Le Horla

Guy de Maupassant · 1887 CE · Short Story · French · Victorian

A gentleman living above the Seine below Rouen watches a Brazilian three-master come up the river one morning and raises his hand to it, and dates the beginning of his trouble from that hour. He wakes worn out, finds the water carafe by his bed drained in the night, and starts a journal to establish by experiment whether anything shares the room with him. Written in the years Maupassant's syphilis was reaching his brain; Lovecraft later put it at the top of the form.

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