The Encyclopedia of Fantastic Victoriana

by Jess Nevins

"Who Knows?" (1890)

copyright © Jess Nevins 2022

“Who Knows?” (original: “Qui sait?”) was written by Guy de Maupassant and first appeared in L'Écho de Paris (Apr. 6, 1890). Henri-René-Albert-Guy De Maupassant (1850-1893) was one of the great short story writers of France or any other country, and two of his novels, Une Vie (1883) and Pierre et Jean (1888), are counted among the best of the nineteenth century. De Maupassant wrote with an almost brutal realism and an insightful grasp of human psychology; he was sympathetic only to the poor and the outcasts of society. “Who Knows” was written when De Maupassant’s syphilis had become acute and shows the further effect of the disease on his mind. The story is also memorable in its own right.

The nameless narrator of “Who Knows” is a solitary man who has little tolerance for the company of others. For him, as for many people, simply being around other human beings for any length of time fills him with an emotional sickness. In Paris he suffers “a kind of supernatural death—and my body and nerves are tortured by the vast, teeming crowds living and breathing all around me, even as they sleep.” He lives alone and exists, with pleasure, inside himself. He displaces all the affection he would ordinarily feel for other people on to things, on to the furniture and knickknacks of his house, inside of which he feels “as content, as satisfied, as truly happy as in the arms of a loving woman whose familiar caress has come to be a gentle, soothing necessity.” But one night, returning from an opera, he is gripped with a fearful malaise, so that he dreads to enter his house. He hears a drumming cacophony, as if someone is violently moving his furniture about. When he summons the nerve to enter the house, the noise increases, and he hears a din of heavy things moving about on his stairs and floors and carpets. Then his armchair waddles out his front door, followed by the rest of his furniture. Even his beloved writing desk leaves despite his best efforts to physically prevent it from going. The narrator eventually flees back to town and takes a room in a hotel, claiming that he had lost the keys to his house. The next morning he is told by his valet that all of his furniture has been stolen. The police investigate the case for months but can find no trace of the “thieves.” The narrator consults with his doctor about his nerves and is told to travel. The sunshine of Italy and Africa does him a great deal of good, but when he returns to France he feels his spirits lower. He continues traveling, and in Rouen, on a street of secondhand furniture dealers, he sees, in one store, his Louis XIII wardrobe, three of his armchairs, and his two Henry II tables. He enters the store to talk to the proprietor, who turns out to be a tiny, extraordinarily fat man, bald with a straggly yellow beard, a wrinkled, bloated face, and a skull like a little moon. The proprietor is not pleasant, but the narrator manages to buy the three armchairs from the man, paying for them on the spot. The narrator then contacts the police, who attempt to capture the store owner that night. But he disappears, never returning to his shop. The next morning all of the narrator’s furniture is missing from the store, and other pieces of furniture have replaced them. The narrator stays in Rouen for two weeks, but the store owner does not return. Then, on the sixteenth day, the narrator gets a letter from his gardener telling him that all of his furniture has reappeared in his house. The narrator, disturbed and paranoid about the furniture store proprietor, checks himself into an asylum and stays there.

“Who knows?” lacks the mounting sense of ominous horror of “The Horla” and the sorrow of “Was it a dream?” What it has, convincingly, is the air of a nightmare in which the irrational and unreal intrudes on an otherwise ordinary day-to-day reality. The story effectively communicates the narrator’s shaky nerves. His anxiety is conveyed so effectively, in fact, that De Maupassant’s own syphilis-infected consciousness can be discerned straight through the prose of “Who knows?” The story’s atmosphere of paranoia shrieks long arias about De Maupassant’s state of mind. The straightforwardness of the prose and the otherwise prosaic atmosphere enhances the air of paranoia and fear and ambiguity.

Recommended Edition

Print: Guy de Maupassant, Guy de Maupassant’s Selected Works. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2016.

Online: https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100325343 (volume 4)