SOURCE: "Le Merveilleux scientifique and the Fantastic," in L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. XXVIII, No. 3, Fall, 1988, pp. 9-22.

The title of my essay might have been: "Qu'est-ce qui fait travailler l'Imaginaire des lecteurs parisiens du XIX^e siècle?" I believe an evolution, both in the themes/exploration of the unconscious and in the production of the effects that make up the Fantastic can be traced through the study of the psychiatric theories and nosography of the nineteenth century. In what measure did authors have recourse to these documents, and to what extent did they furnish these writers with new effects for their tales?

In 1865, Théophile Gautier published Spirite, the last of his récits fantastiques, a genre he had practiced for some 30 years. A few months later, in the same columns where Spirite had appeared in installments, he remarked that the nerves of a 19th-century reader "sont plus éprouvés que ceux des spectateurs du 18^e siècle, et ils ont besoin, pour être ébranlés, d'un fantastique un peu moins naïf ... "

I will propose here that the new sophistication that would inspire fear in the French reader and elicit his or her credulity was to be found in science: in psychiatric case studies and theory. Psychiatric observations and treatment techniques would, throughout the 19th century, become more and more apt to furnish this new secousse for the imagination of the average reader. By the 1880's, the former occupied a large place in the popular imagination, but much earlier in the century, writers like Nodier and Gautier had begun to exploit this field.

The latter are better known for their fantastic tales based on the dream state and on other states yielding bizarre visions. In fact, many parallels can be drawn between the "dream Fantastic" and the Fantastic based on abnormal mental states. Psychiatrists (and, as I will show, writers of the tales) did not fail to see these parallels, as they studied, analyzed, and described mental illness in such a way as to communicate its dramatic/theatrical and sensational character.

The alliance between the Fantastic and the Dream narrative made the former a most appropriate genre for Romantic writers who sought to explore the dream state in depth. The famous opening words of Nerval's Aurélia, "Le Rêve est une seconde vie," have implications for not only Romanticism and the Fantastic, but also for an area psychiatry was just beginning to study in a systematic way: the (privileged) exploration of the avatars of the Self. For, if the dream is a second, alternative life, the Subject living it is not the same as the Subject of the waking existence. In fact, Nerval's phrase could serve as the title of any one of a number of books on dream and somnambulism as a second, parallel existence in the lives of various Subjects. Both realms of the psyche, the dream state and "double consciousness," will be primary fields of study for French psychiatry between 1850 and 1900. In particular, the Fantastic Being whose ego is split in two will come into prominence and elicit positive explanations in the 1840's through the 1880's with the work of Drs. Moreau (de Tours), Landouzy, Azam, Charcot, Binet, and Janet on dream, somnambulistic states, hypnotism, and partial anesthesia. Azam and Binet labelled these sorts of experiences "double conscience"; Janet, in his monumental work L'Automatisme psychologique (1887), was the first psychiatrist to show that the second of these psychic states is one that "persists underneath normal thought": this pensée automatique is "l'inconscient."

In 1838, Gautier wrote that the Fantastic tale benefited from the "scientifically grounded" ideas of Mesmerism.

Le magnétisme animal est un fait désormais acquis à la science ... . Nous sommes entourés de merveilles, de prodiges, de mystères auxquels nous ne comprenons rien ... en nous-mêmes gravitent des mondes ténébreux dont nous n'avons pas la conscience: l'infini et l'inconnu nous pressent et nous obsèdent . . .

Gautier also notes here that science has not yet found a way to apply these theories. Only three years later, a scientific application would be found in England by Braid, whose Neurypneumology or the Rationale of the Nervous Sleep Considered in Relation with Animal Magnetism was published in 1843. In 1841, while watching a magnetizer, Braid became convinced that in the "marvelous and unexplained" exploits of magnetism there existed a basis in truth. In his experiments with induced somnambulism, he found that the phenomena produced were due not to the Mesmerizer but to the patient. States, visions, and powers identical to those described as supernatural were now scientifically produced by hypnotism and studied. This capital transition from the belief that extraordinary phenomena were brought on by external forces to the belief that they were brought on by the Subject is a transition that will be more and more apparent in the Fantastic tale of the nineteenth century. (This shift, moreover, conforms to the Romantic stress on interiority.) Gautier, with his keen interest in Magnetism, must surely have heard of Braid's work. In fact, a scientific article on hypnotism appeared in La Presse during the years Gautier was writing his column on the Beaux-Arts and on Theater for that newspaper.

