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from that alone. After mankind, the Horla.—After our race that can die any day, at any hour, at any minute, from any number of accidents, has come that one, who will only die on his day, at his hour, at his minute, when he has reached the term of his existence!
    No … no … of course not … of course he is not dead.… So then—it’s me, it’s me I have to kill!

    —May 1887

LETTER FROM A MADMAN
    FIRST PUBLISHED IN THE FEBRUARY 17, 1885 ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE
GIL BLAS,
UNDER THE PEN NAME “MAUFRIGNEUSE”

    My dear Doctor, I place myself in your hands. Do with me what you like.
    I am going to tell you my state of mind very frankly, and you will judge whether it isn’t better to have me taken care of for a little while in a sanatorium, rather than leave me prey to the hallucinations and sufferings that are plaguing me.
    Here’s the story, lengthy and precise, of the singular illness of my soul.
    I was living like everybody else, looking at life with the open, blind eyes of man, without surprise and without understanding. I was living as animals live, as we all live, carrying out all the duties of existence, examining and thinking I saw, thinking I knew, thinking I was familiar with, my surroundings, when one day I perceived that everything is false.
    It was a phrase from Montesquieu that suddenly illumined my thinking. Here it is:
    “One more organ or one less in our body would give us a different intelligence. In fact, all the established laws as to why our body is a certain way would be different if our body were not that way.”
    I reflected on that for months on end, and, little by little, a strange clarity came to me, and this clarity let there be night.
    In fact, our organs are the only intermediaries between the exterior world and ourselves. That is to say, the inner being, which constitutes
the ego
, is in contact, by means of a few nerve endings, with the exterior being, which constitutes the world.
    Beyond the fact that this exterior being escapes us by its size, its lengthy existence, its countless and impenetrable properties, its origins, its future or its aims, its distant forms and its infinite manifestations, our organs provide us only with information as uncertain as it is paltry about the portion of it that we can know.
    Uncertain, because it is nothing but the properties of our organs that determine for us the apparent properties of matter.
    Paltry, because since our senses number only five, the field of their investigations and the nature of their revelations are both quite limited.
    I will explain. The eye transmits dimensions, shapes, and colors to us. It deceives us on these three points.
    It can reveal to us only objects and beings of an average dimension in relation to human size, which has led us to apply the word “large” to certain things and the word “small” to certain other things, only because the eye’s weakness does not allow it to be aware of what is too immense or too tiny for it. Hence, it knowsand sees almost nothing, and almost the entire universe remains hidden from it, the star that inhabits space as well as the microbe that inhabits a drop of water.
    Even if our eye had even a hundred million times more than its normal strength, if it perceived in the air that we breathe all the races of invisible beings, and all the inhabitants of neighboring planets, there would still exist an infinite number of races of animals so small, and worlds so distant, that the eye could not see them.
    All our ideas about size, then, are false, since there is no limit possible to largeness or to smallness.
    Our awareness of dimensions and shapes has no absolute value, since it is determined solely by the power of the organ and in constant comparison with ourselves.
    Let us add that the eye is also incapable of seeing the transparent. A flawless glass tricks it. It confuses it with the air, which it does not see either. Let us move on to color.
    Color exists because our eye is