forced and no furniture had been disturbed. The two watchdogs had not woken up.
Here is a summary of the valet’s statement:
“My master had seemed anxious for about a month. He’d received a lot of letters, but he burned them as soon as he’d read them.
He would often grab a riding crop and in a rage that verged on madness, he would furiously whip the dried-up hand that was chained to the wall. The hand disappeared, no one knows how, on the very night of the crime.
He went to bed very late and made sure his door was properly locked. He always had a weapon close by. He often talked out loud at night, as if he were having an argument with someone.”
That night, strangely enough, he hadn’t made any noise, and it was only when the valet came into the room to open the windows that he found Sir John had been murdered. He didn’t suspect anyone.
I told the judges and public officials everything I knew about the dead man, and they carried out a thorough investigation throughout the island. Nothing was discovered.
Then, one night about three months after the crime, I had a terrible nightmare. I could see the hand, that horrible hand, scurrying down my curtains and over my walls, like a spider or scorpion. Three times I woke up, three times I went back to sleep, three times I saw the hideous hand hurtling around my bedroom, using its fingers as legs.
The next day, the hand was brought to me; it had been found on Sir John Rowell’s grave, in the local cemetery where he had been buried, as we could not trace any of his family. The index finger on the hand was missing.
And there you have my story, Mesdames. I know nothing more.”
THE WOMEN WERE ALL PALE, trembling, distraught. One of them cried out:
“But that story doesn’t have an ending, or an explanation! We’re not going to be able to sleep if you don’t tell us what you think really happened.”
The judge smiled unsympathetically.
“Well then, ladies, I will certainly prevent you from having bad dreams. Quite simply, I think that the real owner of the hand was not actually dead, and that he returned with his remaining hand to reclaim it. But I have no idea how he did it, you know. It was a kind of vendetta.”
“No, it couldn’t be that,” one of the women whispered.
The judge kept on smiling.
“I did warn you that you wouldn’t like my explanation.”
____________
1 This story takes place in Corsica, known in the past for its vendettas.
I
EVERYONE IN FÉCAMP KNEW THE STORY OF POOR MADAME PATIN. She certainly had not been happy with her husband, this Madame Patin: before he died, he used to beat her. He beat her the way people thresh wheat in their barns.
He owned a fishing boat and had married her, long ago, because she was kind, even though she was poor.
Patin, who was a good sailor, but violent, was a regular customer at Auban’s inn, where he normally drank four or five glasses of Marc2 a day, eight or ten or even more when he’d had a good day at sea, depending on how he felt, or so he said.
Auban’s daughter served the Marc; she was a pretty brunette who attracted people to the inn because of her good looks, for no one ever implied there was any other reason.
Whenever Patin went to the inn, he would simply look at her, at first, and speak politely and calmly to her, like a decent man. After drinking the first glass of Marc, he found he liked her even more. After the second glass, he winked at her. After the third, he said: “If you would like to, Mam’zelle Désirée . . .” without ever finishing his sentence. After the fourth glass, he tried to grab her skirt so he could kiss her, and, when he’d had ten glasses, it was her father who served him the rest.
The old innkeeper, who knew all the tricks of the trade, had Désirée walk around the tables to make people order more drinks; and Désirée, who was not Auban’s daughter for nothing, strolled amongst the drinkers, joked with them, a smile on her lips and a gleam in her eye.
Because he drank all those glasses of Marc, Patin got so used to seeing Désirée’s face that he would picture it even when at sea, or when he threw his nets into the water, on the high seas, on windy nights or calm nights, on moonlit nights or in the darkness. He thought about her face when at the helm, or in the back of the boat, while his other four companions were dozing, their heads resting on their hands. He always pictured her smiling at him, pouring the golden Marc with a slight movement of her shoulder, then asking, as she walked away, “There. Satisfied now?”
And because he couldn’t stop picturing her and thinking about her, he was overcome by such a desire to marry her that he couldn’t hold out any longer and finally asked for her hand.
He was rich. He owned a boat, his own fishing nets and a house at the foot of the hill on the Retenue;3 her father had nothing. His proposal was thus eagerly accepted, and the wedding took place as quickly as possible, as both parties were anxious to conclude the business, though for different reasons.
Three days after the wedding, however, Patin just couldn’t understand how he might have believed that Désirée was different from any other woman. Had he truly been so stupid as to burden himself with a penniless woman who had seduced him with her Marc? For she had surely put some nasty drug in his drink.
And he swore the whole time he was out at sea, broke his pipe with his teeth, was violent to his crew, and after cursing out loud, using all the vulgar swear words possible against everyone and everything he knew, he vented the rest of his anger on the fish and lobsters caught in one of his nets, throwing them into his large wicker baskets while cursing in filthy language.
Then, once back home, where Auban’s daughter, his wife, was in close range of both his foul mouth and his hands, he never failed to treat her like the lowest of the low. But as she listened to him, resigned, accustomed to her father’s outbursts, he became frustrated at seeing her so calm, so one evening, he gave her a beating. And life at home then became truly terrible.
For ten years, all anyone ever talked about on the Retenue was the thrashings that Patin subjected his wife to and the way he cursed, about everything, whenever he spoke to her. He swore in a particular way, in fact, with a richness of vocabulary and a thundering voice that no other man in Fécamp could match. As soon as his boat entered the port, after his fishing trips, everyone waited for the first volley of abuse hurled from the jetty to the dock the moment he spotted his wife’s white bonnet.
Standing at the back, he would steer his boat, watching the stern and the sail when the sea was rough, and in spite of having to guide the boat through a narrow, difficult passage, in spite of waves that swelled as high as mountains, he would peer through the foamy surf to find his own wife amongst the women waiting for their sailors, his wife, Auban’s daughter, the wretched woman!
In spite of the noise of the wind and the waves, as soon as he spotted her, he would start bellowing at her in such a booming voice that everyone would start laughing, even though they felt very sorry for her. Then, as soon as the boat had docked at the quay, he had a way of throwing overboard any ballast of good manners, as he called it, while unloading his fish, which attracted all the vagabonds and layabouts from the port around his moorings.
The words flew out of his mouth, sometimes short and horrible, like cannonballs, sometimes like thunder that lasted for five full minutes, such a hurricane of curses that his lungs seemed to hold all the fieriness of the God of the Old Testament.
Then, after getting off his boat and standing face to face with her amid the fishwives and other curious onlookers, he would fish around his hold for an entire new cargo of insults and harsh words, and they would go back home together, she in front, he behind, she crying, him shouting.
Once he was alone with her behind closed doors, he would hit her for the slightest reason. Any excuse to raise his hand, and once he’d started, he didn’t stop, spitting the true reasons for his hatred in her face. With every slap, every punch, he would shout, “Ah, you penniless creature, you tramp, you miserable wretch, I really did myself a favor the day I drank your father’s rotgut, that crook!”
The poor woman now lived in constant terror, an endless, gripping fear that ran through her body and soul, in a hopeless state of waiting—waiting for his insults and her beatings.
And this life lasted ten years. She was so fearful that she grew pale whenever she spoke to anyone, and all she could think about were the beatings she was threatened with, so she became thinner, dryer and more yellow than a smoked fish.
II
ONE NIGHT, WHILE HER HUSBAND WAS OUT AT SEA, SHE WAS AWAKENED by the horrid howling the wind makes when it swoops in like a wild dog! She was frightened and sat down on her bed; when she heard nothing more, she climbed back in, but almost immediately, a roar came down the chimney that shook the entire house, then spread across the sky, like a herd of furious snorting, bellowing beasts, stampeding through the night.
She got out of bed and ran down to the port. Women carrying lanterns arrived from all directions. Men rushed over as well, and everyone watched the frothy crests of the waves light up in the darkness above the sea.
The storm lasted fifteen hours. Eleven sailors never returned, and Patin was among them.
The remains of his boat, the Jeune-Amélie, were found near Dieppe. His dead crew was discovered near Saint-Valérie, but Patin’s body was never found. Since the hull of his boat had been cut in two, his wife expected, and feared, his return, because if there had been a collision, it was possible that the other boat might have picked him up, just him, and taken him far away.
Then, little by little, she got used to the idea that she was a widow, though she would shudder every time a neighbor, a beggar or a traveling salesman unexpectedly came to her house.
One afternoon, about four years after her husband had disappeared, she was walking down the Rue aux Juifs when she stopped in front of the house of an old sea captain who had recently died and whose furniture was being sold.
AT THAT VERY MOMENT, they were auctioning off a parrot, a green parrot with a blue head, who was watching everyone with an anxious, mean look in his eyes.
“Three francs!” cried the auctioneer. “Here’s a bird that can talk like a lawyer, three francs!”
One of Désirée’s friends nudged her.
“You should buy it, you’ve got the money,” she said. “It’ll keep you company. That bird there’s worth more than thirty francs. You can always resell it for twenty or twenty-five francs, you know!”
“Four francs! Ladies, four francs!” the man said again. “He sings Vespers and preaches like the parish priest. He’s extraordinary . . . miraculous!”
Madame Patin bid fifty centimes more; the creature with the hooked nose was given to her in a little cage, and she took him away.
Then she got him settled at home; when she was opening the wire door of the cage to give him something to drink, he bit her finger so hard that it cut her skin and made her bleed.
“Oh!” she said. “He’s very malicious.”
Nevertheless, she gave him some hempseed and corn, then let him preen his feathers while staring at his new house and new mistress, a shifty look in his eyes.
The next morning, just as day was breaking, Madame Patin heard a voice, a loud, deep, booming voice, her husband’s voice—there was no mistaking it—shouting:
“Well, are you going to get up, you bitch!”
She was so utterly terrified that she hid her head under the covers, for every morning in the past, as soon as he opened his eyes, her dead husband had screamed those words in her ear, those very words, words she knew only too well.
Trembling, curled up in a ball, her back tensed in anticipation of the beating she expected to get, her face hidden in the bedcovers, she whispered:
“Good God, he’s here! He’s here! He’s come back. Good God!”
The minutes passed; not a sound broke the silence of her room. Then she lifted her head from under the covers, shaking, sure that he was there, laying in wait, ready to beat her.
She saw nothing, nothing but a ray of sunshine coming in through the window.
“He’s hiding, for sure,” she thought.
She waited for a long time, then, feeling somewhat calmer, she thought:
“I must’ve dreamt it, since he ain’t here.”
She closed her eyes again, feeling less worried, when a furious voice, the thunderous voice of the drowned man, shouted out, quite close by:
“Hell, hell, hell, hell! When the hell are you getting up, b . . . !”
She leapt out of bed, roused by a sense of obedience, the passive obedience of a woman who had been beaten black and blue, a woman who still remembered that particular voice, even after four years had passed, and who would always obey it!
“I’m here, Patin,” she said. “What do you want?”
But Patin did not reply.
Terrified, she looked all around her, then checked everywhere—in the wardrobes, in the fireplace, under the bed—finding no one, then collapsed into a chair almost mad with fear, convinced that Patin’s soul was there, right next to her, just his spirit, and that it had come back to torment her.
Suddenly, she remembered the attic, and that you could get into it by climbing up a ladder on the outside of the house. He surely must have hidden there to catch her unawares. He must have been held captive by savages on some faraway shore, unable to escape until now, and he had come back, more evil than ever. She had no doubts at all, not after hearing his voice.
