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‘Deshoulières’, the tale of an eccentric who pushes this quest to a murderous extreme. Richepin was an extravagantly bohemian, larger-than-life character himself, his wild hair topped by fantastical hats; his family hailed from deeply rural areas of France, Picardy and the Aisne. His first popular success was a poem,
La Chanson des gueux
(1876), which landed him in prison for a month. He pursued his career as a poet, but if he survives today it is thanks to his stories, which are sometimes horrible, and always
piquant
. Like an unexpected, and hilarious, twist in one of his own stories, in 1908 Richepin was elected to the Académie française. The eponymous anti-hero of ‘Constant Guignard’, on the other hand, suffers from his name—
avoir la guigne
means ‘to be dogged by bad luck’—and Richepin is ruthless in his pursuit of the theme. ‘Pft! Pft!’ is a clever little story, which reads as a parody of stock Decadent misogyny (and as such it comes as something of a relief); for here the target is less the woman—considered by the male so absolutely empty that her sole riposte to the reproaches of her lovers is a kind of charming sulky
moue
, a
tut-tut
, though the noise given here is
pft! pft!
—than the men who fall for her, including a self-styled and‘dandified’ cynic who in the end falls harder than the rest of them, and damns himself eternally as a fool.
    To pass from Jean Richepin to Guy de Maupassant (1850–93) is to pass from something (relatively) light into something very much darker. Maupassant’s great tales of psychic terror, brought on by his own incipient syphilis and the drugs he used to control it, are masterpieces of the type of hallucinatory
fantastique réel
(as opposed to supernatural occurrence) that is self-induced by the disturbed mind. Stories like ‘Le Horla’ or ‘Lui?’ are barely fictionalized accounts of his own madness, a form of autoscopy, seeing himself as detached from himself—for instance, as a figure sitting in his chair, seen from the door of his own room (as in the story ‘Lui?’). Maupassant’s great subject in these stories is in fact not so much madness as the solitude that brings it on. Biographers ponder the consequences of the very strong, and life-long attachment he had to his own morbidly imaginative mother. Compulsive womanizer though he was, Maupassant was a solitary, and love, in the sense of a lasting relationship of trust with one person, was always lacking. Intellectually, he was another ‘victim’ of Schopenhauer’s pessimism, though the little known tale ‘At the Death-Bed’, included here, which recounts a gruesomely hilarious anecdote relating to the death of the grim-visaged philosopher, would suggest he had put some distance between himself and the German Master. An ultimate solitude, leading to panic and terror, is described here in the famous story ‘Night’. Charcot has already been evoked in this Introduction, and Maupassant’s fascination with clinical pathologies. It was his interest in fetishism, and the displaced love-object, that led to his story ‘The Tresses’. (In another fetishist story, ‘A Case of Divorce’, the husband, horrified by the conjugal bed, displaces his libido on to exotic flowers.) The elderly office clerk Monsieur Leras, in ‘A Walk’, is also a lifelong solitary, who puts off marriage until it is too late, feeling he cannot afford to keep a wife; the unusually prolonged stroll he takes one balmy summer night, however, reveals to him, poignantly and terribly, the desert of his own life. Famous, prolific, successful, Flaubert’s prize ‘pupil’, Maupassant must nevertheless go down as one of the most tormented and darkest writers of this group. The syphilis he contracted early in his life, and which brought about his premature death, in the end unhinged his mind and darkened, almost unbearably, his view of the world. At the end of ‘The Tresses’, the doctor shrugs his shoulders and says: