A glass, a beautiful Venetian glass, broke all by itself, on the hutch in my dining room, in the middle of the day.
The valet accused the cook, who accused the laundress, who accused I don’t know who.
Doors that had been closed at night were open in the morning. Someone was stealing the milk every night from the pantry.
What was it? What was its nature? A nervous curiosity, mixed with anger and horror, kept me day and night in a state of constant agitation.
But the house grew calm once again. I was beginning to believe it was all a dream, when the following happened:
It was July 20th, at nine o’clock in the evening. It was very hot out; I had left my window wide open, my lamp lit on my table, illuminating a volume of Musset’s poems opened to his “May Night”; I had stretched out in a big armchair and fallen asleep.
I slept for about forty minutes, then opened my eyes, without making any movement, awakened by some strange, confused emotion. At first I saw nothing, then all of a sudden it seemed to me that a page of the book had just turned all by itself. No breath of air had come in through the window. I was surprised and I waited. After about four minutes, I saw, I saw, yes, I saw, gentlemen, with my own eyes, another page lift itself and fall back on the preceding one as if a finger had turned it. The chair seemed empty, but I realized that it was there, it! I crossed my room in a single bound to seize it, to touch it, to grasp it, if that were possible … But the chair, before I could reach it, toppled over as if someone were fleeing from me; my lamp too fell and went out, the glass broken; and my window was slammed as if an some thief had seized it as he fled, striking at the latch …
I threw myself at the bell-pull and called out. When my valet appeared, I said to him:
“I’ve knocked everything over and broken everything. Give me some light.”
I slept no more that night. But I thought I might once again have been the plaything of an illusion. When one wakes up, one’s senses are still confused. Wasn’t it I who had knocked over my chair and my light, hurrying like a madman?
No, it was not me! I knew it so positively I didn’t doubt it for a second. And yet I wanted to believe it was me.
Wait. The Being. What should I call him? The Invisible. No, that’s not good enough. I baptized him the Horla. Why? I have no idea. The Horla, then, scarcely ever left me. Day and night I had the sensation, the certainty, of the presence of this elusive neighbor, and I was certain too that he was taking my life, hour by hour, minute by minute.
The impossibility of seeing him exasperated me, so I kept all the lamps lit in my rooms, as if I could reveal him with all this brightness.
I saw him, finally.
You do not believe me. But I did see him. I was sitting in front of some book, not reading, but keeping watch, with all my overexcited senses, keeping watch for the one I felt so close to me. He was definitely there. But where? What was he doing? How could I reach him?
Across from me was my bed, an old oaken four-poster. To my right, the fireplace. To my left, the door, which I had carefully closed. Behind me, a very large wardrobe with a mirror I used every day to shave and get dressed, and in which I had the habit of looking at myself from head to foot every time I passed in front of it.
So I was pretending to read, in order to trick him, for he too was spying on me; and suddenly I felt, I was certain that he was reading over my shoulder, that he was there, grazing my ear.
I stood up, turning around so quickly that I almost fell over. You could see everything in the room as if in full daylight … but I did not see myself in my mirror! It was empty, clear, full of light. My image was not inside it.… Yet I was facing it.… I saw the large glass, limpid from top to bottom! I watched it with panic-stricken eyes, and I no longer dared to move forward, feeling him between us, him, aware that he would escape me again, but that his imperceptible body had absorbed my reflection.
I was terrified. Then suddenly I began to see myself in a mist in the depths of the mirror, in a mist as if through a sheet of water; and it seemed to me that this water shimmered from left to right, slowly, making my image more precise from second to second. It was just like the end of an eclipse. What was hiding me did not seem to possess clearly defined outlines, but a sort of opaque transparency that little by little grew clearer.
Finally I was able to distinguish myself completely, just as I do every day when I look at myself.
I had seen him. The horror of it has remained with me, and makes me shudder still.
The next day I was here, where I begged them to keep me.
Now, gentlemen, I will conclude.
Dr. Marrande, after doubting me for a long time, finally decided to travel alone to my country.
“Three of my neighbors are currently affected just as I was. Isn’t that true?”
The doctor replied, “It’s true.”
“You advised them to leave out some water and milk every night in their bedroom to see if these liquids would disappear. Did these liquids disappear, as they did at my house?”
The doctor replied with a solemn gravity, “They disappeared.”
So, gentlemen, a Being, a new Being, who no doubt will soon multiply just as we have multiplied, has just appeared on Earth.
Ah! You smile! Why? Because this Being remains invisible. But our eye, gentlemen, is such an elementary organ that it can scarcely discern what is indispensable to our existence. Whatever is too small escapes it, whatever is too large escapes it, whatever is too far away escapes it. It is unaware of the animals that live in a drop of water. It is unaware of the inhabitants, the plants, and the surface of neighboring stars; it can’t even see what is transparent.
Place in front of it a perfect two-way mirror, and it will not perceive it, it will make us walk right into it, just as a bird caught in a house breaks his neck on the windowpanes. It does not see the solid and transparent bodies that nevertheless exist; it does not see the air we live on, does not see the wind that is the strongest force in nature, that knocks men down, topples buildings, uproots trees, whips the sea up into mountains of water that make granite cliffs crumble.
Why should it be surprising if our eye cannot see a new body, one that evidently lacks the property of blocking light rays?
Can you see electricity? And yet it exists!
This being, which I have named the Horla, also exists.