“That you up there, Patin?” she asked, looking up toward the roof.
Patin did not reply.
So she went outside, with such fear in her heart that she was shaking, and climbed up the ladder, opened the window, peered in, saw nothing, went inside, looked some more and still found nothing.
She sat down on a bale of hay and started to cry, but while she was sobbing, overwhelmed by some heartbreaking, horrific supernatural fear, she heard Patin’s voice saying things, from below, from inside her bedroom. He sounded less angry, calmer as he spoke:
“Filthy weather!—Such strong winds!—Filthy weather!—I ain’t eaten, damn it!”
She shouted down through the ceiling:
“I’m here, Patin; I’ll make you some soup. Don’t get mad. I’m comin’.”
And she ran downstairs.
There was no one in her room.
She felt as if she might faint, as if Death itself had touched her, and she was about to run away and get help from her neighbors when the voice shouted into her ear:
“I ain’t eaten, damn it!”
And the parrot stared at her from his cage with a wide-eyed, sly, evil expression.
And she looked back at him, terrified.
“Ah!” she whispered. “It’s you!”
The parrot shook his head and kept talking:
“Just you wait, wait, wait . . . I’ll teach you to be a layabout!”
What ran through her mind? She felt, she understood, that it really was him, the dead man, who had come back, hidden in the feathers of this beast to continue torturing her; he was going to swear at her all day long, just as he had in the past, and bite her, and shout out curses to bring the neighbors rushing in, to make them laugh. So she lunged toward the cage, opened it and grabbed the bird; it fought back, tearing at her skin with its beak and claws. But she held onto it with both hands, using all her strength, and throwing herself down on the ground, she rolled on top of it with the fury of a woman possessed, crushed it, turned it into a limp little green lump that didn’t move or speak: it just lay there. Then she wrapped it up, using a dishtowel as a shroud, and went out, barefoot, in her nightgown. She walked across the quayside, washed over by the sea’s low waves, and shaking open the cloth, she threw the tiny dead thing in the water; it looked like a little tuft of grass. Then she went home, fell onto her knees in front of the empty cage, and sobbing, distraught at what she had done, begged God’s forgiveness, as if she had just committed some terrible crime.
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1 The original title of this story is Le Noyé, literally The Drowned Man.
2 A very strong liqueur, similar to brandy.
3 The basin in a port where boats can dock and float regardless of the tide.
I
MY GOD! MY GOD! SO I AM FINALLY GOING TO WRITE DOWN WHAT has happened to me! But can I? Dare I? It is so strange, so inexplicable, so incomprehensible, so unbelievable!
If I weren’t sure of what I’d seen, sure there has been no fault in my reasoning, no errors in my findings, no loopholes in all my disciplined observations, I would think I was nothing more than a simple lunatic, at the mercy of bizarre hallucinations. After all, who can know?
Now I am in a mental institution; but I came here of my own free will, out of prudence, out of fear! Only one person knows what happened to me: the doctor here. I am going to write it down. Do I even really know why? To be rid of it, for I feel it within me like an unbearable nightmare.
Here is my story:
I have always been a solitary soul, a dreamer, a kind of lone philosopher, well meaning, needing little to be happy, bearing no bitterness toward men and no grudge against Heaven. I have always lived alone, continually alone, due to a kind of irritation aroused in me by the presence of other people. How can this be explained? I don’t know. I don’t refuse to socialize, to chat, to have dinner with friends, but as soon as I feel I have been around them for any length of time, even my closest friends begin to bore me, tire me, annoy me, and I experience an ever-increasing, insistent desire to have them go away, or for me to leave, to be alone.
This desire is more than a need, it is an overwhelming necessity. And if I continued to find myself in the company of those people, if I were forced not just to keep hearing their conversations but listen to them as well, something terrible would surely happen to me. What exactly? Ah! Who can know? Perhaps I would simply just faint? Yes, probably!
I like being alone so much that I can’t even stand having anyone else sleeping under my roof; I cannot live in Paris because I constantly feel as if I’m about to die whenever I’m there. I feel I am dying morally, and my body and nervous system suffer because of the immense crowds swarming everywhere, living all around me, even when they are asleep. When other people are asleep it pains me even more than when they speak. And I can never get any rest when I know, when I can sense, there are other people behind the wall whose lives are just as broken off, suspended by these regular lapses of reason.
Why am I like this? Who can know? The reason is perhaps quite simple: I grow very tired of anything that doesn’t happen within me. And there are many others like me.
There are two categories of people on this earth: those who need others, are entertained, kept busy, calmed down by others, and who are exhausted, worn out, destroyed by solitude, feeling the way they would if they had to climb a mighty glacier or walk across a desert, and the others, who, on the contrary, are worn out, bored, irritated and pained by other people, while solitude calms them, bathes them in peace through the freedom and imagination of their minds.
All in all, this is a normal psychological phenomenon. The first type of person is made to be extroverted, the others to be introverted. My own attention span for anything outside myself is short and quickly exhausted, and as soon as I can stand no more, an intolerable sense of uneasiness runs through my whole body and mind.
The result of this has been that I became attached, became greatly attached, to inanimate objects, objects that take on the same importance as people to me, and so my house became, had become, a world in which I lived an active but solitary life, surrounded by objects, furniture, curios, that were as familiar and pleasing to my eye as people’s faces. I’d furnished my home gradually, decorated it, and it was where I felt content, satisfied, as happy as if I were in the arms of a loving woman whose familiar caresses had become the calm, sweet thing I needed most.
I had the house built in a beautiful garden that cut it off from the roads, and near the edge of a city where I could have, when necessary, the possibility of mingling with other people, since I did feel that need every now and then. All my servants slept in quarters quite a distance away, at the back of the vegetable garden, surrounded by a high wall. And the darkness of night over the silence of my isolated, hidden home, completely enclosed by the leaves of the tall trees, was so peaceful, so good, that every night I would put off going to bed for hours in order to savor it for longer.
That day, there had been a performance of Sigurd1 in the town theater. It was the first time I’d seen this wonderful, magical story and heard its music; it gave me much pleasure.
I was walking home, feeling lighthearted, my head full of melodic music and beautiful visions. It was dark, very dark, so dark that I could barely make out the wide road in front of me and I nearly stumbled into a ditch on several occasions. It was about a half a mile from the city limits to my home, maybe a little more, perhaps a twenty-minute walk if you don’t hurry. It was one o’clock in the morning, either one o’clock or one-thirty. The sky brightened up a little in front of me and I could see the crescent moon, the sad final stage of the crescent moon. The first crescent moon, the one that appears at four or five o’clock in the evening, is bright, cheerful, tinged with silver, but the one you see after midnight is reddish, somber, troublesome, the true crescent of the Witches’ Sabbath. Anyone who is awake late at night must have noticed this. The first quarter, even if it is as slim as can be, casts a joyful little light that delights the heart and casts clear shadows on the ground. The final crescent barely gives off a dying light, so lifeless that it hardly highlights any shadows at all.
I could make out the dark shape of my garden in the distance, and I don’t know why, but I felt somewhat uncomfortable at the idea of going through it. I walked more slowly. It was very mild out. The high cluster of trees made me think of a tomb in which my house was buried.
I opened my gate and went down the long path lined with sycamore trees that led to the house. They formed a high archway like a tall tunnel through impenetrable clumps of trees and winding around the lawns full of flowerbeds, oval forms with indistinct shapes beneath the fading shadows.
As I approached the house, a strange feeling of uneasiness spread through me. I stopped. There was not a single sound. Not the slightest wind through the leaves. “What’s wrong with me?” I thought. I’ve been coming home like this for ten years without feeling the least bit anxious. I wasn’t afraid. I’m never afraid at night. Seeing a man, some prowler or thief, would have filled me with rage, and I would have attacked him without a second thought. I did have a weapon, though. I had my revolver. But I wouldn’t touch it, for I wanted to overcome this feeling of dread that was growing within me.
What was it? A premonition? The mysterious premonition that takes over your senses when you are on the brink of experiencing the inexplicable? Perhaps . . . Who can know?
The closer I got, the more I felt myself shaking, and when I was in front of the wall, near the closed shutters, I knew I would have to wait a few moments before opening the door and going inside my spacious house. So I sat down on a bench under my living room windows. I stayed there, feeling rather unnerved, my head leaning against the wall, staring into the leafy darkness. For the first few moments, I noticed nothing out of the ordinary around me. My ears were humming, but that often happens. Sometimes I think I can hear trains passing, bells ringing, a crowd of people walking by.
The humming soon became more distinct, more precise, more recognizable. I was wrong. I wasn’t hearing the usual humming of blood rushing through my veins but a unique yet very vague sound that was definitely coming from inside my house.
I could hear it through the wall, a continuous sound, more like something moving than a noise, the muted movement of a great many things, as if someone had lifted up all my furniture, put it down and was slowly dragging it along.
Oh! For a long time after, I still doubted what I heard. But I pressed my ear against the shutter to better listen this strange commotion in my house, and I remained convinced, certain, that something abnormal and incomprehensible was happening inside. I was not afraid, but I was—how can I express it?—I was so surprised that I was scared to death. I didn’t load my revolver—I could tell there was no need to. I waited.
I waited for a long time, unable to make a decision of any kind; my mind was clear but I was incredibly nervous. I stood there, waiting, persistently listening to the sound that grew louder and every now and again became powerfully intense, as if it were groaning with impatience, with anger, in mysterious turmoil.
Then, suddenly, ashamed of my cowardice, I grabbed my bunch of keys, chose the one I needed, forced it into the lock, turned it twice, and pushing open the door with all my might, I slammed it against the wall inside.
It sounded as if a rifle had been fired, and then, from the top to the bottom of my house, this explosion was followed by a thunderous uproar. It was so unexpected, so horrible, so deafening that I took a few steps back and pulled my revolver out of its holster, even though I could sense it was pointless.
I waited some more, but not for long. I could now make out the extraordinary sound of footsteps on my staircase, on the parquet floors, over the rugs, footsteps not made by shoes, by people’s shoes, but by crutches, wooden crutches and metal crutches that vibrate like cymbals. Then, suddenly, I saw an armchair, the large armchair from my study, shuffling out onto the doorstep. It went out into the garden. Others followed: chairs from my living room, then small sofas dragged along like crocodiles on their short legs, then all of my chairs, leaping about like goats, and little footstools scurrying along like rabbits.
I was so afraid! I slipped into a clump of trees where I remained, crouching down, staring at this endless parade of my furniture—for everything rushed past, one thing after the other, quickly or slowly, depending on its size and weight. My piano, my grand piano, flew by with the speed of a galloping horse with the echo of music in its flanks; the smallest objects slid across the sandy ground like ants—brushes, fine glassware, cups—and the moonlight cast a phosphorescent glow on them, so they looked like glowworms. Fabrics crept along, spreading out like the tentacles on an octopus. My desk appeared, a precious antique from the previous century that contained all the letters I had received, my entire romantic past, a former love affair which had caused me so much suffering! And there were photographs inside as well.
