The Signal - Guy de Maupassant

The petite marchioness of Rennedon was still asleep in her snug and scented bedroom. In her big, soft, low bed, under cambric fine as lace, light and caressing as a kiss, she was lying alone and peaceful, deep and happy in a divorcée’s sleep.

Voices woke her, raised in the little blue drawing-room, and she recognized her dear friend, the petite baroness of Grangerie, arguing with the chambermaid, who was barring the door of her mistress. So the petite marchioness rose, drew the bolts, turned the lock, opened the door, and pushed her head through, just her blonde head, half-hidden under a cloud of hair.

‘What’s going on?’ she asked. ‘Why are you here so early? It’s not even nine o’clock!’

The petite baroness, pale, nervous, upset, replied:

‘I must speak to you. A dreadful thing has happened.’

‘Well, come in, then, ma chérie.’

The baroness entered, the two women embraced, and the petite marchioness got back into bed while the chambermaid opened the windows, letting in air and light. When the maid had left, Madame de Rennedon said:

‘Go on, then, tell me what’s happened.’

Madame Grangerie started to cry, shedding those lovely transparent tears that make women even more attractive. She stammered, careful not to rub her eyes in case they reddened: ‘Oh! ma chère, it’s dreadful, dreadful, what’s happened to me! I didn’t sleep a minute last night, not a minute, you know, not a single minute. Look, feel my heart, see how it’s beating.’

And, taking her friend’s hand, she pressed it to her breast, that round firm shield of a woman’s heart, so satisfying to men that they often don’t bother with what’s beneath it. And yes, her heart was beating very hard. The baroness began to tell her story:

It happened yesterday... about four o’clock... or half past four, I can’t be sure. You know my flat well, you know that my little drawing-room, where I always sit, overlooks the Rue Saint-Lazare from the first floor. And you know how I love to sit at the window and watch the world go by. It’s so gay, the district around the station, so bustling, so alive... And I love that! Well, yesterday, I was sitting on the little chair that I’ve had put in the window-recess. The window was open and I was letting my thoughts wander, just enjoying the fresh air. You’ll remember how fine it was, yesterday!

Suddenly I notice that, on the other side of the street, there’s another woman at her window, a woman in red. I was in mauve myself, you know, wearing my pretty mauve dress. I didn’t know this woman, some new tenant, only there a month, and because it’s rained for a month, I hadn’t caught a glimpse of her before. But I realized suddenly that she was a tart. At first I was disgusted and shocked that she was there at her window like me, and then, bit by bit, I found it amusing to watch her. She was leaning on her elbows, watching out for men, and men were looking up at her, all or almost all of them. You’d have said that they were alerted by something as they approached the house, that they smelt something the way dogs smell game, because they raised their heads suddenly and very quickly exchanged a glance with her, like a kind of Masonic question-and-answer.

Her glance said: ‘Do you want it?’

Theirs answered: ‘Too busy!’ or: ‘Another time!’ or: ‘No money!’ or: ‘How dare you, you hussy!’ It was the eyes of respectable family men, making that last reply.

Well, you can’t imagine how droll it was to watch her having her fun, or rather plying her trade! Sometimes she suddenly closed the window and I saw a man going in through the door. She had reeled him in, that one, like an angler taking a fish. Then I started to check my watch. They stayed from twelve to twenty minutes, never more. She really fascinated me in the end, this spider-woman. And she wasn’t bad-looking either, you know.

I asked myself, how does she make herself so easily understood, so quickly, so completely? Does she make a movement with her head or hand as she looks at them?

So I lifted my opera-glasses to see how she did it. Oh! it was quite simple: first a glance, then a smile, then a very small movement of the head that asked: ‘Do you want to come up?’ But so small, so casual, so discreet, that it took a lot of skill to carry off like that.

And I asked myself: Could I do it as well as her, that tiny jerk of the head, both challenging and charming – because it was very charming, the way she did it.

