The Horla

by Guy de Maupassant

  It can reveal to us only objects and beings of an average dimension in relation to human size, which has led us to apply the word “large” to certain things and the word “small” to certain other things, only because the eye’s weakness does not allow it to be aware of what is too immense or too tiny for it. Hence, it knows and sees almost nothing, and almost the entire universe remains hidden from it, the star that inhabits space as well as the microbe that inhabits a drop of water.

  Even if our eye had even a hundred million times more than its normal strength, if it perceived in the air that we breathe all the races of invisible beings, and all the inhabitants of neighboring planets, there would still exist an infinite number of races of animals so small, and worlds so distant, that the eye could not see them.

  All our ideas about size, then, are false, since there is no limit possible to largeness or to smallness.

  Our awareness of dimensions and shapes has no absolute value, since it is determined solely by the power of the organ and in constant comparison with ourselves.

  Let us add that the eye is also incapable of seeing the transparent. A flawless glass tricks it. It confuses it with the air, which it does not see either. Let us move on to color.

  Color exists because our eye is constituted in such a way that it transmits to the brain, in the form of color, the various ways that bodies absorb and break down, in accordance with their chemical composition, the light rays that strike them.

  The various proportions of this absorption and breaking down make up the shades of color.

  Thus this organ imposes on the mind its way of seeing, or rather its arbitrary way of noting dimensions and perceiving the relationships of light with matter.

  Let us examine the sense of hearing.

  Even more than with the eye, we are the playthings and dupes of this fanciful organ.

  Two bodies colliding produce a certain shock in the atmosphere. This movement makes a certain tiny piece of skin vibrate in our ear, which changes immediately into a sound something that is in fact nothing but a vibration.

  Nature is silent. But the eardrum possesses the miraculous property of transmitting to us all the quiverings of invisible waves in space in the form of meaning, meaning that changes depending on the number of vibrations.

  This metamorphosis, which is performed by the auditory nerve over the short trajectory from the ear to the brain, has allowed us to create a strange art—music—the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

  What shall we say of the senses of taste and smell? Would we recognize smells and the quality of various foods without the peculiar properties of the nose and the palate?

  Humanity, however, could exist without the ear, without taste and smell—that is, without any notion of sound, taste, or smell.

  Thus, if we had a few organs less, we would be unaware of admirable and unusual things, but if we had a few organs more, we would discover around us an infinity of other things we would never have suspected while we lacked the means to observe them.

  So we deceive ourselves when we pass judgments on the Known. We are surrounded by an unexplored unknown.

  Everything is uncertain, and can be perceived in different ways.

  Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

  Let us formulate this certainty by using the old dictum: “Truth this side of the Pyrénées, error beyond.”

  And let us say: Truth inside the sense organ, error outside.

  Two and two no longer have to make four outside of our atmosphere.

  Truth on Earth, error further away. So I conclude that the mysteries we have glimpsed—like electricity, hypnotic sleep, transmission of will, suggestion, all the magnetic phenomena—remain hidden from us, because nature has not provided us with the organ, or organs, necessary to understand them.

  After I had convinced myself that everything my senses reveal to me exists only for me as I perceive it, and would be completely different for someone else differently organized, after having concluded that a differently made humanity would have about the world, about life, about everything, ideas that are absolutely opposite to our own, since the consensus of beliefs results only from the similarity of human organs, and differences of opinion come only from slight differences in the functioning of our nerve endings, I made an effort at superhuman thought in order to get some inkling of the impenetrable universe that surrounds me.

  Have I gone mad?

  I told myself: “I am surrounded by unknown things.” I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me—afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

  And this confused terror of the supernatural, which has haunted mankind since the birth of the world, is legitimate, since the supernatural is nothing other than what remains veiled to us!

  Then I understood terror. It seemed to me that I kept brushing against the discovery of a secret of the universe.

  I tried to sharpen my organs, to excite them, to make them perceive glimpses of the invisible.

  I told myself, “Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?”

  How many men feel them, tremble at their approach, shudder at their imperceptible contact. We feel them around us, but we cannot discern them, for we do not have the eyes to see them, or specifically the unknown organ that could discover them.

  Then, more than anyone else, I felt them myself, these supernatural passersby. Beings or mysteries? How can I know? I can’t say what they are, but I can always indicate their presence. And I have seen—I have seen an invisible being—as much as one can see them, these beings.

  I remained motionless for entire nights, seated in front of my table, my head in my hands, thinking of that, thinking of them. Often I thought an intangible hand, or rather an ungraspable body, was lightly grazing my hair. He didn’t touch me, since it wasn’t a carnal essence, but an imponderable, unknowable essence.

  One evening, I heard the floor creak behind me. It creaked in a strange way. I trembled. I turned around. I saw nothing. And I thought no more of it.

  But the next day, at the same time, the same sound occurred. I was so afraid that I got up, certain, certain, certain that I was not alone in my bedroom. I could see nothing. The air was clear, transparent everywhere. My two lamps lit up all corners of the room.

