7.18 Maupassant — Le Horla — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read about 2,600 words of Guy de Maupassant's Le Horla , the diary of a man who comes to believe that an invisible being lives in his house. Follow a story told as a diary: dated entries, the present and the perfect of things just lived, and the literary past of things told the next day. Recognise the language of fear and doubt: questions without answers, sentences broken off with … , and exclamations. Decide for yourself, as Maupassant's readers have done for a century and more, whether the narrator is mad or the Horla is real. Sentences from this text, before the notes. Read the French aloud; all of them come back below. French English Mes cauchemars anciens reviennent. My old nightmares are coming back. Un frisson me saisit soudain, non pas un frisson de froid, mais un étrange frisson d’angoisse. A shiver suddenly seized me, not a shiver of cold, but a strange shiver of anguish. qui comprendra mon angoisse abominable ? who will understand my dreadful anguish? ce pressentiment qui est sans doute l’atteinte d’un mal encore inconnu this foreboding which is no doubt the first touch of an illness still unknown On a encore bu toute ma carafe cette nuit Someone has drunk my whole carafe again last night Alors, j’étais somnambule So I was a sleepwalker Prerequisites : 7.17 — this reading follows 7.17 Reading , by the same author. You need the literary past of 3.15 Conjugation and the vocabulary of the mind from 5.20 Vocabulary : l'esprit , l'âme , la raison . About this text Note: this text contains disturbing scenes of fear and madness. Maupassant wrote Le Horla twice. A first version, told by a patient to a group of doctors, appeared in a newspaper in 1886; the second, the one here, appeared in 1887 as the title story of a collection, and takes the form of a private diary. Its narrator is a well-off man living in his family house on the Seine, near Rouen. In May he is happy; then he begins to sleep badly, to fear the night, and to feel that someone comes to him in his sleep. Water disappears from his carafe while he sleeps with his door locked. He tests, doubts, travels, returns, and becomes certain that he shares his house with an invisible being, which he names, near the end, the Horla. The story belongs to the fantastique , the French genre in which the reader cannot decide between a natural and a supernatural explanation. Maupassant keeps both open to the last page. Readers have often linked it to his own illness, for he died in 1893 after months in an asylum, but the story is controlled and deliberate, and it is safer to read it as a masterpiece of the genre than as a confession. The text here is an excerpt of about 2,600 words from the edition of the collection Le Horla published in Paris by Ollendorff in 1895, as transcribed in French Wikisource. It gives the entries from 8 May to 3 June, the entries from 3 to 10 July, and the entry of 6 August. Two passages are left out and marked […]: the narrator's journey to Mont Saint-Michel, and the entries from 12 July to 4 August, in which he stays in Paris, where a doctor shows him the power of hypnotism, and then returns home. Reading Maupassant's diary Dated entries. Each entry begins with a date and a dash: 8 mai. — Quelle journée admirable ! A diary is written on the day, so the narrator uses the present for his state, je suis malade , and the perfect for what has just happened, j'ai mal dormi . But when he tells a whole night, he switches to the literary past: je bus un demi-verre d'eau , je m'élançai vers ma table . Watch for the switch; it marks the beginning of a story within the entry. Broken sentences. As the fear grows, the sentences break up: dashes, suspension points, repetitions. Je dors — longtemps — deux ou trois heures — puis un rêve — non — un cauchemar m'étreint. The punctuation is the narrator's breathing. Questions without answers. The narrator asks himself what is happening, and cannot answer: Qu'ai-je donc ? , Ai-je perdu la raison ? These questions with inversion are the formal, written form of the question, from 4.6 Grammar . The ship. In the very first entry, the narrator watches a fine Brazilian three-master sail up the Seine, and salutes it, he does not know why. Remember it. Reading it a second time, part by part 8 to 18 May. A perfect spring day, the narrator's love for his house and his land, the ships on the river, the Brazilian three-master. Then a slight fever, a sadness without cause, and a visit to the doctor, who finds nothing serious. 25 May to 3 June. The nights become a terror. He waits for sleep with dread, and in his sleep he feels someone kneel on his chest and try to strangle him. In the forest of Roumare, walking alone, he suddenly feels followed, turns, sees no one, and loses his way. He decides to travel. 3 to 10 July. Back home, he learns that his coachman has been ill in the same way. Then he discovers that the water in his carafe has been drunk in the night, with his door locked. Is he a sleepwalker? He tests himself with water, milk, wine, bread and strawberries, and with the bottles wrapped in muslin and his lips and hands rubbed with pencil lead. On 6 and 7 July all the water and a little of the milk are gone; on 8 July, with no water or milk on the table, nothing is touched; on 9 July, with the carafes wrapped, all the water and all the milk are gone, and he has not moved. 6 August. In broad daylight, in his rose garden, he sees a rose stem bend and break as if picked by an invisible hand, and the flower rise in the air towards a mouth. He is now certain: something lives with him, under his roof. Full translation An English translation of the whole text, made for this course and kept close to the original. The numbers are the paragraph numbers of the original text, so you can move between the two. The Horla 8 May. What a wonderful day! I spent the whole morning stretched out on the grass in front of my house, under the enormous plane tree that covers, shelters