So I went to try it in front of my mirror. Ma chère, I did it better than she did, much better! I was delighted, and I returned to sit at the window.

She wasn’t hooking anybody now, the poor girl, nobody at all. No, she was having no luck at all. How terrible it must be to earn money that way! Terrible, but entertaining too, because, you know, some of them aren’t so bad, the men you see in the street.

Now all of them were passing on my side, not a single one on hers. The sun had moved, you see. They came along one after another, young men, old men, dark, fair, grey, white.

I saw some very nice ones among them, very nice ones indeed, ma chère, much better than my husband, and than yours, your ex-husband that is, since your divorce. Now you can please yourself.

Well, I said to myself, if I made the signal to them, would they understand me, even though I’m a respectable woman? And suddenly I was seized by an insane longing to make the signal, oh such a longing, like one of those pregnant women get... a terrible longing, you know, one of those longings... that you just can’t resist! I have them sometimes like that, you know. It’s so stupid, isn’t it? I think we’re very like monkeys, we women. Someone once told me – it was a doctor who said it – that a monkey’s brain is very like ours. We always have to imitate somebody. We imitate our husbands, while we love them, in the first month after the marriage, and then our lovers after that, our friends, our confessors, when they’re good ones. We adopt their ways of thinking, their ways of talking, their words, their gestures, everything. It’s stupid.

Anyway, when I’m very tempted to do something, I always do it.

So I said to myself, let’s see, I’ll try it on one man, only on one, just to see. What could happen to me, after all? Nothing! We’ll exchange a smile, and that will be it, I’ll never see him again. And if I do see him again, he’ll not recognize me, and if he does recognize me, I’ll just deny that I know him. So I start looking out for the right man. I wanted one who was good-looking, very good-looking. Suddenly I see a big fair one, a very handsome young man. You know how I like the fair ones.

I look at him. He looks at me. I smile, he smiles; I make the gesture, oh so subtly, so very subtly. He nods at once and my God, he comes straight in, ma chérie! He comes right in by the main entrance of the flats! You can’t imagine what I felt right then! I thought that I’d go crazy! Oh! what a fright! Just think, he’d speak to the servants, to Joseph, who’s completely devoted to my husband! Joseph would certainly believe that I’d known this stranger for a long time. What could I do, tell me, what could I do? And he’d be ringing the bell very shortly, in the next instant! What could I do, tell me? I thought that it would be best to run and meet him, tell him that it was a mistake, beg him to go away. He’d have pity on a woman, on a poor helpless woman! So I rushed to the door and I opened it just as he was lifting his hand to the bell. I stammered, completely beside myself: ‘Please go away, monsieur, please go away, you’ve made a big mistake, I’m a respectable woman, a married woman! It’s all a mistake, a dreadful mistake, I thought you were one of my friends, you look so much like him. Have pity on me, monsieur!’

So he bursts out laughing, ma chère, and he says:

‘Well, darling! You know, I’ve heard that one before. You’re married, so you’ll charge two louis instead of one. Don’t worry, you’ll get them. Come on, show me the way.’

And in he pushed. He closed the door, and as I stood there, terrified, in front of him, he embraced me, took me by the waist and led me back into the drawing-room, whose door I’d left open.

Once he was in, he had a look around, just like an auctioneer, and said: ‘Well, this isn’t bad, your set-up, it’s very smart. You must be short of cash at the moment to play the window game!’ And me, I started to beg again: ‘Oh! monsieur, please go away, please go away! My husband will be back soon! He’ll be back very soon, he always arrives at about this time! I swear to you that you’ve made a mistake!’

And he replied calmly: ‘Come on, beautiful, enough of that. If your husband comes back, I’ll give him hundred sous to pop across the way for a drink.’

Then he sees Raoul’s photograph on the mantelpiece and asks: ‘Is that him, then, your husband?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s him.’

‘He doesn’t look up to much. And that girl there, who is it? One of your friends?’

