A sentence, written by Guy de Maupassant, struck a
familiar chord: "My eyes rested on the mirror reflection
of my face and I lost the notion of who I was. My spirit became
confused and I couldn't recognize myself[...] If this state should
have lasted longer than a minute I'd have become totally mad."
I was not familiar with his dark tales a la Poe,
nor the precision of his objective description of gestures and moods.
Cf. "Un Fou" (1885); "Le Horla" (1887), "La Morte":
"I
stopped short in front of that looking-glass in which she had so often been
reflected--so often, so often, that it must have retained her reflection. I was
standing there. trembling, with my eyes fixed on the glass--on that flat,
profound, empty glass--which had contained her entirely, and had possessed her
as much as I, as my passionate looks had. I felt as if I loved that glass. I
touched it; it was cold.).
I was led to recollect a similiar kind of anguish
in several of Nabokov's short-stories ("Revenge","Terror", "La
Veneziana", "Ultima Thule","That in Aleppo Once...") although the
intimated depersonalization came in sharp contrast with "Sign and
Symbols" and the young man's peculiar "referential mania" ( this
one might be closer to what is felt and
interpreted in "Cloud,Castle, Lake"?).
I had always associated Maupassant to VN's "Ada,or
Ardor" and its pathetic character, Mlle Larivière ( Mlle Larivière, Mlle La
rivière de Diamants, Mlle Laparure, Mlle Ida Montparnasse, etc). When,
later on, I picked up Nabokov's satirical references to Maupassant, I
realized that although Mlle La Rivière's book had exactly the same plot as
the French writer's, one detail was amiss: Mathilde Loiseau and her
husband toiled for ten years to repay their debt to the
jeweller , whereas VN wrote about "thirty or forty horrible
years"...*
Why would he have altered only that little
detail?
.........................................................................................................
* Finally Mlle Larivière read her
La Rivière de Diamants, a story she had just typed out for The Quebec
Quarterly[...] The pretty and refined wife of a seedy clerk borrows a
necklace from a wealthy woman friend. On the way home from the office party she
loses it. For thirty or forty horrible years the unfortunate husband and wife
labor and economize to repay the debts they accumulated in the purchase of a
half-million-franc necklace which they had secretly substituted for the lost one
when returning the jewelbox to Mme F. Oh, how Mathilde’s heart fluttered — would
Jeanne open the box? She did not. When decrepit but victorious (he,
half-paralyzed by a half-century of copie in their mansarde, she, unrecognizably
coarsened by the washing of floors à grand eau), they confess everything to a
white-haired but still young looking Mme F. the latter tells them, in the last
phrase of the tale: ‘But, my poor Mathilde, the necklace was false: it cost only
five hundred francs!’