Before examining Gautier's texts, a brief look at a short story by the author of the paradigmatic fantastic dream narrative, Smarra, will be instructive. Nodier presents the hero of "Jean-François les bas-bleus" (1832) as mad from the outset: "En 1793, il y avait à Besançon un idiot, un monomane, un fou . . ." The scientific term, monomane, stands out from the other appellations; it had been studied five years earlier by Dr. Etienne Esquirol ("Note sur la monomanie homicide," 1827), and was later assimilated with hysteria. It consists of an idée fixe, a mania, which creates a psychic cleavage in the Subject. The way Nodier describes the hero is in perfect accordance with psychiatric observations of the time. Jean-Francois leads a "double life"; because he is able to discuss moral and scientific questions with astonishing intellect, everyday topics cause his words to tumble out in chaos. This is due to the fact that "l'altération d'esprit [qu'il] manifeste dans les opérations les plus communes de son jugement peut bien ne pas être étendue aux propriétés de sa mémoire .. . Je serais bien étonné si cela ne s'observait pas dans la plupart des fous . . ." The supernatural element in the text also turns on a medical symptom (in hysteria), one that had been previously observed with wonderment in somnambulists: la double vue, the capability of seeing, hearing or sensing what others could not, sometimes at an "impossible" distance. A character in the tale asks if Jean-François is "un somnambule, un convulsionnaire, un élève de Mesmer. . . ? —Quelque chose de pareil .. . un maniaque inoffensif, un pauvre fou . . ." is the reply.

If Jean-François' vision is due to hyperthesia, how does that enhance the "effet fantastique"? Nodier's introduction to the tale answers that question and allows us to understand better why he might abandon the dream narrative for the "scientific fantastic." "Le fantastique est un peu passé de mode, et il n'y a pas de mal. L'imagination abuse trop facilement des ressources faciles; . . . La première condition essentielle pour écrire une bonne histoire fantastique, ce serait d'y croire fermement, et personne ne croit à ce qu'il invente." (Except madmen, one might add.) What better way to fulfill that essential condition than to draw on scientific fact? Gautier too felt that belief in one's own textual universe was a prerequisite for the writer of the fantastic tale.

Gautier was not a casual reader of psychiatric studies. As I have already suggested, he most certainly read the articles on psychiatry that appeared in the newspapers he himself regularly contributed to, and under the rubric Variétés one could read such articles as "Hygiène publique" where hysteria, hypochondria, convulsions and catalepsy were discussed in terms of the temporary appearance of death they could cause (La Charte de 1830, 12 November 1837). At the end of "Onuphrius," Gautier refers to a document that surely could not have been read by many people outside the field: Dr. Etienne Esquirol's "Mémoire statistique de la maison royale de Charenton, 1829." Dr. Moreau (de Tours), Esquirol's student, appears as a character at the beginning of Gautier's "Le Club des hachichins" (1846). But, even more interesting than the fact that Gautier incorporates Moreau in his tale (the doctor did in fact frequent these sessions at the Hôtel Pimodan) is the fact that the psychiatrist incorporated in its quasi-entirety a text of Gautier' s, "Le Hachich," in his own work: Du hachisch et de l'aliénation mentale (Paris, 1845). The inverse of my study would be to ask how much the literary fantastic fed the imagination of scientists of the period. Well before Freud, the example of Moreau demonstrates that psychiatrists drew inspiration from literature. The reciprocity involved may have worked in the following way: I suspect that specific psychiatric documents available to Nodier and Gautier in the 1820's and 1830's informed their tales, which in turn led psychiatrists like Moreau and Azam to look at symptoms in a particular way. This remains to be confirmed by further research.

