Repository path: workshop/translations/la-nuit/R06-v1/translation.md · rendered 2026-09-09

T-la-nuit-R06-v1 — Guy de Maupassant, «La Nuit (cauchemar)» (1887), French → English — THE DRAFT

This is the frozen single-pass draft, written straight through from the source with no revision pass, and committed as its own artifact before the revision began, per R04 §Procedure 2a. It is an R06 output. The revised text, the translator's log and the full source apparatus live in ../R04-v1/translation.md; this file carries the draft and nothing else, so that the draft-to-revision delta is recoverable.

Source. ../source-fr.txt, SHA-256 a2f61e673f816a57c0588963f1ca2a23fbea98cabf82add4d29438e9fbb0edaf, 38 paragraphs, 1,873 French words. Provenance and copy-text discussion: ../R04-v1/translation.md §Source.

The Night: a nightmare

[1] I love the night with a passion. I love it the way one loves one's country or one's mistress, with an instinctive, deep, unconquerable love. I love it with all my senses: with my eyes, which see it; with my nose, which breathes it in; with my ears, which listen to its silence; with the whole of my flesh, which the darkness caresses. Larks sing in the sun, in the blue air, in the warm air, in the light air of clear mornings. The owl flees through the night, a black stain crossing black space, and, made glad, made drunk by the black immensity, it lets out its vibrating, sinister cry.

[2] Daylight tires me and bores me. It is brutal and loud. I get up with difficulty, I dress with weariness, I go out with regret, and every step, every movement, every gesture, every word, every thought tires me as if I were lifting a crushing weight.

[3] But when the sun goes down, a confused joy, a joy of my whole body, floods me. I wake, I quicken. As the shadow grows I feel myself quite another man, younger, stronger, more alert, happier. I watch it thicken, the great soft shadow fallen from the sky: it drowns the city like a wave, ungraspable and impenetrable; it hides, erases, destroys colours and shapes, grips houses, living things, monuments in its imperceptible touch.

[4] Then I want to cry out with pleasure like the owls, to run over the roofs like the cats; and an impetuous, an unconquerable desire to love lights up in my veins.

[5] I go, I walk, now through the darkened outskirts, now through the woods near Paris, where I hear my sisters the beasts and my brothers the poachers prowling.

[6] What one loves violently always ends by killing you. But how am I to explain what is happening to me? How even to make it understood that I am able to tell it at all? I do not know, I no longer know, I know only that it is. — There.

[7] So yesterday — was it yesterday? — yes, surely, unless it was earlier, another day, another month, another year — I do not know. It must be yesterday, though, since the day has not risen again, since the sun has not come back. But how long has the night been lasting? How long?… Who will say? who will ever know?

[8] So yesterday I went out, as I do every evening, after my dinner. It was very fine, very mild, very warm. Going down toward the boulevards, I looked up over my head at the black river full of stars cut out of the sky by the roofs of the street, which curved and made that stream rolling with stars undulate like a real river.

[9] Everything was clear in the light air, from the planets down to the gas jets. So many fires were shining up there and in the city that the darkness seemed luminous with them. Shining nights are more joyful than great days of sun.

[10] On the boulevard the cafés were blazing, people were laughing, passing, drinking. I went into a theatre for a few moments — which theatre? I no longer know. It was so bright in there that it saddened me and I came out again with my heart a little darkened by that shock of brutal light on the gilding of the balcony, by the artificial glitter of the enormous crystal chandelier, by the barrier of fire at the footlights, by the melancholy of that false, raw brightness. I made my way to the Champs-Élysées, where the café-concerts looked like seats of a fire in the foliage. The chestnut trees, rubbed with yellow light, had the air of painted things, the air of phosphorescent trees. And the electric globes, like brilliant pale moons, like moon-eggs fallen from the sky, like monstrous living pearls, made the threads of gas — of ugly dirty gas — and the garlands of coloured glass turn pale beneath their pearly, mysterious, royal brightness.

[11] I stopped under the Arc de Triomphe to look at the avenue, the long and admirable starred avenue going toward Paris between two lines of fire, and the stars! The stars up there, the unknown stars flung at random into the immensity where they trace those strange figures that set one dreaming so, that set one musing so.

[12] I went into the Bois de Boulogne and stayed there a long time, a long time. A strange shudder had seized me, an unforeseen and powerful emotion, an exaltation of my thought that verged on madness.

[13] I walked a long time, a long time. Then I came back.

[14] What time was it when I passed under the Arc de Triomphe again? I do not know. The city was falling asleep, and clouds, great black clouds, were spreading slowly over the sky.

[15] For the first time I felt that something strange, something new, was going to happen. It seemed to me that it had turned cold, that the air was thickening, that the night, that my beloved night, was growing heavy on my heart. The avenue was deserted now. Two policemen alone were strolling by the cab stand, and on the roadway, barely lit by gas jets that looked to be dying, a line of vegetable carts was going to the Halles. They went slowly, loaded with carrots, with turnips and with cabbages. The drivers slept, invisible; the horses walked at an even pace, following the cart in front, without a sound, over the wooden paving. In front of each light on the pavement the carrots lit up red, the turnips lit up white, the cabbages lit up green; and they passed one behind another, those carts, red with a red of fire, white with a white of silver, green with a green of emerald. I followed them, then turned along the rue Royale and came back to the boulevards. Nobody now, no more lit cafés, only a few stragglers hurrying. I had never seen Paris so dead, so deserted. I drew out my watch: it was two o'clock.

[16] A force was driving me on, a need to walk. So I went as far as the Bastille. There I realised that I had never seen a night so dark, for I could not even make out the July Column, whose golden Genius was lost in the impenetrable obscurity. A vault of cloud, thick as immensity itself, had drowned the stars and seemed to be lowering itself onto the earth to annihilate it.

[17] I came back. There was no one left around me. In the place du Château-d'Eau, though, a drunk nearly ran into me, then he vanished. For a while I heard his uneven, ringing step. I went on. Level with the faubourg Montmartre a cab passed, going down toward the Seine. I called to it. The driver did not answer. A woman was prowling near the rue Drouot: "Monsieur, do listen." I quickened my step to avoid her outstretched hand. Then nothing more. In front of the Vaudeville a ragpicker was raking the gutter. His little lantern floated at ground level. I asked him: "What time is it, my good man?"

[18] He growled: "How should I know! I ain't got a watch."

[19] Then all at once I realised that the gas jets were out. I know they are put out early, before daylight, at this season, to save money; but the day was still far off, so far from appearing!

[20] "Let's go to the Halles," I thought; "there at least I shall find life."

[21] I set off, but I could not even see well enough to guide myself. I went forward slowly, the way one does in a wood, recognising the streets by counting them.

[22] In front of the Crédit Lyonnais a dog growled. I turned along the rue de Grammont, I lost my way; I wandered, then I recognised the Bourse by the iron railings that go round it. The whole of Paris was sleeping, a deep and frightening sleep. Far off, though, a cab was rolling, a single cab, the one perhaps that had passed me a while before. I was trying to reach it, going toward the sound of its wheels, through the solitary streets, black, black, black as death.

[23] I lost my way again. Where was I? What madness, to put the gas out so soon! Not a passer-by, not a straggler, not a prowler, not a mew from an amorous cat. Nothing.

[24] Where were the policemen, then? I said to myself: "I shall shout, and they will come." I shouted. No one answered.

[25] I called louder. My voice flew off, without an echo, weak, smothered, crushed by the night, by that impenetrable night.

[26] I screamed: "Help! help! help!"

[27] My desperate call went unanswered. What time was it, then? I drew out my watch, but I had no matches. I listened to the light tick-tock of the little mechanism with a strange, unfamiliar joy. It seemed to be alive. I was less alone. What a mystery! I set off again like a blind man, feeling the walls with my cane, and every moment I raised my eyes toward the sky, hoping the day would appear at last; but space was black, all black, more deeply black than the city.

[28] What time could it be? I had been walking, it seemed to me, for an infinity of time, for my legs were giving way under me, my chest was heaving, and I was horribly hungry.

[29] I made up my mind to ring at the first carriage door. I pulled the brass knob, and the bell rang out in the echoing house; it rang strangely, as if that vibrating noise had been alone in the house.

[30] I waited; no one answered, no one opened the door. I rang again; I waited again — nothing!

[31] I was afraid! I ran to the next house, and twenty times over I made the bell sound in the dark passage where the concierge must have been sleeping. But he did not wake — and I went further on, pulling with all my strength at the rings or the knobs, striking with my feet, my cane and my hands at the obstinately closed doors.

[32] And all at once I realised that I was reaching the Halles. The Halles were deserted, without a sound, without a movement, without a cart, without a man, without a bunch of vegetables or flowers. — They were empty, motionless, abandoned, dead!

[33] A terror seized me — a horrible one. What was happening? Oh! my God! what was happening?

[34] I set off again. But the time? the time? who would tell me the time? Not one clock was striking in the belfries or in the public buildings. I thought: "I shall open the glass of my watch and feel the hand with my fingers." I drew out my watch… it was no longer beating… it had stopped. Nothing left, nothing left, not a shiver in the city, not a glimmer, not a brush of sound in the air. Nothing! nothing left! not even the distant rolling of the cab — nothing!

[35] I was on the quays, and an icy coolness was rising from the river.

[36] Was the Seine still flowing?

[37] I wanted to know; I found the steps, I went down… I could not hear the current boiling under the arches of the bridge… More steps… then sand… then mud… then water… I dipped my arm in it… it was flowing… it was flowing… cold… cold… cold… almost frozen… almost dried up… almost dead.

[38] And I felt clearly that I would never again have the strength to climb back up… and that I was going to die there… I too, of hunger — of weariness — and of cold.