  The sound was not repeated, and little by little I calmed down; I remained uneasy, though, and often looked around.

  The next day I shut myself in early, looking for a way I could contrive to see the invisible being that was visiting me.

  And I saw him. I almost died from the terror of it.

  I had lighted all the candles on my mantelpiece and chandelier. The room was illumined as if for a celebration. Both my lamps were burning on my table.

  Opposite me, my bed, an old oaken four-poster. To my right, my fireplace. To my left, the door, which I had locked shut. Behind me, a very large wardrobe with a mirror. I looked at myself in it. My eyes looked strange, and my pupils quite dilated.

  Then I sat down, as I did every day.

  The sound had occurred, the night before and the night before that, at 9:22. I waited. When the precise moment arrived, I perceived an indescribable sensation, as if a fluid, an irresistible fluid, had penetrated me through all the pores of my skin, drowning my soul in an atrocious, true terror. And the creaking sounded, right next to me.

  I got up, turning around so quickly that I almost fell down. You could see everything there as if in
full daylight, but I couldn’t see myself in the mirror! It was empty, clear, full of light. I was not inside it, and yet I was facing it. I looked at it with panic-stricken eyes. I dared not go towards it, since I knew he was between us, he, the invisible one, and he was concealing me.

  I was terrified. And then I began to see myself in a mist far back in the mirror, in a mist as if through water; and it seemed to me that this water shimmered left to right, slowly, making me more precise from second to second. It was like the end of an eclipse.

  What was hiding me had no outlines, but a kind of opaque transparency that little by little became clearer.

  And finally I could see myself clearly, just as I do every day when I look at myself.

  I had seen it!

  And I did not see it again.

  But I wait for it ceaselessly, and I feel that my mind is wandering in this waiting.

  I remain for hours, nights, days, weeks, in front of my mirror, waiting for him! He does not come anymore.

  He has understood that I’ve seen him. But I feel that I will wait for him always, until death, that I will wait for him without rest, in front of this mirror, like a hunter lying in wait.

  And, in this mirror, I am beginning to see crazy images, monsters, hideous corpses, all kinds of terrifying beasts, atrocious beings, all the unlikely visions that must haunt the minds of madmen.

  That is my confession, my dear Doctor. Tell me, what should I do?

  —February 17, 1885

  THE HORLA

  1886

  The eminent Dr. Marrande, most renowned of alienists, had asked three of his colleagues and four

  scholars, who worked in the natural sciences, to come spend an hour at his residence, the sanatorium

  he directed, to show them one of his patients.

  As soon as his friends were assembled, he told them, “I am going to set before you the strangest and most unsettling case I have ever encountered. Moreover, I have nothing to tell you about my client. He will speak for himself.” Then the doctor rang. An orderly ushered in a man. He was very thin, as thin as a corpse, as thin as certain madmen who are eaten away by a thought, for a sick thought can devour the body’s flesh more than fever or consumption.

  When he had greeted everyone and sat down, he started.

  Gentlemen, I know why you are gathered here today, and I am ready to tell you my story, just as my friend Dr. Marrande has asked me. For a long time he thought I was mad. Today he is not sure. In a little while, you will all know that I have as healthy, as lucid, as perceptive a mind as your own, unfortunately for me, and for you, and for all of humanity.

  But I want to begin with the facts themselves, with the simple facts. Here they are:

  I am forty-two years old. I am not married; my wealth is enough to live with a certain luxury. I was living on my estate on the shores of the Seine, in Biessard, near Rouen. I love hunting and fishing. Behind me, beyond the great rocks that tower above my house, I had one of the most beautiful forests in France, the forest of Roumare, and in front of me one of the finest rivers in the world.

  My house is immense, painted white on the outside, handsome, ancient, in the middle of a large garden planted with magnificent trees that stretches to the forest, climbing the enormous rocks I just mentioned.

  My staff consists, or rather consisted, of a coachman, a gardener, a valet, a cook, and a laundress, who was also a kind of housekeeper. All these people had lived in my home anywhere from ten to sixteen years; they knew me, knew my house, the countryside, all that surrounded me in my life. They were good, contented servants. That is important for what I am about to tell you.

  Let me add that the Seine, which runs alongside my garden, is navigable as far as Rouen, as I’m sure you know. Every day I would see great ships pass by, under sail or steam, coming from all the corners of the world.

  A year ago, last Fall, I was suddenly overcome with peculiar and inexplicable feelings of uneasiness. At first it was a sort of nervous anxiety that kept me awake for whole nights at a time. I was so hypersensitive that the least sound made me tremble. My mood turned bitter. I had sudden, inexplicable rages. I called a doctor, who prescribed potassium bromide and showers.

