The protagonist of Maupassant's second version of “Le Horla” resides in a white house on the banks of the Seine, not far from the forest of Roumare and the capital of Normandy, Rouen.¹ His name is unknown to us and so is his age.² As for his physical appearance, we learn only that he is very tall (48) and that he wears a mustache and a beard (28, 31). He must be rich. At any rate, though he does not work, he employs no fewer than four servants (two men and two women: a valet, a driver, a cook, a wardrobe woman). He has no wife, no parents and no children, no relatives who live nearby, no friends or acquaintances to speak of. He is very much an homme seul, a man alone. But perhaps not sufficiently so.

The protagonist keeps a diary and, as early as the second entry, notes that he feels nervous, scared, depressed. His doctor prescribes showers and potassium bromide but the nervousness, the fear, and the depression worsen. Particularly disturbing and debilitating are his nightmares: someone gets into his bed, touches him, kneels on him, like a leech drinks life itself from his lips, and leaves him exhausted and near annihilation. Stranger things begin to happen. Night after night the water in his carafe disappears. Glasses are unaccountably broken. Flowers in his garden are plucked by invisible hands. It seems to him that a mysterious creature has moved into his house. It feeds on water, milk, and human life, and it is gradually controlling his every action.

Maybe the protagonist has gone mad. Yet there are many reasons to think otherwise (“Le Horla” is not a realist tale but a fantastic one). For instance, the driver exhibits the same symptoms as his master: he looks singularly pale (as if his lifeblood were drained) and his “nights are eating up [his] days” (26).³ At Mont Saint-Michel, which the protagonist visits in an attempt at diversion, a monk acting as guide tells of the region's extraordinary beings and adds that people often deny their existence simply because they do not see them. But neither do they see “the greatest force in nature,” the wind (26). In Paris, at a dinner party, the protagonist's cousin is hypnotized and robbed of her will. Human beings can fall under the spell of foreign powers and lose all freedom of action. Besides, the Revue du Monde Scientifique itself reports strange news from the São Paulo province, in Brazil: “The bewildered inhabitants are leaving their houses, deserting their villages, abandoning their farms, saying they are being pursued, possessed, governed like human cattle by invisible though tangible beings, kinds of vampires who feed on their life, during their sleep, and who, moreover, drink water and milk without, apparently, touching any other food” (43). No, the protagonist is not mad. There has to be another creature in his house. It probably came to Normandy on that beautiful Brazilian ship described in the first entry of the diary. Like a kind of “opaque transparency,” it interferes between him and his image in the mirror (46). It even cries out its name to him: “le Horla,” “the Awtther” (44). It is enslaving him. It must be killed. The protagonist decides to lock it up in his room and to burn down his entire house. And he does. But isn't the creature, with its different body, impervious to fire? To escape its domination, the protagonist may have to kill himself.

Like any vampire story perhaps, “Le Horla” is, among other things, a story of sexual desire, fear and transgression. The very title of Maupassant's tale—the very name of the mysterious creature—announces it. The signifier “Horla” can, of course, be interpreted variously and it has been. It might constitute an allusion to “Hor-ka,” the Egyptian name for Saturn and, by extension, for melancholy and misfortune; or a partial anagram of “cholera”; or an inversion of “Lahor,” the pseudonym of the writer's good friend, Dr. Cazalis; or a play on Charles Nodier's Hurlubleu; or a homonymic evocation of “or là,” with its echoes of gold, alchemy, magic. But it also connotes foreignness (“horsain” means “foreigner” in the dialects of Normandy) as well as lawlessness (“horla” r “hors là” r “hors-la-loi” r “outlaw”) and, preceded by the article, it suggests a hesitation between masculine and feminine (“Le or La”).⁴ More generally, the onomastic dimension of the story is consistently telling and it often brings to mind images linked to sexuality and the Law. Some of the historical or geographical names in “Le Horla” (Voltaire, Paris) not only function as “reality signs” but also lend themselves to pertinent thematizations through their signified: Voltaire is the Enlightenment writer par excellence, the great opponent of the supernatural, the formidable derider of superstition; Paris is the center of (European) civilization, the capital of the Old World (as opposed to the New World where the creature may come from). Other names gather thematic force through their signifier: Mont Saint-Michel and São Paulo, for example, both connote religion or the marvelous rather than reason. And a large number of (fictional or non-fictional) appellations evoke two interrelated and sexually charged semantic fields that govern the tale: water (and the elements), the Father (mastery, transgression).⁵ Thus, the doctor who hypnotizes the protagonist's cousin is named Parent; the cousin is Mme Sablé (Mrs. “Sanded”); and the protagonist, who lives near the Roumare forest (“mare” means “pond”), reads the work of Herestauss (“the Master is out”) on “the unknown inhabitants of the ancient world and the new” (40), sees a play by Alexandre Dumas fils during his stay in Paris,⁶ and, after burning his house down, takes refuge in the Continental Hotel.