It was your photograph, ma chère, you know that one of you in a ball-gown. I didn’t know what I was saying any more, I just stammered, ‘Yes, it’s one of my friends.’

‘She’s very nice. You’ll have to introduce us.’

And right then the clock started to strike five o’clock, and Raoul comes back every day at half past! If he came back before the other left, well, think of it! So... so... I lost my head... completely lost it... I thought... I thought... what... what the best way... was... of... of... getting rid of him as... as quickly as possible... The sooner it was over with... you understand... and... and well... well... since he had to have it... he had to, ma chère... and he wouldn’t have left without it... Well, I... I... I bolted the door of the drawing-room... And that was it.

When she stopped speaking, the petite marchioness of Rennedon burst out laughing, laughing madly, her head buried in her pillow, making the whole bed shake. When she had recovered a little, she asked:

‘And... and... he was a good-looking lad?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then what are you complaining about?’

‘But... but... look, ma chère, it’s like this... he said... that he’d come back tomorrow... at the same time. And I’m... I’m out of my mind with worry... You’ve no idea how determined he is... and how strong-willed... So what can I do, tell me, what on earth can I do?’

The petite marchioness sat up in her bed to think it over, then she said abruptly:

‘Have him arrested.’

The petite baroness was astonished. She stammered:

‘How? What do you mean? What are you thinking of? Have him arrested? On what pretext?’

‘Oh, it’s quite simple! You go to the chief of police and tell him that some man has been following you about for three months, that he was brazen enough to come to your flat yesterday, that he threatened to come again tomorrow, so you’re asking for the protection of the law. You’ll be given two policemen to arrest him.’

‘But, ma chère, if he spills the beans...’

‘He won’t be believed, you silly thing, after you’ve got your story straight with the chief of police. You’ll be the credible one, you’re a respectable woman, without a stain on your name.’

‘Oh! I wouldn’t dare.’

‘You’ll have to, ma chère, or you’re in big trouble.’

‘But just think what he’ll do... he’ll say what I got up to... when he’s arrested.’

‘So what? You’ll have plenty of witnesses for your good character and you can get a court order against him.’

‘What kind of court order?’

‘He’ll have to pay damages. In a case like this, you have to be merciless!’

‘Oh, yes, speaking of damages.... there’s something that’s worrying me a lot.... a lot, you know... He left me... two louis... on the mantelpiece.’

‘Two louis?’

‘Yes.’

‘That was all?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s not much. I’d have been humiliated by that. Well?’

‘Well, what should I do with the money?’

The petite marchioness hesitated a few seconds, then answered in a serious voice:

‘Ma chère... You’ll have to... you’ll have to... buy a little gift for your husband... It would only be just, after what’s gone on.’

Letter From a Madman - Guy de Maupassant

 LETTER FROM A MADMAN FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE FEBRUARY 17, 1885 ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE GIL BLAS, UNDER THE PEN NAME “MAUFRIGNEUSE”

  My dear Doctor, I place myself in your hands. Do with me what you like.

I am going to tell you my state of mind very frankly, and you will judge whether it isn’t better to have me taken care of for a little while in a sanatorium, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings that are plaguing me.

Here’s the story, lengthy and precise, of the singular illness of my soul.

I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.

It was a phrase from Montesquieu that suddenly illumined my thinking. Here it is:

“One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.”

 I reflected on that for months on end, and, little by little, a strange clarity came to me, and this clarity let there be night.

In fact, our organs are the only intermediaries between the exterior world and ourselves. That is to say, the inner being, which constitutes the ego, is in contact, by means of a few nerve endings, with the exterior being, which constitutes the world.

Beyond the fact that this exterior being escapes us by its size, its lengthy existence, its countless and impenetrable properties, its origins, its future or its aims, its distant forms and its infinite manifestations, our organs provide us only with information as uncertain as it is paltry about the portion of it that we can know.

Uncertain, because it is nothing but the properties of our organs that determine for us the apparent properties of matter.

Paltry, because since our senses number only five, the field of their investigations and the nature of their revelations are both quite limited.

