also, and, seated motionless at his side, gazed at
him with its threatening countenance. He suffered
from terrible headaches, followed by nights of insomnia.
He had nervous attacks, which he soothed with narcotics
and anesthetics, which he used freely. His sight,
which had troubled him at intervals, became affected,
and a celebrated oculist spoke of abnormality, asymmetry
of the pupils. The famous young man trembled
in secret and was haunted by all kinds of terrors.
The reader is charmed at the saneness of this revived
art and yet, here and there, he is surprised to discover,
amid descriptions of nature that are full of humanity,
disquieting flights towards the supernatural, distressing
conjurations, veiled at first, of the most commonplace,
the most vertiginous shuddering fits of fear, as old
as the world and as eternal as the unknown. But,
instead of being alarmed, he thinks that the author
must be gifted with infallible intuition to follow
out thus the taints in his characters, even through
their most dangerous mazes. The reader does not
know that these hallucinations which he describes so
minutely were experienced by Maupassant himself; he
does not know that the fear is in himself, the anguish
of fear “which is not caused by the presence
of danger, or of inevitable death, but by certain abnormal
conditions, by certain mysterious influences in presence
of vague dangers,” the “fear of fear,
the dread of that horrible sensation of incomprehensible
terror.”
How can one explain these physical sufferings and
this morbid distress that were known for some time
to his intimates alone? Alas! the explanation
is only too simple. All his life, consciously
or unconsciously, Maupassant fought this malady, hidden
as yet, which was latent in him.
As his malady began to take a more definite form,
he turned his steps towards the south, only visiting
Paris to see his physicians and publishers. In
the old port of Antibes beyond the causeway of Cannes,
his yacht, Bel Ami, which he cherished as a brother,
lay at anchor and awaited him. He took it to
the white cities of the Genoese Gulf, towards the
palm trees of Hyeres, or the red bay trees of Antheor.
After several tragic weeks in which, from instinct,
he made a desperate fight, on the 1st of January,
1892, he felt he was hopelessly vanquished, and in
a moment of supreme clearness of intellect, like Gerard
de Nerval, he attempted suicide. Less fortunate
than the author of Sylvia, he was unsuccessful.
But his mind, henceforth “indifferent to all
unhappiness,” had entered into eternal darkness.
He was taken back to Paris and placed in Dr. Meuriot’s
sanatorium, where, after eighteen months of mechanical
existence, the “meteor” quietly passed
away.