Suddenly, I was no longer afraid. I leapt at the desk and grabbed it as you would a thief, the way you might catch hold of a woman who was trying to run away, but it was moving so fast that it simply couldn’t be stopped, and despite my efforts, despite my anger, I could not even slow it down. As I desperately fought this horrifying force, I was thrown to the ground in the struggle. Then it rolled me around, dragged me along the sandy ground, and the furniture that followed was starting to walk over me, trampling my legs and bruising them. Then, after I let go, the rest of the furniture charged over my body like cavalry attacking a fallen soldier.
Mad with terror, I finally managed to pull myself away from the wide pathway and hide in the trees again. I watched everything disappear, the tiniest things, the smallest objects, the least valuable, things I didn’t even remember had belonged to me.
Then, in the distance, I heard an incredibly loud banging of doors slamming shut in my house that now echoed as if it were empty. Doors banged from the top to bottom of the building, even the front door slammed shut, the last to close, the door I had foolishly opened myself so I could get away.
I fled, running toward the village, and only calmed down when I met some people in the street who were out late. I went and rang the bell at a hotel where the people knew me. I had brushed the dust off my clothing and explained how I had lost all my keys, including the key to the kitchen garden where all my servants slept in an isolated house, inside the outer wall that protected my fruit and vegetables from thieves.
I covered myself up to the neck in the bed I was given. But I couldn’t sleep, so I listened to my heart pounding and waited for dawn. I had asked that my servants be told where I was as soon as it was light, and my valet knocked at my door at seven o’clock in the morning.
He looked completely distressed.
“Something terrible happened last night, Monsieur,” he said.
“What was it?”
“All your furniture was stolen, Monsieur, everything, everything, right down to the smallest items.”
This piece of news pleased me. Why? Who can know? I was in complete control of myself, certain I could hide my true feelings, never saying a word to anyone about what I had seen; I could keep it hidden, bury it in my mind like some terrible secret.
“Well, the same people must have stolen my keys,” I replied. “You must go and tell the police at once. I’ll get up and meet you there shortly.”
The investigation lasted five months. Nothing was ever found, not the smallest stolen item, nor was there the slightest trace of the thieves. Heavens! Imagine if I had said something about what I knew . . . If I had told them . . . they would have locked me up, me, not the thieves but the man who had witnessed such a thing.
Oh! I knew how to keep silent. But I didn’t refurnish my house. It was quite pointless. It would have happened again. I didn’t ever want to go back there. I never saw it again.
I came to Paris, to a hotel, and I consulted doctors about my nervous condition, as it worried me a great deal ever since that hideous night.
They suggested that I travel. I took their advice.
II
I BEGAN WITH A TRIP TO ITALY. THE SUN DID ME GOOD. FOR SIX months, I wandered from Genoa to Venice, from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, from Rome to Naples. Then I explored Sicily, a wonderful place thanks to its landscape and monuments, relics left by the Greeks and Normans. I went to Africa, peacefully crossing the calm, golden desert where camels, gazelles and nomadic Arabs wander past, where, under the clear, light sky no haunting thoughts float around you, not in the daytime, not at night.
I returned to France through Marseille, and despite the city’s liveliness, the light in Provence was less brilliant, which saddened me. When I got back to this continent, I had the strange feeling I was a sick man who thinks he’s been cured but who still experiences some slight pain, a warning that the source of his illness has not disappeared.
Then I returned to Paris. By the end of the month, I was bored. It was autumn, and I wanted to take a short trip to Normandy before winter, as I’d never been there.
I started in Rouen, of course, and for a week, I wandered through this medieval city feeling entertained, delighted, enthusiastic in this surprising museum of extraordinary Gothic monuments.
One afternoon, around four o’clock, as I was following an amazing street along a river as black as ink called the “Eau de Robec,” giving all my attention to the unusual ancient architecture of the houses, I was suddenly distracted by the sight of a series of secondhand shops set all in a row.
Ah! They had chosen this spot well, these sordid dealers of things from the past, in this eerie alleyway, along this sinister flowing water, beneath the pointed slate and tile roofs where old weathervanes still creak!
Deep inside these dark shops, you could see piles of carved chests, earthenware from Rouen, Nevers, Moustiers, statues, some in oak, others painted, figures of Christ, the Virgin Mary and the saints, church ornaments, liturgical vestments, even sacred vessels and an old tabernacle in gilded wood from which the Sacred Host had been removed. Oh! The strange cellars in these tall houses, in these large houses, were completely full, from top to bottom, full of objects of all kinds that seemed to no longer exist, objects that had outlived their original owners, their centuries, their eras, their styles, in order to be bought, as curiosities, by successive generations.
My fondness for curios was reawakened in this neighborhood of antique sellers. I went from shop to shop, taking two great strides to leap across the bridges made of four planks of rotting wood placed over the nauseating flow of water from the Eau de Robec.
Heaven have mercy! What a shock! I could see one of my most beautiful wardrobes at the side of an archway stuffed full of various objects; it looked like the entrance to the catacombs of a cemetery of antique furniture. I walked closer to it, trembling from head to foot, trembling so much that I didn’t dare touch it. I stretched out my hand, then hesitated. It really was mine, though: a unique Louis XIII wardrobe, recognizable by anyone who had ever seen it even once. Quickly glancing a little further away, toward the back of the room, which was even darker, I spotted three of my armchairs upholstered in petit point tapestry, then, even further away, my two Henri II tables, so rare that people used to come from Paris just to see them.
Imagine, just imagine my state of mind!
And I walked closer, suffering, rigid with emotion, but I walked closer, for I am brave. I moved closer, like a Knight of the Dark Ages entering a witches’ den. With every step I took, I saw everything that had once belonged to me, my chandeliers, my books, my paintings, my clothing, my weapons, everything, everything except my desk full of letters; that was nowhere to be seen.
I walked through the shop, then downstairs to dark rooms only to go back upstairs again. I was alone. I called out; no one answered. I was alone; there was no one else in this enormous house with as many twists and turns as a labyrinth.
Night fell, and I had to sit down on one of my chairs, for I did not want to leave. Every now and again, I shouted, “Hello, hello! Anybody there?”
I had been there for more than an hour when I heard footsteps, soft, slow footsteps, coming from somewhere, I couldn’t tell where. I nearly ran off, but I drew myself up to my full height and called out once more, then I saw a light in the next room.
“Who’s there?” said a voice.
“A buyer,” I replied.
“It’s very late to be coming to antique shops,” he said.
“I’ve been waiting for you for more than an hour,” I replied.
“You can come back tomorrow.”
“I will have left Rouen by tomorrow.”
I didn’t dare go any closer, and he wasn’t coming to me. I could see his light shining on a tapestry with two angels flying above the dead on a battlefield. It, too, belonged to me.
“Well!” I said. “Are you coming?”
“You come to me,” he replied.
I stood up and walked toward him.
In the middle of the large room was a very small man, very small and very fat, as fat as a freak, a hideous freak.
He had a short beard, dotted with sparse, yellowish hairs, and not a hair on his head! Not a single hair? He held his candle up to see me, and his skull looked like a small moon in this vast room stuffed with old furniture. His face was wrinkled and puffed up, his eyes barely visible.
I bargained with him to buy three chairs that were mine, and paid a great deal of money for them. I paid for them right then and there, giving him only my room number at the hotel. They were to be delivered the next morning before nine o’clock.
Then I left. He walked me to the door and was very polite.
I headed straight for the police headquarters and told the Captain about the theft of my furniture and what I had just discovered.
He immediately sent a telegram for information to the Public Prosecutor’s Office that had dealt with the matter and asked me if I would wait for their reply. An hour later, he got his answer, which completely vindicated me.
“I’m going to arrest that man and question him immediately,” he said, “for he might have become suspicious and gotten rid of your belongings. If you go and have supper and come back in two hours, I’ll have him here and will question him again in front of you.”
“Very gladly, Monsieur. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”
I went and dined at my hotel, with a much better appetite than I thought I would have. I felt rather satisfied. They would get him.
Two hours later, I went back to the police station where the Captain was waiting for me.
“Well, Monsieur,” he said as soon as he saw me, “we haven’t been able to locate your man. My detectives couldn’t arrest him.”
Ah! I felt myself weakening.
“But . . . you found his house all right?” I asked.
“Absolutely. It has been put under surveillance and will be watched until he returns. As for him, though, he’s disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
“Disappeared. He normally spends every evening at his neighbor’s place; she’s an antiques dealer too, an odd old witch, the widow Bidoin. She didn’t see him tonight and couldn’t give us any information. We’ll have to wait until tomorrow.”
I left. Ah! How sinister, troubling and haunted the streets of Rouen seemed!
I slept very badly and had nightmares every time I fell asleep.
The next day, not wishing to appear too anxious, I waited until ten o’clock before going to the police station.
The merchant had not come back. His shop remained closed.
“I’ve taken care of all the necessary formalities,” the Captain said. “The Public Prosecutor’s Office is aware of what’s happened; we will go to the shop together and open it up, and you can point out all the things that are yours.”
We were driven there. Some policemen stood in front of the shop with a locksmith; it had been opened.
When I went inside, I saw none of the furniture, nothing that had been in my house, nothing at all, not my wardrobe, not my armchairs, not my tables, while the day before, I hadn’t been able to turn around without seeing something of mine.
The Captain, surprised, looked at me suspiciously at first.
“My God, Monsieur,” I said, “the disappearance of my furniture coincides strangely with the disappearance of the merchant.”
He smiled. “How true! You shouldn’t have bought and paid for your things yesterday. That must have aroused his suspicions.”
“But what is completely incomprehensible,” I continued, “is that all the space taken up by my things is now filled with other furniture.”
“Oh!” the Captain replied, “he had all night, and accomplices, no doubt. This house must adjoin the neighbors’ place. Don’t worry about anything, Monsieur, I’m going to stay on top of this case. This crook won’t evade us for long since we’re watching his hideaway.”
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Ah! My heart, my heart, my poor heart, how fast and hard I felt it beat!
.......................................................................................................................
I stayed in Rouen for two weeks. The man never returned. Good heavens! Good heavens! Who could possibly stop that man or catch him off guard?
On the morning of the following day, I received a strange letter from my gardener, who had been looking after my empty, pillaged house. This is what it said:
“Dear Monsieur,
I am pleased to inform you that last night something happened that no one can understand, not us and not even the police. All the furniture was back, all of it, without exception, right down to the smallest items. The house is now exactly as it was just before everything was stolen. It’s enough to drive anyone mad! It happened between Friday night and Saturday morning. The paths are ripped apart as if everything had been dragged from the gate to the house. It was the same the day it all disappeared.
We await Monsieur’s arrival.
Your very humble servant,
Philippe Raudin
Ah! No! No! No! I will not go back there!
I took the letter to the Captain of Police in Rouen.
“It’s a very clever move, taking back all your things,” he said. “We’ll lie low. We’ll get him, one of these days.”
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But they didn’t get him. No. They didn’t get him, and I’m afraid of him now, as if he were a ferocious beast let loose to attack me.
Impossible to find! He is impossible to find, that monster with the moon-shaped head! They’ll never catch him. He’ll never go back to his place. What does he care? I’m the only one who might find him, and I don’t want to.
I don’t want to! I don’t want to! I don’t want to!
And what if he does come back, what if he goes back to his shop? Who could prove that my furniture was ever there? It’s my word against his; and I can tell my story is already starting to look suspicious.