Dr. Parent is not the only father figure in the tale. There is also the monk at Mont Saint-Michel, who is addressed as “father” (25); the physician whose treatment proves ineffectual; Mme Sablé's husband, a military officer leading the “76^echasseurs” in Limoges (30); and the Horla itself, who is described as the “new Lord” (44) and the “new master” (49). As for the protagonist, who may have given birth to the creature (!), he proves a poor master. He finds less and less room for himself in his own residence and burns it down, forgetting that his servants will be caught in the fire (49). There is no place for him in the house of the father.

The protagonist's desire to assume the father's role and occupy his place manifests itself in the very first entry of the diary. As Max Milner points out, the “fusional beatitude” characterizing that entry—with the description of an “admirable day” spent in the shade of a tree, by the “big and broad” river Seine and the house “where I have my roots … my house where I grew up” (19)—figures incestuous bliss.⁷ Water is attractive to the protagonist. He likes to take walks along the Seine (20), spends entire days looking at it (36), and, during his trip to Paris, enjoys an excellent evening at the boaters' ball on the island of Grenouillère (35). But water and the attraction it exerts can be dangerous. After all, it brought the Horla to Normandy and it seems to be the creature's favorite drink. Besides, it can swallow up the earth—the sand (25)—and is textually linked to madness (37) and sickness: “When one is stricken by certain diseases, all the springs of the physical being seem broken, all the energies annihilated, all the muscles flabby, the bones soft like flesh and the flesh liquid like water” (39). Instead of flowing, water can become a stagnant abyss (22). Instead of being clear, it can become opaque, a malevolent mirror that devours objects and beings instead of reflecting them (47).

Perhaps nothing terrifies the protagonist more than the loss of his reflection: “I didn't see myself in my mirror! … It was empty, clear, deep, full of light! My image wasn't in it … and I was facing the mirror!” (47). He must have expected this to happen. Every time he goes by the mirror in his bedroom, he looks at himself “from head to toe” (46) and, in Paris, he has a photograph taken of himself. He needs reassurance. He needs to have his image preserved. Indeed, his diary functions as a kind of mirror and, like him, it is fragmented. It consists of thirty-nine entries, some of which are less than one line long (38, 39), and it is framed and traversed by dotted lines, empty lines, holes (19, 24, 46, 48, 50). At first, the diary constitutes a refuge for the protagonist, a site for analysis and reason. However, like other mirrors in the text, it quickly stops providing comfort and, instead, encourages fantasms, fears, disorder, madness. Writing in general and storytelling prove treacherous. Letters or telegrams bring bad news (38) and the tales of the monk, the scientific stories of Dr. Parent, the book by Herrmann Herestauss, the article in the Revue du Monde Scientifique contribute decisively to the protagonist's distress. Maybe writing—especially intimate writing—should be burned (34) like the Horla.⁸

That is what Mme Sablé, controlled by Dr. Parent's hypnotic suggestions, will believe she has done to a letter from her husband. This young Parisian woman, whom the protagonist has known “like a sister, since childhood” (32) and whose husband is in Limoges with his military unit (30), has invited her cousin to dinner as well as the doctor, his wife, and another young woman.⁹ Parent recounts at length the extraordinary experiments in hypnosis performed by modern scientists and, as the hostess and the protagonist look incredulous, he asks to hypnotize her: “She sat in an armchair and he started to stare at her and fascinate her. I felt a little anxious, my heart beating hard, a tightness in my throat. I saw Mme Sablé's eyes become heavy, her mouth tense, her chest heave” (31). Parent has the protagonist sit behind her and, showing her his card, tells her that it is a mirror. She is to say what she sees in it. She does not see herself but the protagonist, twisting his mustache and taking out of his pocket a picture where he stands head uncovered. And it is all true! Parent then persuades her that she will get a letter from Mr. Sablé, asking for 5000 francs, and he orders her to beg her cousin for the money: “—Can you show it [the letter] to me?—No … no … no … it contained intimate things … too personal … I … I burned it” (33-34). The entire episode—with, notably, the husband's absence, the presence of Dr. Parent, the sibling relation between Mme Sablé and her cousin as well as their physical reactions, the strange mirror, the protagonist's floating image, his mustache twisting and his uncovered head, the imaginary letter and its imaginary burning—the entire episode is under the sign of an illegitimate, ambiguous, repressed sexuality.¹⁰