Many of Gautier's fantastic tales deal with the cleavage or split in the Self. Of thirteen texts, six focus on this problem, and in another four it is implied by the depiction of the hero becoming "other" in an oneiric or drug-inspired hallucinatory state. Even in the texts that do not explicitly deal with this split, one can uncover a character who functions as the hero's Double. It is evident, then, that the problem of the Self and its others is of central importance to the creation of Gautier's Fantastic. The six texts that focus on this theme are: "Onuphrius" (1832), "La Morte amoureuse" (1836), "Le Chevalier double" (1840), "Deux acteurs pour un rôle" (1841), Avatar and Jettatura (1856).

In "Le Chevalier double," the hero's personality is radically split between good and evil. The style imitates an oral tale, legend or ballad, and relies on repetition and oxymoron. It is largely these figures that create an atmosphere of strangeness. At the same time, repetition expresses doubling, while oxymorons express the quality of radical difference united in the same being. Ambivalence and hesitation are produced in the reader by the use of oxymorons (e. g., "ange tombé," "douce . . . terreur," "grâce scélérate"), which also manage to express the indicible by an "impossible" concept or image. We see that Gautier's figurai language is chosen to convey simultaneously the psychological dimension of the tale and the elements that make up the Fantastic (hesitation, strangeness, the inexpressible). The "blonde Edwige" has magically been impregnated by a mysterious "maître chanteur" visiting the château, and the child born of this union will be a baffling reunion of contradictions. Lending the Subject's duality a seemingly unpsychological cause, the "enfant étrange" is born of a stranger. That is, the strange, the Fantastic comes from someplace outside the Self, from a supernatural force and not from the Subject's psyche. Yet the way the mysterious "stranger" affects the Subject conforms to a psychological interpretation: thanks to the act of impregnation, this strangeness is put into the very fiber of the Subject's being. His contradictions will only be resolved in the dénouement when the psychic cleavage is concretized and the chevalier does bloody battle to the death with his evil side. "Chose étrange, Oluf sentait les coups qu'il portait au chevalier inconnu. . . . Singulier duel [note the subtlety of the oxymoron], où le vainqueur souffrait autant que le vaincu, où donner et recevoir était une chose indifférente." Concretization is a characteristic of the Marvelous and the Fantastic. It would seem to negate the psychological interpretation, yet it is in harmony with the radical split in the Subject, for concretization is a frequent symptom of schizophrenia (not only do mental images become concrete, but metaphors are taken literally). Finally, Gautier ends the tale with a moral: ".. . vous qui avez le malheur d'être double, combattez bravement . . . l'adversaire intérieur, le méchant chevalier." Marc Eigeldinger notes that this moral (added contrary to Gautier's habit) "n'ajoute rien au fantastique du dédoublement, mais tend plutôt à en réduire la portée." Of course, this judgment entirely overlooks a possible evolution in the genre of an emphasis laid upon purely psychological phenomena. It should not pass unnoticed that the narrator addresses the reader directly here. This is not a frequent occurrence in Gautier's contes fantastiques but, when it is present, it often serves to implicate the reader in the psychological drama of the hero. In this tale, then, one sees a recourse to effects that equally generate the supernatural and the psychological. Like the chevalier, the text is double ("supernatural fantastic" or "scientific fantastic") and allows for a double reading . . . until le mot de la fin.

Romuald, the priest in "La Morte amoureuse," for three years led a nocturnal existence entirely different than that of his chaste, diurnal life. "La nuit, dès que j'avais fermé les yeux, je devenais un jeune seigneur, fin connaisseur en femmes, .. . et lorsqu'au lever de l'aube je me réveillais, il me semblait au contraire que je m'endormais et que je rêvais que j'étais prêtre." His nocturnal existence is, of course, a realization of intense erotic desire: "j'ai aimé . . . d'un amour insensé et furieux, si violent queje suis étonné qu'il n'ait pas fait éclater mon cœur. Ah! quelles nuits! quelles nuits!"