Ah, no! I couldn’t live like this any more. And I couldn’t keep what I saw a secret. I couldn’t continue living like everyone else with the fear that something similar might happen again.
I came to see the doctor who runs this hospital and I told him everything.
After questioning me for a long time, he asked:
“Would you agree to stay here for a while, Monsieur?”
“Very gladly.”
“Are you wealthy?”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“Would you prefer to stay in private quarters, isolated?”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
“Would you like to have your friends visit?”
“No, Monsieur, no, no one. That man from Rouen might dare to follow me here, to take revenge.”
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And so for three months I have been alone, alone, all alone. I feel calm, more or less. I have only one fear . . . What if that antiques dealer went mad . . . what if they brought him to this mental hospital . . . Even prisons are not always safe.
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1 An acclaimed opera by Ernest Reyer, first performed in Paris in 1885, five years before this story was written.
I LOVE THE NIGHT PASSIONATELY. I LOVE IT THE WAY YOU LOVE your country or your mistress, with an invincible, deep, instinctive kind of love. I love it with all my senses, my eyes that can see it, my sense of smell that breathes it in, my ears that can hear its silence, with my whole body caressed by its shadows. The larks sing in the sunshine, in the blue sky, the warm air, the gentle breeze of bright mornings. The owl flies at night, a shadowy shape crossing the dark skies, and, rejoicing, intoxicated by the infinite blackness, he lets out his resonant, sinister cry.
Daytime bores and tires me. It is harsh and noisy. I get up with difficulty, dress wearily, go out reluctantly, and every step, movement, gesture, word, and thought exhausts me as if I were trying to free myself from some crushing burden.
But when the sun sets, my body is filled with overwhelming joy. I awaken, become alert. The darker it gets, the more I feel myself becoming someone else, someone younger, stronger, more attentive, happier. I watch the great, soft shadows grow darker as they descend from the sky: they drown the city, like an intangible and impenetrable wave, hiding, obliterating, destroying colors and shapes; they surround houses and people and monuments with their feathery-light touch.
Then I feel the desire to cry out with pleasure like an owl, to run over the rooftops like a cat; and an impetuous, invincible desire sends fire rushing through my veins.
I go out, I walk, sometimes in the somber outskirts of the town, sometimes in the woods just outside Paris, where I can hear my sisters, the animals, and my brothers, the poachers, rushing about.
Whatever you love passionately ends up killing you. How can I explain what is happening to me? How can I make you understand that I might even be able to explain it? I don’t know, I don’t know any more, I just know what happened. Here it is.
So yesterday—was it really yesterday?—yes, of course, unless it was before then, a different day, a different month, a different year—I don’t know. Yet it must have been yesterday, since it is not yet daylight, the sun has not yet risen. But how long does night last? How long? Who can say? Who could ever know?
YESTERDAY, I WENT OUT after dinner, as I do every evening. The weather was very lovely, very mild, very warm. As I walked toward the boulevards, I looked above my head at the dark river full of stars, a backdrop to the rooftops on the winding street, a moving stream of stars that undulated as if it were a real river.
Everything was bright in the light air, from the planets to the lampposts.2 So many fires burned high above and in the city that even the shadows looked lit up. Luminous evenings are more joyful than bright sunny days.
On the wide avenue, the cafés were brightly lit and people were laughing, walking by, drinking. I went into the theater for a few minutes. Which theater? I don’t recall. It was so light inside that I was saddened, and I went outside again feeling my heart heavier because of the shock of that brutal light on the gilt balcony, the artificial sparkling of the enormous crystal chandelier, the blazing footlights, the melancholy of this unnatural, raw brightness. I walked along the Champs-Elysées where the cafés-concerts3 looked like houses on fire amid the trees. The chestnut trees swathed in a yellowish light seemed covered in phosphorescent paint. And the electric globes—pale, dazzling moons, lunar eggs fallen from the sky, monstrous, pulsating pearls—made the strings of colored lights and the fine streams of filthy, vile gas grow pale beneath their regal, mysterious, pearly light.
I stopped under the Arc de Triomphe to gaze down the wide boulevard, the long, attractive avenue all ablaze that led to Paris between two rows of fire. And the stars!
The stars above, the mysterious stars randomly scattered toward infinity where they form strange shapes that make us wish and dream so very much.
I went into the Bois de Boulogne and stayed there for a long, long time. A peculiar shiver had rushed through me, a surprising, powerful emotion, an intense euphoria that bordered on madness.
I walked for a very long time. Then I turned back.
What time was it when I walked back under the Arc de Triomphe? I don’t know. The city was asleep, and the clouds—great dark clouds—were spreading slowly across the sky.
For the first time, I felt that something new, something strange was about to happen. It seemed as if it had suddenly turned cold, as if the air was denser, as if the night, my beloved night, weighed heavily on my heart. The wide avenue was deserted. Only two policemen were walking where the horse-drawn carriages4 were lined up, and, on the street, barely lit by the gaslights that seemed to be dying out, a row of carts full of vegetables headed toward Les Halles.5 They drove slowly, laden with carrots, turnips and cabbages. The drivers dozed, invisible, while the horses fell into step, following the carriage in front, making no noise on the cobblestones. As they passed in front of each streetlight, the carrots lit up bright red, the turnips gleamed white, the cabbages glowed green, and the carriages passed by, one after the other, red carriages, fiery red, carriages as white as silver, as green as emeralds. I followed them, then turned down the Rue Royale and went back along the wide boulevards. No one in sight, no more bright cafés, only a few people who had stayed out very late hurried past. I had never seen Paris so dead, so deserted. I looked at my watch. It was two o’clock.
Something forced me to keep going, a need to keep walking. So I walked as far as the Place de la Bastille. Once there, I realized I had never seen such a dark night, for I couldn’t even make out the Colonne de Juillet;6 even its golden statue was invisible in the impenetrable darkness. A canopy of clouds, as thick as infinity, engulfed the stars and seemed to weigh down on the earth, as if to blot it out.
I headed back. There was not a soul in sight. At the Place du Château-d’Eau, however, a drunkard nearly bumped into me, then disappeared. For some time, I could hear his uneven, echoing footsteps.
I kept walking. At the top of the Faubourg Montmartre, a horse-drawn carriage passed by, heading toward the Seine. I called out. The driver didn’t reply. A woman was wandering around near the Rue Drouot: “Monsieur, listen, please.” I rushed ahead to avoid her outstretched hand. Then nothing more. In front of Le Vaudeville, a ragman was rummaging in the gutter. His little lantern flickered at the water’s edge. “You there, what time is it?” I asked him.
“You think I know!” he grumbled. “I ain’t got a watch.”
I suddenly noticed that the gaslights had gone out. I know they are turned off early, before daybreak at this time of year, to save money; but it was a long time until dawn, a very long time!
“Let’s go to Les Halles,” I thought. “There should be people around there at least.”
I set off, but it was so dark I couldn’t see where I was going. I walked slowly, the way you do in the woods, counting the streets I passed to recognize them.
In front of the Crédit Lyonnais bank, a dog growled. I turned down the Rue de Grammont and got lost; I wandered around, then recognized La Bourse7 and the iron gates that surround it. All of Paris was asleep, in a deep, terrifying sleep. Yet in the distance I heard a carriage, just one carriage, perhaps the one that had passed me a little while ago. I tried to find it, heading toward the sound of its wheels through the dark, empty streets, so very dark, as dark as death.
I got lost again. Where was I? What madness to turn off the gaslights so early! Not a single passerby, not one person out late, no one wandering around, not even the meowing of a cat on the prowl. Nothing.
Where were the policemen? “I’ll call out,” I said to myself, “and they’ll come.” I cried out. No one replied.
I shouted louder. My voice faded away, weak, without an echo, stifled, obliterated by the night, by this impenetrable night.
I screamed: “Help! Help! Help me!”
My despairing cry went unanswered. What time was it now? I took out my watch but I had no matches. I listened to the watch’s faint tick-tock with a strange, unfamiliar feeling of joy. It seemed to be alive. I felt less alone. It was so mysterious! I started walking again, like a blind man, feeling my way along the walls with my cane, and constantly looking upward toward the sky, hoping that day would finally break; but the sky was black, utterly black, even darker than the city.
What time could it be? I felt as if I had been walking forever; my legs were giving way beneath me; I was panting and starving half to death.
I decided to ring the first door I came to. I pressed the brass doorbell and I could hear it reverberate through the house; it echoed strangely, as if this quivering sound was the only thing inside.
I waited, no one replied, no one opened the door. I rang the bell again; I waited some more—nothing!
I was afraid! I ran to the next house, and twenty times in a row, I rang the doorbell in the dark entrance where the concierge must be sleeping in his room. But he didn’t wake up, so I went further down the street, knocking with the brass rings and pressing the bells with all my strength, banging at the doors with my feet, my cane and my fists, but they remained obstinately closed.
And suddenly, I realized I had reached Les Halles. It was deserted, not a sound, not a carriage, not a soul, no vegetables, not a bunch of flowers.
The entire place was empty, still, abandoned, dead!
Terror ran through me—horrifying. What was happening? Oh, my God! What was happening?
I walked away. What time was it? What time? Who could tell me the time? Not a single sound from the clocktowers or the monuments. “I’ll open the glass cover of my watch,” I thought, “and feel for the hands with my fingers.” I took out my watch . . . it wasn’t working . . . it had stopped . . . There was nothing now, nothing, not the slightest movement in the whole city, not a sliver of light, not the faintest echo of a sound through the air. Nothing! Nothing! Not even the distant sound of the carriage—simply nothing!
I was at the quayside; an icy chill rose from the river.
Was the Seine still flowing?
I wanted to know, I found the steps and went down . . . I couldn’t hear the water bubbling beneath the arches of the bridge . . . More steps . . . then sand . . . sludge . . . the water . . . I put my arm in . . . the river was still flowing . . . flowing . . . cold . . . cold . . . so cold . . . almost freezing . . . almost dried up . . . almost dead.
And I truly felt that I would never have the strength to pull myself away again . . . and that I would die right there . . . of hunger—of exhaustion—of the cold . . . I too would die.
____________
1 This is the subtitle of the story; the original title is La Nuit (Night).
2 At the time de Maupassant was writing, the street lamps were lit by gas.
3 These cafés had singers who entertained the clients.
4 Fiacres in French.
5 The central market in Paris (it was moved to the outskirts in 1971). Wagons arrived all night long with fresh produce and the cafés stayed open serving hot onion soup and white wine to the drivers.
6 This monument commemorates the 1830 Revolution, the fall of Charles X and the commencement of the “July Monarchy” of Louis-Philippe.
7 The French stock market.
May 8
WHAT A WONDERFUL DAY! I SPENT THE ENTIRE MORNING STRETCHED out on the grass in front of my house, under an enormous plane tree that completely covers it, shades it and hides it from view. I like this region, and I like living here because this is where my roots are, the fine, deep roots that tie a man to the land where his ancestors were born and died, roots that tie him to how he thinks and what he likes to eat, to tradition as well as food, to the local dialect, the unique intonation of the farmers when they speak, the smell of the earth, the villages and even the air itself.
I love the house where I grew up. I can see the Seine from my windows; it flows along the edge of my garden, behind the road, nearly up to my house: the wide, long Seine that stretches from Rouen to Le Havre, full of passing boats.