Who is it? Gentlemen, it is the one the Earth is waiting for, the one that will succeed mankind! The one who is coming to dethrone us, subjugate us, tame us, feed on us perhaps, just as we fed on the ox and the wild boar.
For centuries, we have had a foreboding of him, we have dreaded him and foretold him! The fear of the Invisible always haunted our ancestors.
He has come.
All the fairy tales, the legends about goblins and ungraspable and malevolent prowlers of the air, it was he they were talking about, he is the one of whom an already anxious and trembling humanity had some premonition.
And everything you yourselves have been doing, gentlemen, in recent years, what you call ‘hypnotism,’ ‘suggestion,’ ‘magnetism’—it is he you are heralding and prophesying!
I tell you he has come. He prowls about, anxious himself as the first men were, still ignorant of his own force and power that he will come to know soon, too soon.
And now, gentlemen, to finish, a fragment from a newspaper I came across, which comes from Rio de Janeiro. I quote:
A sort of epidemic of madness seems for some time to have been raging in the province of Saõ Paulo. The inhabitants of several villages have run away, abandoning their land and their houses, claiming they are pursued and consumed by invisible vampires that are feeding on their breath while they sleep and that otherwise drink nothing but water, and sometimes milk!
I will add: A few days before the first attack of the sickness from which I almost died, I vividly recall seeing a grand Brazilian three-master pass by with its flag flying … I told you that my house was on the water’s e
dge … all white.… He was hidden on this ship, without a doubt.…
I have nothing more to add, gentlemen.
Dr. Marrande rose and murmured:
“Nor I. I do not know if this man is mad, or if we are both mad … or if … if our successor has actually arrived.”
—October 26, 1886
TRANSLATOR’S NOTE
The word “horla” (pronounced “orla”), although not a word in French, does have some interesting connotations to a French ear. “Hors” means outside, and “là” means simply “there”—so le (note the masculine gender) Horla sounds like the Outsider, the outer, the one Out There.
Maupassant seems to have been much taken with the Horla, since he wrote two versions of the story, in 1886 and 1887, as well as the more austere, but no less frightening “Letter from a Madman” (1885). All three are included here, in a new, integral presentation of the Horla cycle.
Maupassant also wrote a short story called “The Voyage of The Horla,” which was published in July 1887, just a few months after the final version of “The Horla.” “The Voyage of the Horla” does not, however, deal with the supernatural: It is about a journey in a hot-air balloon called “Le Horla,” about how interesting the earth looks when viewed from far away, from Out There.
CHARLOTTE MANDELL
ANNANDALE-ON-HUDSON, NY
DECEMBER 2004
THE ART OF THE NOVELLA
OTHER TITLES IN THE ART OF THE NOVELLA SERIES
BARTLEBY THE SCRIVENER
HERMAN MELVILLE
THE LESSON OF THE MASTER
HENRY JAMES
MY LIFE
ANTON CHEKHOV
THE DEVIL
LEO TOLSTOY
THE TOUCHSTONE
EDITH WHARTON
THE HOUND OF THE
BASKERVILLES
ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE
THE DEAD
JAMES JOYCE
FIRST LOVE
IVAN TURGENEV
A SIMPLE HEART
GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
RUDYARD KIPLING
MICHAEL KOHLHAAS
HEINRICH VON KLEIST
THE BEACH OF FALESÁ
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON
THE HORLA
GUY DE MAUPASSANT
THE ETERNAL HUSBAND
FYODOR DOSTOEVSKY
THE MAN THAT CORRUPTED
HADLEYBURG
MARK TWAIN
THE LIFTED VEIL
GEORGE ELIOT
THE GIRL WITH THE
GOLDEN EYES
HONORÉ DE BALZAC
A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING
WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
BENITO CERENO
HERMAN MELVILLE
MATHILDA
MARY SHELLEY
STEMPENYU: A JEWISH ROMANCE
SHOLEM ALEICHEM
FREYA OF THE SEVEN ISLES
JOSEPH CONRAD
HOW THE TWO IVANS
QUARRELLED
NIKOLAI GOGOL
MAY DAY
F. SCOTT FITZGERALD
RASSELAS, PRINCE ABYSSINIA
SAMUEL JOHNSON
THE DIALOGUE OF THE DOGS
MIGUEL DE CERVANTES
THE LEMOINE AFFAIR
MARCEL PROUST
THE COXON FUND
HENRY JAMES
THE DEATH OF IVAN ILYICH
LEO TOLSTOY
TALES OF BELKIN
ALEXANDER PUSHKIN
THE AWAKENING
KATE CHOPIN
ADOLPHE
BENJAMIN CONSTANT
THE COUNTRY OF
THE POINTED FIRS
SARAH ORNE JEWETT
PARNASSUS ON WHEELS
CHRISTOPHER MORLEY
THE NICE OLD MAN
AND THE PRETTY GIRL
ITALO SVEVO
LADY SUSAN
JANE AUSTEN
JACOB’S ROOM
VIRGINIA WOOLF
THE DUEL
GIACOMO CASANOVA
THE DUEL
ANTON CHEKHOV
THE DUEL
JOSEPH CONRAD
THE DUEL
HEINRICH VON KLEIST
THE DUEL
ALEXANDER KUPRIN
THE ALIENIST
MACHADO DE ASSIS
ALEXANDER’S BRIDGE
WILLA CATHER
FANFARLO
CHARLES BAUDELAIRE
THE DISTRACTED PREACHER
THOMAS HARDY
THE ENCHANTED WANDERER
NIKOLAI LESKOV
Guy de Maupassant, The Horla
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