Five to Twelve - Your dark literature resource pages

Gustave Flaubert, was a friend of his mother - and for some biographers may even have been his biological father. He was introduced to may writers like Henry James (The turn of the screw) of Emile Zola. He also met Swinburne, who showed him a dried up human hand, which will in fact inspire two stories : "La main d'écorché" (1875) and "La main" (1883). It may be during the 1870 war against Prussia that he caught syphilis, which started a progressive deterioration of his health.

He was indeed clinically mad and ended up committing suicide in 1893, but it seems to me that he was in fact lucid for the major part of his life, although it could be easy to link his fantastic tales to a form of madness - as can be assumed for the eccentricity of Lovecraft.
There it is important to see the influence of Paul Le Poitevin, his grand father on his mother's side, who was indulging in occultism.

He also wrote novels and fictions, like "Une vie", and countryside tales or tales about the Parisian lifestyle; one of the key elements of a gothic tale is hyperrealism. There his experience in novels certainly helped him create realistic and detailed stories... his readers also probably enjoyed the suspense of discovering as they were reading.

My favourite fiction tale is "Aux champs" - a really short story, followed by "Ce cochon de Morin", a lewd and very funny tale.In his gothic tales though, madness plays a vital role, and where the narrator is a paranoiac, like in "Une nuit à Paris". It is the way these tales were built then, back in the 19th century. Some biographers saw there the madness of Maupassant himself.His writing is then punctured with question marks, including in the very titles of the stories. Maupassant is indeed focusing on the aspect of the fantastic tale, as described rightly by Tzvetan Todorov : chiefly a dual interpretation tale, natural and supernatural.In "Le Horla" the main character describes his persecution by an invisible being, while in "Un fou" a judge condemns an innocent man for a crime that he, a man of law, committed due to a morbid fascination with murder, Maupassant writing there a disturbing and socially aggressive piece of work, probably there the sign of his own paranoia - and the root of a disrepect and distrust for the authorities representing the law.

His story "L'auberge" was an inspiration for Stephen King - one of Maupassant's faithful admirers - for the extremely famous "Shining".Maupassant's world is not pleasant, indeed. After the defeat of 1870, France loses Alsace and Lorraine, which of course gives rise to a strong antiGerman resentment for the French, ending in the gory WWI, and incidentally striking the flourishing Art Nouveau movement in its prime youth.In France, the Belle Epoque is marqued by a deep sorrowful feeling - a bit like losing a key football game - which will push artists and common folk alike in a depression and seek refuge in drugs, occultism, and will start the crumbling down of religious and moral values.The idea that our senses are imperfect, our knowledge incomplete brings in the rise of occultism and parallel interpretations of the world (same as HP Lovecraft).
For Maupassant, horror is not born in remote castles or gloomy settings. In fact he uses the Frech daily city landscape, filled with ordinary people and objects, an often the horror and gothic tale arises in the mind of the narrator first. The supernatural events are born from these realistic settings.

It is the glass of water in "Le Horla" which is the tanglible proof of the existence of the invisible monster. Altered senses, mistakes of perceptions, shadows, tiredness, and suddenly madness steps in.
The characters are common people. Maupassant bases - like Lovecraft - all his tales on the risk we are all running to see a pillar of our existence fall and sbe shattered forever : our sanity, always at risk to be destroyed or alienated: certainly his own madness.Maupassant had three categories of tales :
Angoisse, like "Qui sait ?": we face poltergeists and moving furniture
Madness, like "Le Horla",
and Strange tales
At the same time in France, Jean Lorrain, Remy de Gourmont ("Histoires Magiques" - 1895) and Catulle Mendès ("Monstres Parisiens" - 1882), where the French capital is full of masquerades and monsters in a lewd atmosphere.

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