To the left, in the distance, lies Rouen, that sprawling city of blue slate roofs beneath countless tall Gothic steeples, both delicate and solid, in the shadow of the cathedral’s iron spire. These steeples are full of bells that ring out in the clear blue light on beautiful mornings, sending me the soft metallic hum of their distant bronze songs that are swept along by the wind, sometimes louder, sometimes softer, depending on whether the bells are starting to peel or are fading away.
How beautiful it was this morning!
At about eleven o’clock, a long convoy of ships passed by my gates: they were pulled along by a tugboat that was as fat as a fly and groaned with the effort, spewing out thick smoke.
After two English schooners, whose red flags fluttered against the sky, came a superb Brazilian three-master, all white, wonderfully clean and shiny. This ship filled me with such pleasure that I saluted it, I don’t really know why.
May 12
I’VE HAD A SLIGHT FEVER FOR THE PAST FEW DAYS; I DON’T FEEL well, or rather, I feel somewhat sad.
Where do these mysterious influences come from that can transform our happiness into discouragement and our confidence into distress? It’s as if the air, the invisible air, is full of unknowable Forces, mysterious Forces that close in around us. I wake up full of cheerfulness, with a song in my heart—Why?—I walk down to the water’s edge and suddenly, after a short stroll, I come back home in despair, as if some misfortune lies in wait for me in my house—Why?—Has a chill wind swept over my body, setting my nerves on edge and filling my soul with gloom? Has the shape of the clouds, or the colors of the day, the colors of objects, so changeable, flowed past my eyes and unsettled my mind? How can we know? Everything that surrounds us, everything we look at without really seeing, everything we brush against without knowing what it is, everything we touch without actually feeling it, everything we encounter without recognizing it, do all these things have an inexplicable, surprising, immediate effect on us, on our physical being, and through our bodies, affect our thoughts, even our very hearts?
How profound is this mystery of the Invisible! We can never know its depths with our inadequate senses, our eyes that do not know how to truly perceive what is too small, or too big, or too close, or too distant, or the beings that inhabit the stars or a drop of water . . . with our ears that deceive us, for they carry vibrations through the air as sonorous notes. They are fairies that accomplish the miracle of transforming movement into sound and through this metamorphosis, bring music to life, making the silent turbulence of nature sing out . . . our sense of smell, weaker than a dog’s . . . our sense of taste that can barely determine the age of a bottle of wine!
Ah! If only we had more organs that could accomplish other miracles for us: then we could discover so many things that are all around us!
May 16
I AM NOT WELL; THERE IS NO DOUBT ABOUT IT! I FELT SO GOOD last month! I have a fever, a horrible fever, or rather, a feverish nervousness that is making my soul suffer as much as my body! I have a continual, terrifying sense of impending danger, a feeling of apprehension, as if something terrible is about to happen, or that death is drawing closer, a premonition which is surely an expectation of some evil as yet unknown, taking root in my body and my blood.
May 18
I HAVE JUST COME FROM SEEING MY DOCTOR FOR I COULDN’T SLEEP any more. He found my pulse racing, my pupils dilated, my nerves on edge, but with no alarming symptoms. I have to take showers and drink potassium bromide.
May 25
NO CHANGE AT ALL! MY CONDITION IS TRULY STRANGE. AS EVENING approaches, an incomprehensible anxiety rushes through me, as if the night is hiding some terrible danger it has in store for me. I eat dinner quickly, then I try to read; but I don’t understand the words; I can barely make out the letters. So I pace back and forth through my living room, oppressed by a vague, compelling fear, the fear of sleep and the fear of my bed.
I go up to my bedroom at around ten o’clock. As soon as I am inside, I double-lock the door and secure the bolts; I am afraid . . . but of what? . . . I was never frightened of anything until now . . . I open my wardrobes, I look under my bed; I listen . . . I listen . . . For what? . . . Is it not strange that a simple feeling of unease, perhaps a minor circulation problem, the irritation of nerve endings, a bit of congestion, a very slight disturbance in the very imperfect and delicate functioning of our living organism can make the most cheerful of men morose and transform the bravest into cowards? Then I get into bed and wait for sleep to come as one waits for the executioner. I wait in terror for it to come; and my heart pounds, and my legs shake; and my entire body is trembling beneath the warm sheets, until the moment when I suddenly fall into a deep sleep, the way a man would fall if he were trying to drown himself in deep, stagnant waters. I cannot feel it coming, as I did in the past, this treacherous sleep that hides close by, lies in wait to grab hold of my head, to close my eyes, to send me into dark oblivion.
I sleep—for a long time—two or three hours—then a dream—no—a nightmare seizes hold of me. I can sense quite well that I am in bed and asleep . . . I can sense it and I know it . . . and I also sense that someone is coming closer, watching me, touching me, getting into my bed, kneeling on my chest, grabbing me by the throat and strangling me . . . strangling me . . . with all his strength.
I struggle, I try to fight, held back by this atrocious powerlessness that paralyzes us in our dreams; I want to cry out—and cannot—I want to move—and cannot; I am panting, in anguish, I try with all my might to turn over, to throw off this being that is crushing me, suffocating me—and I cannot!
And suddenly, I wake up, terror-stricken, covered in sweat. I light a candle. I am alone.
After this attack, which happens again and again, every night, I finally go calmly to sleep and do not wake until dawn.
June 2
MY CONDITION IS GETTING WORSE. WHAT CAN BE WRONG WITH ME? The bromide has no effect at all; the showers do nothing to help. This afternoon, to tire my body out—even though it is already so weary—I went for a walk in the Roumare woods. At first I thought that the fresh air, so sweet and calm, full of the scent of grass and leaves, would pour new blood into my veins, new energy into my heart. I crossed a wide hunting ground, then headed toward the little village of La Bouille, taking a narrow path lined by two armies of trees that were unbelievably tall, forming a thick, very dark green roof between myself and the sky.
A shiver suddenly ran through me, not a cold shiver, but a strange shiver of anguish.
I walked more quickly, anxious at being alone in this wood, frightened for no reason, absurdly frightened, by my utter solitude. Suddenly, I felt as if I were being followed, that someone was right behind me, close by, so close that he could touch me.
I turned sharply around. I was alone. All I could see behind me was the wide road, empty, long, frighteningly empty; and on the other side it was just the same: it stretched out and was lost in the distance, terrifying.
I closed my eyes. Why? And I started spinning around on my heel, very quickly, like a top. I nearly fell; I opened my eyes again; the trees were swaying; the ground wobbled; I had to sit down. Then, ah! I no longer knew which way I had come! It was strange! Strange! So strange! I had no idea at all. I headed for the road to my right and was back on the avenue that had led me to the middle of the woods.
June 3
LAST NIGHT WAS HORRIBLE. I WILL GO AWAY FOR A FEW WEEKS. A little trip will no doubt cure me.
July 2
I’M BACK AT HOME. I AM CURED. I HAD A WONDERFUL TRIP. I VISITED Mont Saint-Michel, where I’d never been.
What a sight it is when you arrive, as I did, at Avranches, toward the end of the day! The town stands on a hill, and I was taken to the public gardens, at the far end of the city. I cried out in astonishment. An endless bay stretched out before me, as far as the eye could see, set between two remote coasts lost in the distant mist. And in the middle of this golden bay, beneath a clear, shimmering sky, a dark, pointed, strange mount rises up from the sand. The sun had just set, and on the horizon, still ablaze, you could make out the silhouette of this incredible rock that bears an incredible monument at its summit.
As soon as day broke, I headed toward it. The sea was at low tide, as it had been the night before, and as I got closer, I could see the astonishing abbey rising in front of me. After walking for a few hours, I reached the mass of stone that supports the small village dominated by the great church. Having crossed the short, narrow street, I entered the splendid Gothic temple built here on earth to worship God, sprawling like a city, full of low rooms that are dwarfed by the vaults, and high galleries supported by slender columns. I entered this gigantic granite gem of architecture, light as lace, covered with towers and svelte little steeples with spiral staircases, all linked by delicately carved arches, and its strange heads of chimeras, devils, fantastic beasts and enormous flowers rise up toward the blue heavens by day and the black firmament by night.
When I reached the top, I said to the monk who accompanied me: “Father, how happy you must be here!”
“There’s a lot of wind here, Monsieur,” he replied. Then we started to chat while watching the tide rise; it ran over the sand, enclosing it in steel armor.
And the monk told me stories, all the old stories that happened in this place, and legends, all the legends.
One of them struck me forcibly. The people in this area, the ones who live on the top of the hill, claim that they hear voices at night, coming from the beach, sometimes they hear goats bleating, one with a strong voice, the other making a faint sound. The unbelievers say it is only the sea gulls squawking, which sometimes sounds like bleating and sometimes like someone wailing; but the fishermen who stay out late swear they have met someone wandering around the sand dunes, between high and low tide, around the little village so isolated from the rest of the world: an old shepherd whose face is always hidden by his coat and who is followed closely behind by a billy goat with the face of a man and a nanny goat with the face of a woman, both with long white hair and talking continually, arguing in an strange language, then suddenly stopping their shouting in order to bleat with all their might.
“Do you believe this?” I asked the monk.
“I don’t know,” he murmured.
“If beings other than us existed on this earth,” I continued, “why have we not known about them for so long? Why haven’t either of us—not you, not I—ever seen them?”
“Do we ever see a hundred thousandth of what actually exists?” he replied. “Take the wind, for example, which is the greatest force of nature: it knocks men over, tears down buildings, uproots trees, lifts the sea to form mountains of water, destroys cliffs and forces ships onto the reefs; the wind kills, it whistles, it groans and howls, but have you ever seen it? Could you ever see it? And yet, it exists.”
I said nothing in reply to this simple reasoning. This monk was either a wise man or a fool. I couldn’t actually tell; but I kept silent. What he had been saying, I had often thought myself.
July 3
I SLEPT BADLY; THERE IS SURELY SOME CONTAGIOUS FEVER GOING around, for my coach driver seems to have the same disease. When I got back home last night, I noticed how terribly pale he looked.
“What’s wrong with you, Jean?” I asked.
“I just can’t sleep any more, Monsieur; my nights are ruining my days. Ever since Monsieur left, I feel as if I’m under some kind of spell.”
The other servants seem fine, though, but I am very frightened that I will become ill again myself.
July 4
IT IS DEFINITELY BACK. MY OLD NIGHTMARES HAVE RETURNED. Last night, I felt someone crouching over me who placed his mouth against mine and was sucking the life out of me. Yes, he was drawing the life from between my lips like some sort of leech. Then he got up, sated, and I . . . I woke up, so battered, broken, overwhelmed, that I couldn’t even move. If this continues a few more days, I will certainly go away again.
July 5
AM I GOING MAD? WHAT HAPPENED LAST NIGHT, WHAT I SAW, IS SO strange that I feel I’m going mad when I think about it!
I had locked my door, as I do every night now; then, as I was thirsty, I drank half a glass of water; I happened to notice that my decanter was full, right up to the crystal stopper.
I went to bed and fell into one of my terrifying sleeps, and woke up after about two hours with a jolt that was even more frightening.
Imagine a man who is asleep, who is being murdered and who wakes up with a knife in his chest; he is gasping for breath, covered in blood, unable to breathe, about to die and doesn’t understand why—that was my dream.