The same sexual uneasiness is suggested by the protagonist's unmarried status, of course, as well as by his fascination for one of the monk's stories (25), a story involving an old shepherd—whose head is always covered—leading a man-faced billy goat and a woman-faced she-goat who constantly quarrel in an unknown language. It is also strongly connoted by the protagonist's disgust with a human body subject to disease, deformity, putrefaction, and premature destruction (45, 50), a soft and flabby body, degrading, organic, “feminine” (interestingly, when the house burns down at the end of the tale, “a cry, a horrible cry, shrill, harrowing, the cry of a woman” is heard through the night). But the uneasiness manifests itself most strikingly, perhaps, in the (first) scenes evoking the Horla (whose more perfect and refined body is—37, 45, 47, 49, 50—the body of transparency). The protagonist, who dreams that someone assaults him in his bed, awaits sleep with apprehension: “my heart beats hard, and my legs tremble, and my whole body twitches in the warmth of the sheets” (22). As mentioned above, the accounts of his nightmares foreground an unknown creature with its body and its mouth on his, clinging to him, penetrating him, dominating him, and leaving him spent (22, 26). When he notices that his carafe of water empties mysteriously every night, he thinks he may be a sleepwalker and decides to find out by wrapping it in white muslin before going to bed (he also fastens the cork!) and by smearing graphite on his hands, lips, and beard. Again, the water disappears. But he must be innocent: “I had not moved; my sheets themselves did not show any spots. … The cloth around the [carafe] had remained immaculate” (28). Drawn to the place of the father but fearful of being absorbed by it and haunted by the avenging return of the Law, attracted and repulsed by the feminine, increasingly sensitive to an unknown language, increasingly consumed by a force that leaves less and less room for his conscious being (the unconscious is evoked quite explicitly, 27 and 37-38), terrified of losing control, of having lost control, the protagonist might be said to externalize the Other in him trying to get out into an Other outside trying to get in: the Horla.

In the very first lines of the diary, the protagonist emphasizes that he is from Normandy. He belongs there and he enjoys it: “I like this country and I like to live in it because that is where I have my roots, those deep and delicate roots which bind a man to the ground where his ancestors were born and died, which bind him to what is thought there and what is eaten, the customs and the foods, the local locutions, the peasants' intonations, the smells of the soil, of the villages, and of the air itself” (19). If the protagonist is a native, goes to the Théâtre-Français (!), and celebrates the Fête de la République on July 14 (29),¹¹ the Horla is a foreigner who comes from far away. But the difference between them is not one of origin only. As already mentioned, they also differ physically. And they differ culturally. The Horla ingests water and milk (the mother's milk) but disdains the other foods that the protagonist leaves for it: bread, wine, strawberries from his garden (28).¹² It likes liquids rather than solids (and would not touch such substances as “grass and meat” with which human beings “feed themselves laboriously” [45]). It favors the colorless or the white while rejecting the colored. Most relevantly, perhaps, it privileges natural products as opposed to the products of (French and Christian) culture. The Horla thus represents a thoroughly different race, something which Maupassant's text signals explicitly on two occasions (40, 43).¹³ It is a race born in Brazil (43), a race that could also have arisen in the Indies but not in Paris or Bougival (35), a race, therefore, linked to places which are not only exotic and connotatively suggestive of magic or savagery (the Horla practices a kind of modified cannibalism) but which are also (former) European colonies.¹⁴ And the protagonist's nationalism and pride in his roots slowly translates into xenophobia, racial fear, the terror of being a victim of colonization.

It is not simply the protagonist's personal integrity or individual well-being that is at stake. Nor does the threat come from a single malevolent creature. Others have already been attacked, in and out of Normandy (the driver; the people of São Paulo), and there exists an entire race of Horlas (43). After rising in the (colonized) New World and terrorizing it, they are now threatening the (colonizing) Old World. Indeed, they constitute a menace for the whole human race, for every human being (44), or, rather, for every “white” or “non-colored.” The Horla's affinities for things white or colorless have already been noted. It arrived on a white Brazilian sailboat and was attracted by the protagonist's white house (43); it appreciates milk and likes water even more; and it is itself without color. Nothing could be more normal, therefore, than its desire (and the desire of its race) to subjugate whites, to enslave them, to live off them like a “domineering parasite” (40). And nothing could be more certain than its success. Throughout history, stronger races have conquered weaker ones. Didn't the Normans of yore cross the oceans to do it (41)? And didn't Europeans colonize Brazil?¹⁵ Now it is their turn to be colonized. They will prove incapable of resisting more perfect and more powerful creatures: the masses make up a “stupid herd” (29) while the parasitic dominant classes—to which the protagonist belongs—lack energy, courage, will (30, 39, 41).¹⁶ The conquest will soon be completed. A new historical era is beginning. Indeed, the bizarre fact that there are two diary entries for August 19—the date on which the protagonist fails to see his image in the mirror and that on which he “sees” the Horla's imminent victory—suggests, beyond his growing aphasic difficulties,¹⁷ the start of a new calendar. The reign of the Horla is coming.

