“Left alone, I experienced for several seconds the horrible agitation of one who awakens from a nightmare.  At length I regained my senses.  I ran to the window and with a mighty effort burst open the shutters, letting a flood of light into the room.  Immediately I sprang to the door by which that being had departed.  I found it closed and immovable!

“Then the mad desire to flee overcame me like a panic the panic which soldiers know in battle.  I seized the three packets of letters on the open desk, ran from the room, dashed down the stairs four steps at a time, found myself outside, I know not how, and, perceiving my horse a few steps off, leaped into the saddle and galloped away.

“I stopped only when I reached Rouen and alighted at my lodgings.  Throwing the reins to my orderly, I fled to my room and shut myself in to reflect.  For an hour I anxiously asked myself if I were not the victim of a hallucination.  Undoubtedly I had had one of those incomprehensible nervous attacks those exaltations of mind that give rise to visions and are the stronghold of the supernatural.  And I was about to believe I had seen a vision, had a hallucination, when, as I approached the window, my eyes fell, by chance, upon my breast.  My military cape was covered with long black hairs!  One by one, with trembling fingers, I plucked them off and threw them away.

“I then called my orderly.  I was too disturbed, too upset to go and see my friend that day, and I also wished to reflect more fully upon what I ought to tell him.  I sent him his letters, for which he gave the soldier a receipt.  He asked after me most particularly, and, on being told I was ill—­had had a sunstroke—­appeared exceedingly anxious.  Next morning I went to him, determined to tell him the truth.  He had gone out the evening before and had not yet returned.  I called again during the day; my friend was still absent.  After waiting a week longer without news of him, I notified the authorities and a judicial search was instituted.  Not the slightest trace of his whereabouts or manner of disappearance was discovered.

“A minute inspection of the abandoned chateau revealed nothing of a suspicious character.  There was no indication that a woman had been concealed there.

“After fruitless researches all further efforts were abandoned, and for fifty-six years I have heard nothing; I know no more than before.”

Original short stories, Vol. 8.

Guy de maupassant
original short stories
Translated by
Albert M. C. McMASTER, B.A. 
A. E. Henderson, B.A. 
Mme. Quesada and Others

VOLUME VIII.

CLOCHETTE

How strange those old recollections are which haunt us, without our being able to get rid of them.

This one is so very old that I cannot understand how it has clung so vividly and tenaciously to my memory.  Since then I have seen so many sinister things, which were either affecting or terrible, that I am astonished at not being able to pass a single day without the face of Mother Bellflower recurring to my mind’s eye, just as I knew her formerly, now so long ago, when I was ten or twelve years old.