After finally calming myself down, I was thirsty again; I lit a candle and went over to the table where I’d left the decanter of water. I picked it up to pour some into my glass; nothing came out—It was empty! Completely empty! At first, I just couldn’t understand; then, suddenly, I had a feeling that was so horrifying that I had to sit down, or rather that I needed to collapse into a chair! I sprang up to look around the room! Then I sat down again and looked at the empty decanter, overwhelmed with astonishment and terror! I stared at it wide-eyed, trying to understand. My hands were shaking! So someone had drunk all the water? But who? Me? It had to be me, didn’t it? It could only have been me, couldn’t it? So I must be a sleepwalker; without knowing it, I was living this mysterious double life which makes us wonder if there are two people who inhabit us, or if some stranger, unknowable and invisible, is awakened at times, when our soul is deadened, our body captive, obeying this other being the way they usually obey us, even more than they obey us.
Ah! Who could understand my hideous anguish? Who could understand the emotion of a man who is of sound mind, wide-awake, completely rational and who stares in terror at an empty glass decanter from which a bit of water had disappeared while he was asleep! I remained there until daybreak, not daring to go back to bed.
July 6
I AM GOING MAD. SOMEONE DRANK ALL THE WATER IN MY decanter again last night—or rather, I drank it!
But was it me? Was it me? Who else could it be? Who? Oh, my God! Am I going mad? Who can save me?
July 10
I HAVE JUST CARRIED OUT SOME UNUSUAL EXPERIMENTS.
I am definitely insane! Even so!
On July 6, before going to bed, I put some wine, milk, water, bread and strawberries on my table.
Someone drank—I drank—all the water and a little milk. The wine, bread and strawberries remained untouched.
On July 7, I repeated the experiment; same result.
On July 8, I left no water or milk. Nothing was touched.
Finally, on July 9, I only put the water and milk on the table, taking care to wrap the decanters in white muslin and tie string around the stoppers. Then I put some graphite on my lips, my beard and my hands and I went to bed.
Invincible sleep seized hold of me, followed soon afterwards by my horrifying awakening. I had not stirred; even my sheets had no traces of black. I rushed toward the table. The muslin surrounding the bottles was spotless. I untied the strings, my heart beating hard out of fear. All the water was gone! Someone had drunk all the milk! Ah, my God! . . .
I am leaving for Paris right away.
PARIS. I HAD REALLY GONE MAD THESE PAST FEW DAYS! MY UNSETTLED imagination must be toying with me, unless I truly am a sleepwalker, or have been subject to one of those influences claimed, though unexplained until now, that are called suggestions. In any case, my panic was bordering on insanity, and twenty-four hours in Paris were enough to recover my equilibrium.
Yesterday, after doing some shopping and visiting friends, who filled my entire being with new vitality, I ended my evening at the Théâtre-Français. They were performing a play by Alexandre Dumas the younger,2 and this vibrant, powerful spirit managed to cure me. Solitude is surely dangerous to active minds. We must have thinking men and conversation around us. When we are alone for a long time, we fill the void with ghosts.
I walked along the boulevards to go back to my hotel, feeling very cheerful. As I rubbed shoulders with the crowd, I thought, not without some irony, about my terrors, my assumptions of a week ago, how I believed, yes, I actually believed that an invisible being was living under my roof. How weak our minds are, and how quickly they panic and are led astray the minute one small, incomprehensible fact assails us!
Instead of reaching a conclusion with the simple words: “I don’t understand because the reason escapes me,” we immediately imagine terrifying mysteries and supernatural forces.
July 14
BASTILLE DAY. I STROLLED DOWN THE STREETS. THE FIRECRACKERS and flags amused me as if I were a child. And yet it is quite ridiculous to be happy on a specific date designated by a government law. People are a foolish herd, sometimes stupidly patient, sometimes revolting fiercely. When they are told: “Have a good time,” they have a good time. When they are told: “You must go to war with our neighbor,” they go to war. When they are told: “Vote for the Emperor,” they vote for the Emperor. Then when they are told: “Vote for the Republic,” they vote for the Republic.
Their leaders are also fools; but instead of obeying men, they obey principles—principles that can only be inane, fruitless and false precisely because they are principles, that is to say, ideas that are deemed to be unchanging and definitive in this world in which no one is certain of anything, because enlightenment is an illusion, great events are an illusion.
July 16
YESTERDAY, I SAW THINGS THAT TROUBLED ME GREATLY.
I was having dinner at Mme Sablé’s house; she is my cousin and her husband is Commander of the 76th Regiment of Chasseurs3 in Limoges. I found myself in the company of two young women, one of whom is married to a doctor, Dr. Parent, who specializes in nervous conditions and extraordinary symptoms that are currently the subject of experiments with hypnotism and the influence of suggestion.
He recounted at length the extraordinary results obtained by English scientists and some doctors from the medical school in Nancy.
The facts he put forward seemed so strange to me that I immediately said I did not believe them.
“We are on the verge of discovering one of the important secrets of nature,” he stated, “I mean one of the most important secrets on this earth; for nature certainly holds other important secrets, beyond this world, in the firmament. Ever since man was able to speak and write down his thoughts, he has felt the invisible presence of some impenetrable mystery that his crude, imperfect senses cannot grasp; and, through the effort of his intelligence, he has tried to compensate for the powerlessness of his senses. When man’s intelligence was still in a rudimentary state, being haunted by invisible phenomena took on forms that were frightening in the most ordinary of ways. These led to the birth of popular belief in the supernatural, legends of wandering spirits, fairies, gnomes, ghosts, I would even go so far as to say the legend of God, for our ideas about a master creator, from whatever religion we are taught them, are truly the most mediocre, the most stupid, the most unacceptable ideas to emerge from the human mind that is afraid of such creatures. Nothing is truer than what Voltaire once said: ‘God made man in his own image, but man truly returned the favor.’
“But for more than half a century now, we seem to sense something new. Mesmer and others have taken us down a surprising path, and we have had truly astonishing results, especially in the past four or five years.”
My cousin, also quite skeptical, smiled. “Shall I try to hypnotize you, Madame?” Dr. Parent asked.
“Yes, willingly.”
She sat down in an armchair and he began staring at her and hypnotizing her. Suddenly, I . . . I felt nervous, my heart was pounding and my throat constricted. I watched as Mme Sablé’s eyes started feeling heavy, her mouth become tense, her chest started to heave.
Ten minutes later, she was asleep.
“Go and stand behind her,” the doctor told me.
So I sat down behind her. He placed a visitor’s card in her hand.
“This is a mirror,” he said. “What do you see reflected in it?”
“I see my cousin,” she replied.
“What is he doing?”
“He is twisting his moustache.”
“And now?”
“He is taking a photograph out of his pocket.”
“Whose photograph is it?”
“His.”
It was true! And the photograph had just been delivered to me at my hotel that very evening.
“What does he look like in this picture?”
“He is standing up and holding a hat in his hand.”
And so she could see in the card, in this piece of white card, as if she were looking in a mirror.
“Enough! Enough!” the young women said, terrified. “That’s enough!”
But the doctor gave an order: “You will get up tomorrow morning at eight o’clock; then you will go to see your cousin at his hotel and you will beg him to lend you five thousand francs that your husband has asked you to give him when he leaves on his next trip.”
Then he woke her up.
On the way back to my hotel, I thought about this strange séance and was overwhelmed with doubt, not about the absolute good faith of my cousin—that was above suspicion, as I had known her since we were children and she was like a sister to me—but about the possible hoax perpetrated by the doctor.
Perhaps he was hiding a mirror in his hand that he showed to the hypnotized young woman at the same time as his calling card? Professional magicians do other such extraordinary things.
I went home to bed.
The next morning, around eight-thirty, I was awakened by my valet.
“Mme Sablé is here,” he said, “and she is asking to see you right away, Monsieur.”
I dressed quickly and went out to greet her.
She was sitting down and looked very upset indeed; her eyes were lowered, and without raising her veil, she said:
“My dear cousin, I have a great favor to ask of you.”
“What favor is that, my dear?”
“It troubles me greatly to ask you and yet I must. I need, I am in dire need, of five thousand francs.”
“Is that so? You really are?”
“Yes, yes, or rather, my husband is, and he has asked me to find the money.”
I was so astonished that I muttered my reply. I wondered if she had actually not plotted with Dr. Parent to trick me, if it were nothing more than an elaborate joke prepared in advance and well played out.
But when I looked at her closely, all my doubts disappeared. Making this request was so painful to her that she was trembling with anguish, and I realized she was trying to hide her sobs.
I knew she was extremely wealthy so I continued:
“What! Your husband doesn’t have five thousand francs of his own! Come now, just think about it. Are you sure that he sent you to ask me for the money?”
She hesitated for a moment as if she were making a great effort to remember something.
“Yes . . . yes,” she replied, “I’m quite sure.”
“Did he write to you?”
She hesitated again and thought about it. I could guess how difficult it was for her to think it through. She didn’t know. All she knew was that she was supposed to borrow five thousand francs from me for her husband. And so she actually lied.
“Yes, he wrote to me.”
“When was that? You didn’t mention anything about it at all last night.”
“I got his letter this morning.”
“Can you show it to me?”
“No . . . no . . . no . . . It contains personal things . . . it’s too personal . . . I’ve . . . I’ve burnt it.”
“So has your husband been running up debts?”
She hesitated once more, then murmured:
“I don’t know.”
“It’s just that I don’t have five thousand francs to lend you at this time, my dear cousin,” I said quickly.
She let out a cry of anguish.
“Oh! Oh! I beg of you, find the money for me, I’m begging you . . .”
She was getting very upset, clasping her hands together as if she were praying to me! I could hear the tone of her voice change; she was crying and stammering, obsessed, overwhelmed by the irresistible order she had received.
“Oh! Oh! I’m begging you . . .if you only knew how much I’m suffering . . . I must have the money today.”
I took pity on her.
“You will have it this afternoon, I promise.”
“Oh! Thank you! Thank you! You are so kind.”
“Do you remember what happened last night?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Do you remember that Dr. Parent hypnotized you?”
“Yes.”
“Well! He ordered you to come and borrow five thousand francs from me this morning, and you are obeying his command.”
She thought for a few seconds.
“But it’s my husband who is asking me for the money,” she replied.
I tried to convince her for an hour, but without success.
When she left, I hurried to the doctor’s house. He was about to go out; he listened to what I had to say and smiled.
“Do you believe in it now?” he asked.
“Yes, I have to.”
“Let’s go and see your cousin.”
She was already half-asleep on a chaise longue, overcome with exhaustion.
The doctor took her pulse, looked at her for a time with one hand raised toward her eyes; she gradually closed them, unable to fight his spellbinding force.
“Your husband no longer needs the five thousand francs,” he said, once she was asleep. “You will forget that you asked your cousin to borrow the money, and if he mentions it to you, you won’t understand what he is talking about.”
Then he woke her up. I took my wallet out of my pocket.
“Here you are, my dear cousin, here is the money you asked for this morning.”
She was so surprised that I didn’t dare insist. Instead, I tried to help her to remember, but she hotly denied it, thought I was teasing her and, in the end, nearly got angry.
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And there you have it! I just got home and this experience upset me so much that I couldn’t eat my breakfast.
