SOURCE: Stadt, Janneke van de. “Seeing ‘Amiss’ or Misreading ‘A Miss’: Imperfect Vision in Maupassant's ‘Les Tombales.’” Dalhousie French Studies 51 (summer 2000): 37-44.

In the following essay, Stadt asserts that “Les Tombales” “reveals itself to be a metacritical tale whose principal theses are misinterpretation and narrative autonomy.”

By the time Guy de Maupassant published “Les Tombales” in 1891 it was becoming increasingly clear that he was losing his prolonged battle with syphilis. Eleven years earlier a syphilitic lesion had been diagnosed in the nerve of his right eye which caused excruciating migraines and resulted in a progressive loss of sight (Borel 1951:132). In February of the same year Maupassant wrote to Flaubert: “Je n'y vois presque plus de l'œil droit,” and an acquaintance recalls that already in 1883, “se regardant dans la glace: le verre ne lui rendait pas sa propre image” (Borel 1929:109). For an author whose work was so intimately...