After the first nocturnal experience with the lovely, if dead, Clarimonde, the priest's first interpretation is that he is "le jouet d'une illusion magique," but the palpable reality of the events makes him reject that idea. Nor does he believe that he was dreaming, for his governess was a witness to his being sent for at the beginning of the strange adventure (he may well have been sent for; that would not negate the possibility that the later events were imagined by him). One fact insistently indicates, however, the unreal nature of the experience: the château he was brought to does not correspond to any known château in the vicinity. Of a later episode, Romuald says: 'Toujours est-il que j'étais ou du moins je croyais être à Venise; je n'ai pu encore bien démêler ce qu'il y avait d'illusion et de réalité dans cette bizarre aventure." These notions all conform to contemporary psychiatric observations of hallucination, illusion, and somnambulism.

With the observation of somnambulism, and then with artificially induced somnambulism, the history of psychiatry's study of the split Subject begins. Thus it should be noted that on the first page of "La Morte amoureuse," Gautier specifically labels the priest's second life "cette vie somnambulique" rather than attributing its cause to possession or to the intervention of some other supernatural force. The possibility that his vampire-lover Clarimonde really does meet him each night is never fully discounted, but what I am interested in exploring is the knowledgeable way Gautier plays with the sensations of illusion and reality in somnambulism.

The "oldest psychological theory of hallucination" is credited to Dr. Etienne Esquirol. "Des Hallucinations des aliénés," a report made to l'Académie des Sciences, dates from 1817. A related study entitled "Des Illusions chez des aliénés" was published in 1832; in it Esquirol defines the difference between hallucination and illusion. In the former, the Subject thinks he sees, tastes, or hears an object that is not present. This involves a highly energetic intellectual activity acting on sensations perceived at a prior moment. In the latter, on the contrary, sensations actually received at the present moment solicit the brain's activity; but the brain is under the influence of obsessive ideas and passions. These sensations can be external or internal. (Hypochondriacs, for example, erroneously interpret internal sensations.) Esquirol reiterates at the conclusion of the treatise (after presenting nine observations that confirm this notion) that "les illusions prennent le caractère des passions et des idées qui dominent l'aliéné." This is certainly the case with Romuald. ("Je demeurai seul et sans autre appui que moi-même. La pensée de Clarimonde recommença à m'obséder . . .") In fact, a visual illusion immediately follows: "un soir . . . il me sembla voir à travers la charmille une forme de femme qui suivait tous mes mouvements, et entre les feuilles étinceler les deux prunelles vert de mer; mais ce n'était qu'une illusion . . . il n'y avait personne." The priest's recounting of his experience displays another parallel with Esquirol's study: despite a glaring fact that cannot be explained away (such as the absence of the château), people experiencing illusions stubbornly maintain their belief in the reality of the illusion. Finally, Esquirol's student, Moreau, observed that the great majority of mental patients who hallucinate claim, "je n'ai pas rêvé ce que je vous dis là." He also believes that hallucinations have their origin in dreams. This would "explain"/be in accordance with the fantastic quality of what Romuald calls his somnambulistic life: part dream, part hallucination.

The priest's visit to Clarimonde's deathbed is written in such a way as to suggest the event is a mental illusion, one produced by excessive passion:

Cette pâle lueur avait plutôt l'air d'un demi-jour. .. . Il me sembla qu'on avait soupiré derrière moi. . . . C'était l'écho.... 'Je suis bien fou de me désoler et de m'agiter ainsi.' ... et je regardai avec un redoublement d'attention l'objet de mon incertitude. .. . Navré de douleur, éperdu de joie, frissonnant de crainte et de plaisir . . .

he removes the transparent mortuary drape and "sees" Clarimonde and, as the night advances, places a kiss on her lips, which respond to his. Lastly, she speaks to him. He then faints on her breast. Of course, one is free to imagine Romuald fainting at an earlier moment, thereby placing the final events more emphatically yet in the camp of dream/hallucination.