I will explain. The eye transmits dimensions, shapes, and colors to us. It deceives us on these three points.

It can reveal to us only objects and beings of an average dimension in relation to human size, which has led us to apply the word “large” to certain things and the word “small” to certain other things, only because the eye’s weakness does not allow it to be aware of what is too immense or too tiny for it. Hence, it knows  and sees almost nothing, and almost the entire universe remains hidden from it, the star that inhabits space as well as the microbe that inhabits a drop of water.

Even if our eye had even a hundred million times more than its normal strength, if it perceived in the air that we breathe all the races of invisible beings, and all the inhabitants of neighboring planets, there would still exist an infinite number of races of animals so small, and worlds so distant, that the eye could not see them.

All our ideas about size, then, are false, since there is no limit possible to largeness or to smallness.

Our awareness of dimensions and shapes has no absolute value, since it is determined solely by the power of the organ and in constant comparison with ourselves.

Let us add that the eye is also incapable of seeing the transparent. A flawless glass tricks it. It confuses it with the air, which it does not see either. Let us move on to color.

Color exists because our eye is constituted in such a way that it transmits to the brain, in the form of color, the various ways that bodies absorb and break down, in accordance with their chemical composition, the light rays that strike them.

The various proportions of this absorption and breaking down make up the shades of color.

Thus this organ imposes on the mind its way of seeing, or rather its arbitrary way of noting dimensions and perceiving the relationships of light with matter.

 Let us examine the sense of hearing.

Even more than with the eye, we are the playthings and dupes of this fanciful organ.

Two bodies colliding produce a certain shock in the atmosphere. This movement makes a certain tiny piece of skin vibrate in our ear, which changes immediately into a sound something that is in fact nothing but a vibration.

Nature is silent. But the eardrum possesses the miraculous property of transmitting to us all the quiverings of invisible waves in space in the form of meaning, meaning that changes depending on the number of vibrations.

This metamorphosis, which is performed by the auditory nerve over the short trajectory from the ear to the brain, has allowed us to create a strange art—music—the most poetic and precise of all the arts, vague as a dream and precise as algebra.

What shall we say of the senses of taste and smell? Would we recognize smells and the quality of various foods without the peculiar properties of the nose and the palate?

Humanity, however, could exist without the ear, without taste and smell—that is, without any notion of sound, taste, or smell.

Thus, if we had a few organs less, we would be unaware of admirable and unusual things, but if we had a few organs more, we would discover around us an infinity of other things we would never have suspected while we lacked the means to observe them.

 So we deceive ourselves when we pass judgments on the Known. We are surrounded by an unexplored unknown.

Everything is uncertain, and can be perceived in different ways.

Everything is false, everything is possible, everything is doubtful.

Let us formulate this certainty by using the old dictum: “Truth this side of the Pyrénées, error beyond.”

And let us say: Truth inside the sense organ, error outside.

Two and two no longer have to make four outside of our atmosphere.

Truth on Earth, error further away. So I conclude that the mysteries we have glimpsed—like electricity, hypnotic sleep, transmission of will, suggestion, all the magnetic phenomena—remain hidden from us, because nature has not provided us with the organ, or organs, necessary to understand them.

After I had convinced myself that everything my senses reveal to me exists only for me as I perceive it, and would be completely different for someone else differently organized, after having concluded that a differently made humanity would have about the world, about life, about everything, ideas that are absolutely opposite to our own, since the consensus of beliefs results only from the similarity of human organs, and differences of opinion come only from slight differences in the functioning of our nerve endings, I made an effort  at superhuman thought in order to get some inkling of the impenetrable universe that surrounds me.

Have I gone mad?

I told myself: “I am surrounded by unknown things.” I imagined man without ears, suspecting the existence of sound as we suspect so many hidden mysteries, man noting acoustic phenomena whose nature and provenance he cannot determine. And I grew afraid of everything around me—afraid of the air, afraid of the night. From the moment we can know almost nothing, and from the moment that everything is limitless, what remains? Does emptiness actually not exist? What does exist in this apparent emptiness?

