The Horla (7 page)
Authors: Guy De Maupassant
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 edge … 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
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
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