  So morning and evening I made myself take showers, and I began to take the bromide. Soon, in fact, I did begin to sleep again, but the sleep was more terrifying than the insomnia. As soon as I went to bed, I closed my eyes and was annihilated. Yes, I fell into the void, into an absolute void, into a death of my entire being from which I was suddenly, horribly jolted by the dreadful feeling of a crushing weight on my chest, and of a mouth that was eating up my life, on my mouth. The shock of it—I’ve never known anything more horrible.

  Imagine to yourselves a man asleep, who has been murdered, and who wakes up with a knife in his throat; and who moans covered with blood, who can no longer breathe, who will die, but who doesn’t understand why—that’s what it’s like.

  I kept getting steadily, alarmingly thinner. One day I noticed that my coachman, who had been quite fat, was beginning to grow thin like me.

  Finally I asked him:

  “What is wrong with you, Jean? You are sick.”

  He replied:

  “I do believe I’ve caught the same illness as Monsieur. My nights are eating up my days.”

  I thought at the time that there was a feverish influence in the house because of the proximity of the river, and that I should go away for two or three months, even though we were in the middle of hunting season. But then a small, peculiar fact, observed by chance, brought about such an unlikely, fantastic, and terrifying series of discoveries for me that I stayed home.

  I was thirsty one evening, and drank half a glass of water; I noticed that my carafe, standing on the chest of drawers opposite my bed, was full up to the crystal stopper.

  During the night, I had one of those dreadful awakenings I’ve just told you about. I lit my candle, prey to terrible anxiety, and when I went to take another drink of water I saw with astonishment that my carafe was empty. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Either someone had entered my bedroom, or I had become a sleepwalker.

  The next evening, I wanted to perform the same test. So I locked my door in order to be sure no one could penetrate my room. I went to sleep and woke up as I did every night. Someone had drunk all the water that I had seen two hours before.

  Who had drunk this water? Myself, no doubt, and yet I was certain, absolutely certain, that I hadn’t made a movement in my deep and painful sleep.

  So I resorted to tricks to convince myself that I was not performing these acts unconsciously. One evening I placed, next to the carafe, a bottle of old Bordeaux, a glass of milk (which I hate), and some chocolate cakes (which I love).

  The wine and cakes remained intact. The milk and water disappeared. Every day, then, I changed the drinks and the food. Never did someone touch the solid, thick foods, and, as to liquids, someone drank nothing but fresh milk and above all water.

  But this heartbreaking doubt remained in my soul. Couldn’t I be the one who was getting up without being aware of it, and who was drinking even the things I disliked, since my senses, numbed by somnambulistic sleep, might be changed, might have lost their ordinary dislikes and acquired different tastes?

  So I used a new trick against myself. I wrapped strips of white muslin on all the objects that would certainly have to be touched, and I covered them all with a cotton napkin.

  Then, when it was time for me to go to bed, I smeared my hands, lips, and moustache with graphite.

  When I woke up, all the objects remained spotless, although someone had touched them, for the napkin was not placed as I had left it; and, moreover, someone had drunk the water and the milk. Yet my door, which I had shut with a safety lock, and my shutters, padlocked as a precaution, would have kept anyone out of the room.

  Then I asked myself the overwhelming question: Who was there, every night, close to me?

  I sense, gentlemen, that I am telling you all of t
his too quickly. You are smiling, your opinion has already been formed: “He is a madman.” I should have described to you at length my emotions, the emotions of a man who, locked up at home, with a healthy mind, sees, through the glass of a carafe, a little water that has vanished while he slept. I should have made you understand this torture renewed every night and every morning, and that invincible sleep, and those even more dreadful awakenings.

  But I will go on.

  All of a sudden, the miracle stopped. Someone no longer touched anything in my room. It was over. I was feeling better. My happiness returned, when I learned that one of my neighbors, Monsieur Legite, was in just the same condition that I had been in myself. I believed again in a feverish influence in the countryside. My coachman had left me a month ago, very ill.

  The winter passed, and spring began. One morning, as I was walking near my rose garden, I saw, I distinctly saw, quite close to me, the stem of one of the most beautiful roses break as if an invisible hand had picked it. Then the flower followed the curve an arm would have described as it carried it to a mouth, where it remained suspended in the transparent air, all alone, motionless, terrifying, three feet from my eyes.

  Seized with mad horror, I hurled myself on it to seize it. I found nothing. It had disappeared. Then I was overcome with a furious rage against myself. A reasonable and serious man cannot permit himself such hallucinations!

  But was it indeed a hallucination? I looked for the stem. I found it immediately on the bush, freshly broken, between two other roses that had remained on the branch; for there had been three of them, as I had seen perfectly.

  I returned home, my soul in turmoil. Gentlemen, listen to me, I am calm; I did not believe in the supernatural, I do not even believe in it today; but, from that moment onward, I was sure, sure as I am of day and night, that there existed near me an invisible being who had haunted me, then left me, and who was returning.

  A little later I had proof of this.

  Among my servants every day furious arguments broke out for a hundred reasons that seemed trivial at first, but soon were full of meaning for me.