These somnambulistic experiences destabilize Romuald's identity. The shifts in Romuald's personality (normally so "pious and calm," he is now "agitated like a wild beast") and the transformations in his identity (from the country priest "of a little village," he metamorphoses into "il signor Romualdo, amant en titre de Clarimonde") .. . are antithetical. As he notes, "Je n'étais plus le même, et je ne me reconnus pas"; ".. . ma nature s'est en quelque sorte dédoublée, et il y eut en moi deux hommes dont l'un ne connaissait pas l'autre." Perhaps these phrases sounded a little too clearly grounded in psychiatry to Gautier himself (all of these alterations of the personality can be found in descriptions of delirium, in particular, in hysteria and delusions of grandeur) for he felt obliged to refute a psychiatric interpretation immediately after the passages cited:

Malgré l'étrangeté de cette position, je ne crois pas avoir un seul instant touché à la folie. J'ai toujours conservé très nettes les perceptions de mes deux existences. Seulement, il y avait un fait absurde que je ne pouvais pas m'expliquer: c'est que le sentiment du même moi existait dans deux hommes si différents. C'était une anomalie dont je ne me rendais pas compte . . .

Yet this very apologia conforms closely to observations made by Moreau: "Dans les songes, les perceptions se retracent si vivement qu'au réveil on a quelquefois de la peine à reconnaître son erreur. Voilà certainement un moment de folie." (Here he is quoting Condillac.) While treating a 21-year-old laborer of humble birth who at the same time believed himself to be the King's son, Moreau asks him, "On ne peut pas être deux personnes différentes .. . ?" The young man replies, "Cela me paraît juste. Tout de même; j'ai été .. . et je suis actuellement (scieur et fils du Roi)." The psychiatrist concludes: "Il est clair qu'il y a ici plus d'une conviction ordinaire." Conclusion: "il faut donc reconnaître deux êtres en lui, deux personnalités . . . et ces deux êtres ne peuvent être que ceux de la veille et du rêve. . . . De l'accouplement hétérogène de ces deux êtres résulte l'homme aliéné." This doubleness, handled in entirely new ways, will resurface in Avatar and Iettatura 20 years later: it is an obsessional motif in Gautier's Fantastic.

The fusion or confusion between dreaming and waking states (in Romuald and in Moreau's patients) is a frequent element in the Fantastic and it is often used by Gautier to create ambiguity. But the "dream fantastic" can also be the "scientific fantastic." The 1855 study from which I have been quoting, Moreau's De l'identité du rêve et de la folie, is of exceptional interest for us here. He begins by referring back to an 1845 study where he noted that under the influence of hachich "un véritable état de rêve, mais de rêve sans sommeil" comes about. Sleep and wakefulness are so confused that it is impossible to distinguish between them. "De ce fait. . . nous avons déduit la nature réelle de la folie." Moreover, for Moreau, this fact explains and encompasses all the phenomena of madness. Adhering to the anonymous dictum that "la folie est le rêve de l'homme éveillé," he goes on to examine point for point "l'identité absolue au point de vue psychique entre l'état de rêve et la folie." The elements examined are: the involuntary nature of both states, the transformation of the self, the advent of another personality, the loss of intellectual spontaneity, and a weakening of the power to link and direct one's ideas. Finally, the dream "fait irruption dans la vie de la veille . . . comme cela a lieu dans la folie." Moreau then quotes from earlier studies that (implicitly or explicitly) draw an analogy between dreams and madness: for example, Deslasiauve (1846), Condillac, and Virey. These ideas lend themselves extraordinarily well to the development of the scientifically-grounded Fantastic. The problematic of dream/reality (for example, in "Omphale") is intensified to dream = madness/reality.