July 19
MANY PEOPLE I TOLD THIS STORY TO MADE FUN OF ME. I NO LONGER know what to think. The wise man says: Perhaps?
July 21
I WENT TO BOUGIVAL FOR DINNER, THEN SPENT THE EVENING AT the dance the boatmen held. Undoubtedly, everything depends on where you are, and the atmosphere. Believing in the supernatural on Ile de la Grenouillière would be the height of folly . . . but at the top of Mont Saint-Michel? . . . or in the Indies? We are intensely influenced by everything that surrounds us. I will go home next week.
July 30
I’VE BEEN HOME SINCE YESTERDAY. EVERYTHING IS FINE.
August 2
NOTHING NEW; THE WEATHER IS SUBLIME. I SPEND MY DAYS watching the Seine flow by.
August 4
THE SERVANTS ARE QUARRELING. THEY CLAIM THAT GLASSES IN the cupboards are being broken during the night. The valet accuses the cook, the cook accuses the laundress, who in turn accuses the other two. Who is responsible? Who on earth can tell?
THIS TIME, I AM NOT MAD. I SAW IT . . . I SAW IT . . . I SAW IT! I CAN no longer have any doubts. I saw it! I am still frozen to the bone . . . frightened to my very core . . . I saw it with my own eyes!
I was walking through my rose garden, at two o’clock, in bright sunlight . . . in the path where the first roses of autumn are beginning to blossom.
When I stopped to look at a géant des batailles4 that had three magnificent flowers, I saw, I distinctly saw, right next to me, the stem of one of these roses bend and then break off—as if some invisible hand had twisted it and picked it from the bush! Then the flower rose in the air, making an arch, as if an arm had raised it to its mouth, and it remained suspended in the clear air, all alone, motionless, a terrifying red patch close to my eyes.
Frantic, I lunged forward to grab it! There was nothing there; it had disappeared. Then I was stricken by fierce anger toward myself, for it is not acceptable for a logical, serious man to have such hallucinations.
But was it really a hallucination? I turned around to look for the stem and immediately found it on the rosebush, freshly broken off, between the two other roses that remained on the branch.
So I went back home, my soul in turmoil. For now, I am certain, as certain as day follows night, that an invisible being is living at my side, a being that drinks milk and water, who can touch things, pick them up and move them, is endowed with physical characteristics that we are quite incapable of seeing, and who lives, as I do, under my roof . . .
August 7
I SLEPT PEACEFULLY. HE DRANK SOME WATER FROM MY DECANTER but did not wake me.
I wonder if I am mad. While I was walking along the riverbank in the sunshine today, I began to have doubts about my sanity, not vague doubts like the ones I’ve had up until now, but precise, absolute doubts. I have known madmen; some of them remained intelligent, lucid, even perceptive about everything in life, except in one way. They talked about everything with clarity, finesse, insight, and suddenly their thoughts would hurtle against the stumbling block of their madness, break up into little pieces, scattering and foundering in a terrifying, raging ocean, full of soaring waves, layers of fog and squalls—the ocean that is called “insanity.”
Of course, I would believe myself to be mad, absolutely mad, except for the fact that I was perfectly aware, conscious of my condition, for I probed it and analyzed it with complete lucidity. In short, I was, therefore, simply a logical man who was suffering from hallucinations. Some unknown disorder must have taken hold of my brain, one of those disorders that the physiologists of today attempt to record and define; and this disorder must have left a great crevice in my mind, in the logic and order of my thoughts. Similar phenomena take place in dreams, providing us with the most unbelievably bizarre scenarios, without being in the least surprised, because the mechanism that verifies and controls us is asleep, while our imagination is awake and at work. Perhaps one of the imperceptible ivories on my brain’s keyboard no longer works? After an accident, some men cannot remember people’s names or certain verbs or figures or simply dates. The location of all the areas of thought has been defined in our time. So why should it be surprising that my ability to control certain unreal hallucinations has gone dead in me at present!
I thought about all these things as I walked along the water’s edge. The sun made the river sparkle, the countryside look delightful, filling my eyes with a love of life, for the swallows, whose agility is a joy to behold, a love of the reeds along the riverbank, whose rustling sound brings me happiness.
And yet, little by little, an inexplicable feeling of anxiety ran through me. Some force, or so it seemed, some supernatural force was taking over my body, stopping me, preventing me from going further, forcing me to go back. I felt a painful, oppressive need to go back home, like the feeling you get when you have left a sick person you love in the house and you get a premonition that they are getting worse.
And so, in spite of myself, I went back home, certain that I would find a letter or telegram that contained bad news waiting for me there. There was nothing; and I remained more surprised and more anxious than if I had had some new eerie vision.
I HAD A HORRIBLE NIGHT. HE IS NO LONGER MAKING HIS PRESENCE known but I can feel him near me, spying on me, watching me, entering my body, taking over; and he is even more formidable when he hides himself this way than when he makes his constant, invisible presence known through supernatural phenomena.
And yet, I managed to sleep.
August 9
NOTHING, BUT I’M AFRAID.
August 10
NOTHING; BUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN TOMORROW?
August 11
STILL NOTHING; I CAN NO LONGER STAY AT HOME WITH THIS FEAR and these thoughts that have invaded my soul; I am going away.
August 12
TEN O’CLOCK AT NIGHT—ALL DAY I HAVE WANTED TO LEAVE; BUT I couldn’t. I wanted to accomplish this act of freedom, so easy, so simple—to leave—to get into my carriage and go to Rouen—but I couldn’t. Why?
August 13
WHEN SUFFERING FROM CERTAIN ILLNESSES, THE INNER WORKINGS of the physical human body seem to be broken, every type of energy becomes dissipated, all the muscles slack, the bones as soft as flesh and the flesh as liquid as water. I experience this feeling in my soul in a strange, depressing way. I have no more strength, no more courage, no more control over myself, none at all, not even the power to accomplish an act of will. I no longer have a will; someone has taken over my will, and I obey.
August 14
ALL IS LOST! SOMEONE HAS POSSESSED ME AND IS CONTROLLING me! Someone is commanding my every action, every movement, every thought. I no longer count for anything: I am nothing more than an enslaved spectator, terrified by everything I do. I want to go out. I cannot. He does not want me to, and so I remain overwhelmed, trembling in my armchair where he keeps me seated. I only wish to rise, to stand up, so I can believe I am still my own master. I cannot! I am riveted to my chair; and my chair grips the floor so strongly that no power in this world could release us.
Then, suddenly, I must, I must, I must go to the back of my garden to pick strawberries and eat them. And so I go. I pick strawberries and eat them! Oh my God! My God! Is there a God? If there is, save me, free me! Help me! Forgive me! Take pity on me! Have mercy on me! Save me! Oh! Such suffering! Such torture! Such horror!
August 15
THIS IS SURELY HOW MY POOR COUSIN WAS POSSESSED AND CONTROLLED when she came to borrow five thousand francs from me. She was yielding to some strange will that had entered her, like another soul, like another parasitic, dominating soul. Is the world coming to an end?
But the thing that controls me, what is it, this invisible being? This unknowable creature from a supernatural race who wanders through my soul?
So invisible life forms exist! Well, then, why haven’t they shown themselves in such a concrete way since the beginnings of the world, as they have shown themselves to me? I have never read anything that is like what is happening in my home. Oh! If only I could leave, go away, flee and never return. I would be saved then. But I cannot.
August 16
I MANAGED TO ESCAPE TODAY FOR TWO HOURS, LIKE A PRISONER who, by chance, finds the door of his cell unlocked. I felt completely free suddenly and that he was far away. I ordered my carriage to be quickly prepared and I went to Rouen. Oh! What a joy to be able to tell someone: “Drive to Rouen” and have him obey!
I had him stop at a library and asked if I might borrow Dr. Hermann Herestauss’s famous treatise on the unknown inhabitants of the ancient and modern world.
Then, just as I got back into my carriage and wanted to say: “Take me to the station!” I shouted—I didn’t say it, I actually shouted—in such a loud voice that passersby turned around: “Take me back home.” And I fell back against the seat of my carriage, mad and overcome with anguish. He had found me and taken control of me again.
August 17
WHAT A NIGHT! WHAT A NIGHT! AND YET IT SEEMS I SHOULD BE rejoicing. I read until one o’clock in the morning! Hermann Herestauss, Doctor of Philosophy and Theogony, wrote a history of the instances of all the invisible beings who exist alongside man or who are dreamed by us. He describes their origins, their worlds, their powers. But none of them resembles the one who is haunting me. You could say that ever since man was able to think, he could sense and fear some unknown creature, stronger than himself, his successor in this world; and feeling him nearby, yet unable to understand the nature of this master, in his terror he created all the fantastical race of supernatural beings, vague ghosts born of fear.
Having read until one o’clock in the morning, I sat down next to my window to feel the cool, calm wind against my face and refresh my mind in the darkness.
It felt so good; it was warm outside! How I would have enjoyed such a night in the past!
No moon. The stars glistened and shimmered far away in the dark sky. Who inhabits those worlds? What spirits, essences, animals, plants are living there, in the beyond? If there are thinking life forms in these distant universes, how much more do they know than we do? How much more are they capable of than us? What do they see that we have no knowledge of whatsoever? One day, as they are traveling through space, one of them will land on Earth in order to conquer it, just as in the past the Normans crossed the sea to enslave races of men who were weaker than them.
We are all so handicapped, so helpless, so ignorant, so unimportant on this speck of mud that spins around in a drop of water.
I fell asleep in the cool evening air while wondering about such things.
After sleeping for about forty minutes, I opened my eyes without moving a muscle, awakened by some strange, inexplicable, confused feeling. At first I saw nothing, then, suddenly, it seemed that a page of the book I had left open on my table had just turned over by itself. No gust of wind had entered through my window. I was surprised and waited. After about four minutes, I saw, I saw—yes, I saw with my own eyes—another page rise and fall down onto the one before it, as if some hand had been leafing through it. My armchair was empty, at least it looked empty; but I realized that he was there: he was sitting in my chair and reading. I leapt up in a rage, like a wild animal intent on ripping his master to shreds; I crossed my room to grab hold of him, pin him down, and kill him! . . . But before I could get there, my armchair tumbled backwards as if someone was running away from me . . . my table shook, my lamp wobbled and went out, and my window closed as if some evildoer had been discovered and ran off into the night, slamming the door behind him.
So he had run away; he was afraid, afraid of me: he was afraid of me!
Well, then . . . that means that . . . tomorrow . . . or the day after . . . or some day, I could grab hold of him and crush him into the ground! Don’t dogs sometimes bite and kill their masters?
I THOUGHT ABOUT IT ALL DAY LONG. OH, YES! I’LL OBEY HIM, FOLLOW his whims, fulfill all his desires, make myself humble, submissive, cowardly. He is the stronger. But the day will come when . . .
August 19
I KNOW . . . I UNDERSTAND . . . I KNOW EVERYTHING! I HAVE JUST read this in the Revue du Monde Scientifique:5
A rather curious piece of news has been brought to our attention from Rio de Janeiro. A form of madness, an epidemic of hysteria comparable to the contagious madness that swept through Europe in the Middle Ages is currently rife in the province of São Paolo. Its terrified inhabitants are leaving their homes, deserting their villages, abandoning their fields, claiming they are being followed, possessed, controlled like human cattle by invisible beings whose presence can be sensed, a kind of race of vampires who feed off their lives while they sleep, and who drink water and milk without appearing to touch any other type of food.