And this confused terror of the supernatural, which has haunted mankind since the birth of the world, is legitimate, since the supernatural is nothing other than what remains veiled to us!

Then I understood terror. It seemed to me that I kept brushing against the discovery of a secret of the universe.

I tried to sharpen my organs, to excite them, to make them perceive glimpses of the invisible.

I told myself, “Everything is a being! The shout that passes into the air is an entity like an animal, since it is born, produces a movement, and is again transformed, in order to die. So the fearful mind that believes in incorporeal beings is not wrong. What are they?”

 How many men feel them, tremble at their approach, shudder at their imperceptible contact. We feel them around us, but we cannot discern them, for we do not have the eyes to see them, or specifically the unknown organ that could discover them.

Then, more than anyone else, I felt them myself, these supernatural passersby. Beings or mysteries? How can I know? I can’t say what they are, but I can always indicate their presence. And I have seen—I have seen an invisible being—as much as one can see them, these beings.

I remained motionless for entire nights, seated in front of my table, my head in my hands, thinking of that, thinking of them. Often I thought an intangible hand, or rather an ungraspable body, was lightly grazing my hair. He didn’t touch me, since it wasn’t a carnal essence, but an imponderable, unknowable essence.

One evening, I heard the floor creak behind me. It creaked in a strange way. I trembled. I turned around. I saw nothing. And I thought no more of it.

But the next day, at the same time, the same sound occurred. I was so afraid that I got up, certain, certain, certain that I was not alone in my bedroom. I could see nothing. The air was clear, transparent everywhere. My two lamps lit up all corners of the room.

The sound was not repeated, and little by little I calmed down; I remained uneasy, though, and often looked around.

 The next day I shut myself in early, looking for a way I could contrive to see the invisible being that was visiting me.

And I saw him. I almost died from the terror of it.

I had lighted all the candles on my mantelpiece and chandelier. The room was illumined as if for a celebration. Both my lamps were burning on my table.

Opposite me, my bed, an old oaken four-poster. To my right, my fireplace. To my left, the door, which I had locked shut. Behind me, a very large wardrobe with a mirror. I looked at myself in it. My eyes looked strange, and my pupils quite dilated.

Then I sat down, as I did every day.

The sound had occurred, the night before and the night before that, at 9:22. I waited. When the precise moment arrived, I perceived an indescribable sensation, as if a fluid, an irresistible fluid, had penetrated me through all the pores of my skin, drowning my soul in an atrocious, true terror. And the creaking sounded, right next to me.

I got up, turning around so quickly that I almost fell down. You could see everything there as if in full daylight, but I couldn’t see myself in the mirror! It was empty, clear, full of light. I was not inside it, and yet I was facing it. I looked at it with panic-stricken eyes. I dared not go towards it, since I knew he was between us, he, the invisible one, and he was concealing me.

I was terrified. And then I began to see myself in a mist far back in the mirror, in a mist as if through  water; and it seemed to me that this water shimmered left to right, slowly, making me more precise from second to second. It was like the end of an eclipse.

What was hiding me had no outlines, but a kind of opaque transparency that little by little became clearer.

And finally I could see myself clearly, just as I do every day when I look at myself.

I had seen it!

And I did not see it again.

But I wait for it ceaselessly, and I feel that my mind is wandering in this waiting.

I remain for hours, nights, days, weeks, in front of my mirror, waiting for him! He does not come anymore.

He has understood that I’ve seen him. But I feel that I will wait for him always, until death, that I will wait for him without rest, in front of this mirror, like a hunter lying in wait.

And, in this mirror, I am beginning to see crazy images, monsters, hideous corpses, all kinds of terrifying beasts, atrocious beings, all the unlikely visions that must haunt the minds of madmen.

That is my confession, my dear Doctor. Tell me, what should I do?

—February 17, 1885