The notions that dream and madness are identical in nature, and that hallucinations have their origin in dreams bring the nineteenth-century reader closer and closer to the uneasy apprehension that the distance to travel between the quotidian commonplace of dream and the frightening experience of hallucination and insanity is a short one indeed. What is more, Dr. Lelut in 1846 wrote that "L'hallucination ne devra presque paraître, et n'est presque pas autre chose que le résultat un peu forcé d'un acte normal de l'intelligence, le plus haut degré de la transformation sensoriale de l'idée" (cited by Dheur). Many psychiatrists agreed that there was no absolute difference in nature between hallucination and other mental representations. Finally, the frequency of hallucinations in hypnogogic states (the period between waking and dreaming) is seen as a sign of the invasion of madness. "Excitable" Subjects in particular easily move from hypnogogic hallucinations to hallucinating at other times, for example, "dès que le malade ferme les yeux, ou encore dans l'obscurité." Conditions as trivial as a tendency to congestion, lack of sleep, arduous work, and circulatory problems can produce hallucinations (hypnogogic and those in delirium). Everyone, it would seem, is more than a little susceptible to hallucination, illusion, and madness. So, in addition to the traditional epistemological questions posed by the Fantastic, the "scientific fantastic" jars readers ontologically, shaking every assumption about categories of reality and subjective coherence. If Gautier addresses the reader directly in tales involving split identity in contrast to his other tales, it is to draw the reader more surely into this ontological undecidability.

Before psychoanalysis, many a reader sensed that the monstrous creatures in the Fantastic tale sprang from the psyche. The unknown inside oneself, then, is as frightening and dangerous as that outside the self. One may conjecture that this intuition was strongly reinforced by the findings of Braid and Azam in the 1840's. By 1870, Charcot's theory and description of the attack of Grande Hystérie once and for all transformed the supernatural into the natural (the fantastic exploits of the convulsionnaires, and instances of demoniacal possession were transformed by positivism into scientifically demonstrable phenomena). Dr. Azam wrote in 1860 that "le merveilleux descendra ainsi du piédestal... et beaucoup de ces phénomènes renieront dans la science, d'où ils n'auront jamais dû sortir." His 1888 article, however, "Ce qu'il faut penser du Merveilleux," leads us to think otherwise.

On nous raconte aujourd'hui, surtout depuis quelques années, des choses si extraordinaires, si merveilleuses . . .J'ai quelque expérience de ce sujet; une carrière médicale déjà longue... Aujourd'hui le somnambulisme provoqué est [la chose] qui passionne le plus. Cette curiosité scientifique a deux sortes de partisans: ceux qui l'étudient sérieusement... et les 'gens du monde.' Ces derniers se passionnent pour les phénomènes de l'hypnose, qui touchent au merveilleux. . . . [Le] somnambule [est] un personnage qui a accès au fantastique. . . . Tous ignorent que si la science sérieuse étudie le merveilleux dans un but élevé, elle a un méthode précise d'observation et qu'elle sait se garer des tromperies. [Car] ces 'sujets' . . . sont des prodiges de finesse et de rouerie, [il est facile] d'être leur dupe.

Not all psychiatrists were that optimistic about triumphing over these patients who were "masters of deception," and whose madness was often "brought on by" the cult of the supernatural. Studying them in order to separate clearly the supernatural from mental illness is fraught with difficulty, particularly when the methods of science drew from the panoply of the occult/spiritual realm: the submission of the Subject's will to a master/doctor, the gaze fixed on an object to induce trance (as with yogis or convulsionarles), the resemblance of Charcot's exhibitions of hysterical patients at the Salpêtrière to exhibitions of somnambulists by charlatans. And sometimes the same patients went from treatment for hysteria at that hospital to public performance in the streets of Paris!

It should be clear from the above that the grounding of science in logic and objectivity—one which would seem far removed from the basis of the Romantic Fantastic in the subjective imagination—is illusory. This false polarity is complicated by the fact that psychiatry, in studying the illogical and subjective, suffers "contamination" from its object. Nineteenth-century psychiatry is at times almost as much a product of the Imaginary as is the Fantastic.