Professor Don Pedro Henriquez, accompanied by several medical scientists, went to the province of São Paolo in order to study the origins and manifestations of this surprising madness on site, and to suggest what measures the Emperor should best take to return his demented people to a rational state of mind.
Ah! Ah! I remember it now: I remember that beautiful Brazilian three-master that passed beneath my windows while gliding up the Seine. It was last May 8. I thought it so superb, so white, so cheerful! The Being was on it, coming from there, from São Paolo where its race was born! And he saw me! He saw my house that was also white; and he jumped off the boat onto the riverbank. Oh, my God!
Now I know, I can sense it. The rule of mankind is over.
He has come. He who is the embodiment of all the primeval terrors of innocent people in this world, He who is exorcised by anxious priests, He who is summoned by witches on dark nights but has not yet appeared, He whom the fleeting masters of this world fear in every monstrous or graceful form: gnomes, spirits, genies, fairies, elves. After the crude ideas of primitive terror, shrewder men have understood Him more clearly. Mesmer had imagined Him, and for the past ten years, doctors have already imagined and detailed the nature of His power even before He used it. They experimented with this new Lord’s weapon: the domination of a mysterious will over a human soul that had been enslaved. They called it casting a spell, hypnotism, the power of suggestion . . . what can I know of it? I have watched them amuse themselves with this horrible force like foolish children! How wretched we are! How ill-fated is man! He has come, the . . . the—what does He call Himself?—the . . . I feel as if He is shouting out His name to me and I cannot hear it . . . the . . . yes . . . He is shouting it . . . I am listening but I cannot . . . say it again . . . Le Horla . . . Now I’ve heard it . . . Le Horla . . . that is who He is . . . Le Horla has come!
Ah! The vulture ate the dove; the wolf devoured the lamb; the lion killed the buffalo with its sharp horns; man killed the lion with his arrow, with his sword, with his gunpowder; but Le Horla will make of man what we have made of horses and cattle: will we belong to Him, become His servant and His food, solely by the power of His will. How wretched we are!
And yet, sometimes an animal revolts and kills whoever has tamed it . . . I too want to . . . I could . . . but first I must know Him, touch him, see Him! Scientists say that an animal’s eye is different from ours and sees things differently . . . And my own eyes cannot make out this stranger who oppresses me.
Why? Oh! Now I remember the words of the monk at Mont Saint-Michel: “Do we ever see a hundred thousandth of what actually exists? Take the wind, for example, which is the greatest force of nature: it knocks men over, tears down buildings, uproots trees, lifts the sea to form mountains of water, destroys cliffs and forces ships onto the reefs; the wind kills, it whistles, it groans and howls, but have you ever seen it? Could you ever see it? And yet, it exists.”
And I went on musing: my eyes are so weak, so imperfect, that when solid objects are as transparent as glass, I cannot even make them out! . . . It’s as if a two-way mirror is blocking my path, throwing me around like a bird that gets into the room and crashes into the window, breaking his neck. Do a thousand other things trick him or make him lose his way? So there is nothing surprising about the fact that a bird cannot see a new object when light shines through it.
A new being! Why not? He was bound to come! Why would we be the final race? We cannot make Him out, just like all the others that came before us. It is because His nature is more perfect, His body more delicate and more subtle than ours, because ours is so weak, so awkwardly conceived, burdened with organs that are always tired, always straining as if they were overly complex; we live like plants and animals, existing, with great difficulty, on air, vegetation and meat, a bestial organism prone to illness, deformity, decay; we are short of breath, unstable, naïve and strange, ingeniously but badly designed, with a delicate yet crude construction, a rough sketch of a being with the potential to become intelligent and magnificent.
There are so few of us, so very few species in this world, from the oyster up to man. Why not yet another type of being once the time span has passed that separates the successive evolution of the various species?
Why not one more? Why not other trees and enormous flowers as well, flowers that are dazzling and spread their perfume across entire regions? Why not other elements apart from fire, air, earth and water?—There are only four of them, only four, these elements that nourish our living beings! What a shame! Why not forty, four hundred, four thousand! How feeble, petty and pitiful everything is! Given reluctantly, created quickly, crudely made! Ah! The elephant, the hippopotamus, such grace! The camel, such elegance!
But what about the butterfly, a flower that can fly, you might say. I dream of one that would be as big as a hundred universes, with wings whose shape, beauty, color and movement I cannot even begin to describe. But I can picture it . . . it goes from star to star, cooling them and filling the air with a light, rhythmic breeze as it passes! . . . And the people who live in those distant lands watch it go by, ecstatic with delight.
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What is wrong with me? It’s Him, Him, Le Horla who is haunting me, making me think of such mad things! He is inside me. He is taking over my soul. I will kill Him!
August 19
I WILL KILL HIM! I HAVE SEEN HIM! YESTERDAY, I SAT DOWN AT MY table and pretended to be writing with great concentration. I knew very well that He would come and hover around me, quite close to me, so close that I might be able to touch Him, grab hold of Him. And then . . . then, I will have the strength of a desperate man: I will use my hands, my knees, my chest, my head, my teeth to strangle Him, crush Him, bite Him, tear Him apart.
And feeling every part of my body ready to pounce, I waited for Him.
I had lit my two lamps and the eight candles on my mantelpiece, as if I might be able to see Him in the bright light.
Opposite me was my bed, an old oak four-poster bed; to my right was the fireplace; to the left, I had carefully closed my door, after leaving it open for a long time, in order to draw Him in; behind me was a very tall wardrobe with a mirror that I used every day to shave and dress, where it was my habit to gaze at myself, from head to toe, every time I walked by it.
And so, I pretended to be writing, in order to trick Him, for He was also spying on me; and suddenly, I felt, I was certain, that He was reading over my shoulder, that He was there, almost touching my ear.
I sprang up, my fists clenched, and turned around so quickly that I nearly fell over. And then? . . . It was as bright as day inside the room and yet I did not see my reflection in the mirror! . . . It was empty, bright, deep, full of light! But my reflection was not there . . . and I was standing right opposite it!
I could see the clear glass from top to bottom. And I stared at it wild-eyed. I didn’t dare take a step forward; I didn’t dare make a move, and yet I could sense that He was there—He was there but He would escape my clutches once more, He whose invisible body had devoured my reflection.
I was so very afraid! Then suddenly, I gradually began to see myself in a mist, deep inside the mirror, in a fog as if through a layer of water; and it seemed as if this water glided from side to side, slowly, making my image clearer with every moment that passed. It was like the end of an eclipse. The thing that was hiding me did not appear to have any clearly defined shape, but a sort of opaque transparency that gradually grew more and more visible.
I could finally see myself clearly, just as I did every day when I looked at myself in that mirror.
I had seen Him! I could still feel the terror of that moment that made me continue to tremble.
August 20
HOW CAN I KILL HIM? I CAN’T EVEN GET HOLD OF HIM? POISON? But He will see me mix it with the water. And besides, will our poisons have any effect on his invisible body? No . . . no . . . of course they won’t . . . So what can I do? What can I do?
August 21
I HAD AN IRONSMITH COME FROM ROUEN AND COMMISSIONED HIM to make me some iron shutters, the kind that certain private houses have in Paris, on the ground floor, out of fear they may be robbed. He will also make me a door of the same material. I came across as a coward but I couldn’t care less!
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September 10
ROUEN, CONTINENTAL HOTEL. IT’S DONE . . . IT’S DONE . . . BUT IS he dead? My mind is in a spin over what I saw.
Yesterday, after the ironsmith had set the shutters and door in place, I left everything open until midnight, even though it was starting to get cold.
Suddenly, I sensed that He was there, and a feeling of joy, of mad joy ran through me. I got up slowly and paced back and forth for a long time, so He wouldn’t guess anything. Then I casually took off my boots and put on my slippers.
Then I closed the iron shutters and walking calmly toward the door, I double-locked it. I then walked back over to the window, padlocked the shutter and put the key in my pocket.
Suddenly, I realized that He was becoming agitated close by me, that it was His turn to be afraid. He was commanding me to open the door for Him and I nearly gave in. But I didn’t give in; leaning against the door, I opened it just a crack, just enough for me—and me alone—to get out. I slowly stepped backwards, and as I am very tall, my head nearly touched the top of the doorway. I was sure that He was unable to escape and I locked Him inside, alone, all alone, completely alone! What joy I felt! I had Him! Then I ran downstairs. I took the two lamps from my sitting room and spilled the oil over the carpet, over the furniture, over everything. Then I set it on fire and ran outside, after having double-locked the large front door.
Then I went and hid at the back of my garden, in a clump of bay trees. How long it took, how very long! Everything was dark, silent, still; not a breath of air, not a single star, mountains of clouds that you couldn’t see but that weighed so heavily, so very heavily, on my soul.
I watched my house and waited. How long it took! I thought the fire had already gone out by itself, or that it had been put out by Him, when one of the large windows on the ground floor shattered under the force of the fire, and a flame, a great red and yellow flame, long, languid, climbed straight up the white walls, surrounding them right up to the roof. Light shimmered against the trees, the branches, in the leaves, and a shiver of fear ran through me! Birds woke up; a dog began to howl; it felt as if day were breaking! Two other windows shattered at that very moment and I could see that my entire house had been reduced to a terrifying inferno. But then a woman’s cry, a horrible, shrill, heartrending cry was heard through the still night, and two garrets opened! I had forgotten about my servants! I could see their terrified faces as they waved their arms about! . . .
And so, frantic with horror, I started running toward the village shouting: “Help! Help! Fire! Fire!” I came across some people who were already on their way there and I went back with them to see what had happened.
By now, the house was nothing more than a magnificent but horrible funeral pyre, an enormous pyre that was lighting up the earth and burning men to death, the place where He was burning, He as well, my prisoner, the New Being, the new master, Le Horla!
Suddenly, the entire roof collapsed between the walls and a volcano of flames spurted up toward the sky. I could see the fireball through all the open windows of the house and I thought that He was in there, inside that furnace, dead . . .
Dead? Perhaps? . . . But what about His body? His body that light passed through . . . was it not impossible to destroy it in ways that kill our bodies?
What if He weren’t dead? . . . Perhaps only time had an effect on this Terrifying, Invisible Being. Why would He have a transparent body, an unknowable body, a body made of pure Essence if He had to fear pain, wounds, illnesses, untimely death just as we did?
Untimely death? All human horror springs from this idea! After man, Le Horla. After we who could die on any day, at any hour, at any moment, through any accident, after us has come the Being who need not die until it is His time, at exactly the right day, hour, minute, because He has reached the end of His existence!
No . . . no . . . there is no doubt, no shadow of a doubt . . . He is not dead . . . And so . . . so . . . it is up to me; I will have to kill myself! . . .
____________
1 In French, this invented word for a supernatural being sounds identical to hors-là, which means “something beyond, not of this world.”
2 Alexandre Dumas fils (1824–1895) the playwright and novelist, was a contemporary of Maupassant. His most famous novel, La Dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias)(1848), became a play in 1852.
3 Infantrymen.
4 A type of rosebush.
5 International Scientific Journal, a fictional journal.