Now I know, I understand. The reign of man is at an end.
He is here, whom the dawning fears of primitive peoples taught them to dread. He who was exorcised by troubled priests, evoked in the darkness of night by wizards who yet never saw him materialise, to whom the foreboding vision of the masters who have passed through this world lent all the monstrous or gracious forms of gnomes, spirits, jinns, fairies and hobgoblins. Primitive terror visualised him in the crudest forms; later wiser men have seen him more clearly. Mesmer foresaw him, and it is ten years since doctors made the most exact inquiries into the nature of his power, even before he exercised it himself. They have been making a plaything of this weapon of the new God, this imposition of a mysterious will on the enslaved soul of man. They called it magnetism, hypnotism, suggestion … anything you like. I have seen them amusing themselves with this horrible power like foolish children. Woe to us! Cursed is man! He is here … the … the … what is his name? … the … it seems as if he were shouting his name in my ear and I cannot hear it … the … yes … he is shouting it. … I am listening. … I can’t hear … again, tell me again … the … Horla. … I heard … the Horla … it is he … the Horla … he is here!
Oh, the vulture has been used to eat the dove, the wolf to eat the sheep; the lion to devour the sharp-horned buffalo; man to kill the lion with arrow, spear and gun; but the Horla is going to make of man what we have made of the horse and the cow: his thing, his servant and his food, by the mere force of his will. Woe to us!
But sometimes the beast rebels and kills his tamer … I too want … I could … but I must know him, touch him, see him. Scientists say that the eye of the beast is not like ours and does not see as ours does. … And my eye fails to show me this newcomer who is oppressing me.
Why? Oh, the words of the monk of Mont-Saint Michel come to my mind: “Do we see the hundred thousandth part of all that exists? Think, there’s the wind, the greatest force in nature, which throws down men, shatters buildings, uproots trees, stirs up the sea into watery mountains, destroys cliffs and tosses the tall ships against the shore, the wind that kills, whistles, groans, roars—have you seen it, can you see it? Nevertheless, it exists.”
And I considered further: my eye is so weak, so imperfect, that it does not distinguish even solid bodies that have the transparency of glass. If a looking-glass that has no foil backing bars my path, I hurl myself against it as a bird that has got into a room breaks its head on the windowpane. How many other things deceive and mislead my eye? Then what is there to be surprised at in its failure to see a new body that offers no resistance to the passage of light?
A new being! why not? He must assuredly come! why should we be the last? Why is he not seen of our eyes as are all the beings created before us? Because his form is nearer perfection, his body finer and completer than ours—ours, which is so weak, so clumsily conceived, encumbered by organs always tired, always breaking down like a too complex mechanism, which lives like a vegetable or a beast, drawing its substance with difficulty from the air, the herbs of the field and meat, a living machine subject to sickness, deformity and corruption, drawing its breath in pain, ill-regulated, simple and fantastic, ingeniously ill-made, clumsily and delicately erected, the mere rough sketch of a being who could become intelligent and noble.
There have been so few kinds created in the world, from the bivalve to man. Why not one more, when we reach the end of the period of time that separates each successive appearance of a species from that which appeared before it?
Why not one more? Why not also new kinds of trees bearing monstrous flowers, blazing with colour and filling all the countryside with their perfume? Why not other elements than fire, air, earth and water? There are four, only four sources of our being! What a pity! Why not forty, four hundred, four thousand? How poor, niggardly and brutish is life! grudgingly given, meanly conceived, stupidly executed. Consider the grace of the elephant, the hippopotamus! The elegance of the camel!
You bid me consider the butterfly! a winged flower! I can imagine one vast as a hundred worlds, with wings for whose shape, beauty, colour, and sweep I cannot find any words. But I see it … it goes from star to star, refreshing and perfuming them with the soft, gracious wind of its passing. And the people of the upper air watch it pass, in an ecstasy of joy!
What is the matter with me? It is he, he, the Horla, who is haunting me, filling my head with these absurdities! He is in me, he has become my soul; I will kill him.
August 19. I will kill him. I have seen him! I was sitting at my table yesterday evening, making a great show of being very absorbed in writing. I knew quite well that he would come and prowl round me, very close to me, so close that I might be able to touch him, seize him, perhaps? And then! … then, I should be filled with the strength of desperation; I should have hands, knees, chest, face, teeth to strangle him, crush him, tear him, rend him.
With every sense quiveringly alert, I watched for him.
I had lit both my lamps and the eight candles on my chimneypiece, as if I thought I should be more likely to discover him by this bright light.
In front of me was