In 1855, Moreau wrote, "nous n'en savons pas le premier mot (de ce que c'est qu'un rêve, de ce que sont les pouvoirs intellectuels). C'est une question insoluble." Yet he had just written a 50-page study on the subject! And, toward the end of that study:

Comme on le voit, la science des maladies mentales n'a aucun fondement réel, car elle ne repose que sur des fictions, des impossibilités psychologiques, ou sur des faits imparfaitement observés . . . Ces maladies .. . ont un côté merveilleux qui, au premier aspect, excite l'étonnement et déroute l'observateur (De l'identité du rêve et de la folie).

Despite and because of his recourse to the terms "fiction," "no basis in reality," and "impossibilities"—terms which suit not only Moreau the psychiatrist, but also Moreau the reader and actor in the Fantastic tale of the period—his appraisal is more realistic than Azam's. Things were not much improved at the end of the century. Dheur wrote in 1899 that "le savant lui-même n'a pas su encore s'affranchir complètement des idées que lui ont légué [sic] les générations passées et en face d'un problème difficile, il semble à tous moments que l'on va voir sortir de ses lèvres le mot mystère." The Supernatural is always returning to haunt Science. Quoting another alléniste: "il y a des phénomènes qu'il faut se contenter de constater, sans en pénétrer le mécanisme, et malheureusement l'hallucination est de ce nombre."

Guy de Maupassant's assessment of Charcot in the 1882 tale "Magnétisme" recapitulates the above problems: "Charcot... me fait l'effet de ces conteurs dans le genre d'Edgar Poe, qui finissent par devenir fous à force de réfléchir à d'étranges cas de folie. Il a constaté des phénomènes nerveux inexpliqués et encore inexplicables. . . ." Nonetheless, he attended the doctor's lessons for two years, absorbed current theory on hysterical symptoms, and became the unsurpassed practitioner of the Fantastic as psychological delirium. Whereas science is often used in the tales in apparent opposition to the supernatural, it is in fact their similarities that fascinate de Maupassant. And therein lies the real terror of his tales. In "Lui," the hero "ne croi[t] pas au surnaturel." "Eh bien! j'ai peur de moi! j'ai peur de la peur; peur des spasmes de mon esprit qui s'affole . . . de ma raison qui m'échappe." And at the tale's conclusion: "J'avais peur de le revoir, lui. Non pas peur de lui, non pas peur de sa présence à laquelle je ne croyais point, mais j'avais peur d'un trouble nouveau de mes yeux, peur de l'hallucination, peur de l'épouvante qui me saisirait" (Contes et nouvelles). Here is the proof that what creates the Fantastic, what is indeed terrible at the present moment, is not the phantom, the supernatural being, but rather the experience of mental alienation, the psychic phenomena that had been so meticulously documented—but that remained to be explained—by medicine.

In 1887, Maupassant wrote: "Les fous m'attirent. Ces genslà vivent dans un pays mystérieux de songes bizarres, dans ce nuage impénétrable de la démence. . . ."As reader of psychiatric observations, and as someone who himself experienced madness beginning in 1883, he was able to re-create the very language of delirium (in "La Nuit" and "Le Horla," 1887). Thus, the "impenetrable cloud of madness" was made accessible in an immediate and terrifying way to the readers of his tales.

Even a doctor as confident as Azam recognized in 1890 that contemporary science was quite imperfect: "Nos descendants ne hausserontils leurs épaules à leur tour, en un temps où .. . on aura des explications que nous ne pouvons donner aujourd'hui et où ce qui nous étonne n'étonnera plus personne?"

Of course, on the day that scientific observations no longer are cause for astonishment and wonder, they will no longer furnish fodder for the Fantastic. For the psychiatrist of the nineteenth century, the phenomena under study were perceived as so extraordinary as to elicit comparisons with the supernatural. Indeed, psychiatry's fascination with the more spectacular aspects of madness seems at times to foster a desire to play up these parallels. For the reader of the nineteenth century, though, the "natural" was in fact more terrifying than the supernatural, for the scientifically observable events of mental illness were irrefutably real, struck closer to home and, despite the efforts of science, remained mysterious, impenetrable and . . . fantastic.