Sometimes, of course, the dog bites his master; the servant murders his lord; the slave rebels and strangles his owner. That is the way things are, the law of enslavement and servitude (42, 44). Perhaps the protagonist too can eliminate his tamer. If the Horla were in him, he would have to kill himself. But with the Horla “out there,” the situation is different. Yet the plan he carries out may have failed and the creature may well have escaped the fire. Besides, even if the plan was successful, are there not countless other Horlas already on the rampage? Death is the only way out. The inside and the outside must become one and disappear.

Notes

1. Guy de Maupassant, “Le Horla” in Le Horla, ed. Philippe Bonnefis (Paris: Livre de Poche, 1984) 19-50. The text of the entire collection is based on the original Ollendorf edition of 1887. I have profited a great deal from Bonnefis's preface, commentaries, and notes. All my references are to his edition and all the translations are mine.

2. In the first and much shorter version of “Le Horla,” originally published in Gil Blas on October 26, 1886, the nameless protagonist is forty-two years old. See Guy de Maupassant, “Le Horla” in Le Horla et autres contes cruels et fantastiques, ed. Marie-Claire Bancquart (Paris: Bordas, 1989) 410.

3. In the first version of the story, the thinness—rather than pallor—of both master and servant is emphasized. See “Le Horla” in Le Horla et autres contes cruels et fantastiques 411 and 413.

4. See Mary Donaldson-Evans's fine discussion in her A Woman's Revenge: The Chronology of Dispossession in Maupassant's Fiction. French Forum Monographs 64 (Lexington, KY: French Forum, 1986) 133-38. See also Bonnefis's comments in Le Horla 7-8, 189, and 203-04.

5. These semantic fields play an important role in the Maupassant corpus. See, for instance, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Maupassant conteur fantastique (Paris: Minard, 1976); Philippe Bonnefis, Comme Maupassant (Lille: PU de Lille, 1981); Alain Buisine, “Tel Fils, quel père?” in Le Naturalisme, ed. Pierre Cogny (Paris: Union Générale d'Editions, 1978) 317-37; Mary Donaldson-Evans, A Woman's Revenge; and Armand Lanoux, Maupassant le bel-ami (Paris: Fayard, 1967). On Maupassant, see also André Vial, Maupassant et l'art du roman (Paris: Nizet, 1954).

6. In the context of the tale, “Alexandre Dumas fils” is a most evocative name: Alexandre r conqueror; Dumas r from the house!

7. Max Milner, La Fantasmagorie (Paris: PUF, 1982) 113. Note that, in the manuscript, Maupassant at first writes: “my house where I was born.” See Le Horla et autres contes cruels et fantastiques 579.

8. On this subject, see Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuillemier's interesting “La Lettre brûlée (écriture et folie dans ‘Le Horla’)” in Le Naturalisme 349-60.

9. According to the manuscript, Maupassant initially thought of having Mme Sablé invite her cousin, two young women and their husbands, and Dr. Parent. There would have then been three women and four men instead of two. See Le Horla et autres contes cruels et fantastiques 588.

10. The episode makes up the longest entry in the diary.

11. In the diary's first entry, the protagonist even salutes a blue, white and red landscape.

12. In the first version of “Le Horla,” the protagonist says: “One evening, I placed next to the carafe a bottle of old Bordeaux, a cup of milk, which I abhor, and chocolate cake, which I adore.” See Le Horla et autres contes cruels et fantastiques 413-14.

13. If the published text speaks of a “supernatural race” (40), the manuscript speaks of a “foreign race.” See Le Horla et autres contes cruels et fantastiques 596. Note that racism is an important ingredient of (most) vampire stories.

14. Interestingly, Brazil was one of the very first countries to be colonized after the “discovery” of the New World.

15. The nineteenth century, which is the century of Darwin and Spencer, is also a period of intense colonialist activity. In the 1880s and for France, one can mention Tunisia, Madagascar, and the Tonkin as well as a significant expansion in Black Africa.

16. Bonnefis notes that, during the fin de siècle, the notion that “we are beings without will” was quite common. See Le Horla 204-05.

17. Aphasia is referred to on 38, and on 40, the protagonist wants to say “To the station!” but says “To the house!” instead.