Guy de Maupassant's The Flayed Hand (La Main d'écorché), Explained: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis
- Michael Kellermeyer
- 3 minutes ago
- 5 min read
Written in 1875, eight years before “The Hand,” “The Flayed Hand” is a less artful, though perhaps more enigmatic treatment of the same theme—a simple horror story with little to say beyond providing a chill. Like “The Hand,” it features a cavalier young man who acquires a black, shriveled hand with yellow nails, and its conclusion, while hardly endowed with the same irony or subtext as its later descendant, is similarly macabre.
Both stories, at heart, ponder the concept that close proximity to evil -- even apparently neutralized evil, or an evil associated with previous generations and bygone years, thought to have been left behind with the voiceless dead -- is a very dangerous thing for a headstrong young person, lacking in wisdom and humility, to undergo.
This theme would later resonate with many of the 20th century masters, including M. R. James in such tales as “Count Magnus” and "A Warning to the Curious" and with H. P. Lovecraft in tales ranging from “The Case of Charles Dexter Ward” to "The Hound."
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Aside from its influence on later writers, “The Flayed Hand” is a uniquely interesting piece for readers approaching Maupassant’s fiction -- whether focued on the supernatural tales or examining his entire oeuvre as a whole -- as it was his first published tale of any sort, appearing in 1875 under the pseudonym Joseph Prunier, when he was still years away from the fame he would achieve with such works as “Boule de Suif,” “The Horla,” and “The Necklace.”
Although Maupassant would become best known for his sharply observed realist stories, he repeatedly returned to the fantastic, particularly to stories in which apparently ordinary people encounter something that unsettles their confidence in the rational world. “The Flayed Hand” belongs to a long nineteenth-century fascination with severed or enchanted hands, a motif that appeared in French fantastic literature before Maupassant and would continue to flourish afterward.
This earlier “haunted hand” story is consequently valuable not only as a compact piece of supernatural horror in its own right, but also as a glimpse of Maupassant experimenting with a subject he would revisit nearly a decade later. Its youthful atmosphere—boisterous young men, drinking, joking, and treating the macabre as a source of amusement—only heightens the uneasiness when the boundary between joke and reality begins to blur.
SUMMARY
One evening, the narrator joins several college friends at the lodgings of Louis R., where they drink punch, smoke, and joke about literature and art. Their conversation is interrupted when their friend Pierre bursts through the door and announces that he has returned from Normandy with “one of my friends, a great criminal.” He produces a long, black, shriveled human hand, severed at the wrist, its yellow nails still attached and its muscles preserved beneath parchment-like skin.
Pierre explains that the hand belonged to a notorious criminal executed in 1736 after murdering his wife and killing the priest who had married them. The man subsequently robbed twelve travelers, “smoked” a score of monks in their monastery, and made “a seraglio of a convent.” Pierre acquired the hand when the possessions of an old sorcerer were sold.
The friends mock the grotesque object, and Pierre jokingly declares that he will attach it to his doorbell to frighten his creditors. A medical student warns him to give it Christian burial, citing the proverb, “Who has killed will kill.” Pierre instead toasts the hand and says, “I drink to the next visit of thy master.”
The following day, Pierre tells the narrator that someone rang his bell around midnight but disappeared without answering. Pierre has moved the hand from his bell-pull to the bell-cord in his bedroom. His landlord objects to the “carrion” and threatens to evict him unless he removes it, but Pierre responds that the hand belonged to “a man of high breeding.”
That night, the narrator sleeps badly and experiences an uneasy sense of being watched or threatened. Early the next morning, Pierre’s servant arrives in terror, announcing, “My poor master. Someone has murdered him.”
The narrator rushes to Pierre’s lodgings, where police and doctors find the room in disorder and Pierre unconscious on his bed. His neck bears five deep finger marks, and the doctors conclude that the attacker must have possessed extraordinary strength and an exceptionally thin, sinewy hand.
Pierre survives but loses his reason. For seven months he remains in a hospital, convinced that a specter continually pursues him. As he dies, he suddenly cries, “Take it away! It strangles me!” and collapses dead.
Because Pierre is an orphan, the narrator accompanies his body to Normandy for burial. At the cemetery, the gravediggers uncover an older coffin containing a skeleton of unusual stature. One hand has been severed at the wrist, and beside the body they discover the same huge, withered hand.
The narrator returns to Paris after leaving fifty francs with the priest for Masses to be said for the soul of the mutilated skeleton without fully elucidating the mystery of its history.
ANALYSIS
“The Flayed Hand” suffers, perhaps, most from the success of its descendant – not out of any innate literary deficit, though it is notably minimalistic in its message. While it provides a chilling little story in the ever-popular “buyer beware” tradition, it has little else to say. “The Hand” succeeds as a socio-political commentary, whereas its predecessor provides little in the way of genuine literary merit.
Still, despite its brevity, it provides an admirable shiver when read on a dark October evening, and as a horror story it succeeds much as Bernard Capes’s similarly themed—and genuinely thrilling—“The Marble Hands” does: in eliciting a terror of the dead, and of death’s power to reach into our lives at any moment, despite our youth, vigor, humor, or breeding.
It compares nicely to the “warnings” of M. R. James, whose ghost stories often feature confident young treasure seekers, tourists, or souvenir-finders being horribly punished after coming into possession of a haunted object. “Canon Alberic’s Scrapbook,” “Oh, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” “The Tractate Middoth,” “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” “The Uncommon Prayer Book,” “A View from a Hill,” “A Warning to the Curious,” and several other chilling stories follow in the footsteps of this creepy bogey tale by de Maupassant, often with even grimmer conclusions.
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What the story does particularly well, however, is establish a sharp contrast between comedy and terror. Its opening is almost farcical: the young men drink, joke, tease one another, and treat the severed hand as an amusing curiosity. Pierre’s decision to use it as a doorbell turns a grotesque relic into a piece of furniture, reducing the supernatural to the level of a practical joke. That casual treatment is precisely what makes the later violence unsettling.
The hand is not merely an object that frightens Pierre; it is an object whose status gradually changes from souvenir, to joke, to threat, and finally to evidence of something that cannot comfortably be explained.
The story is also unusually interested in the problem of evidence. The newspaper accounts introduce a deliberately factual, almost clinical register into an otherwise Gothic narrative. Police, doctors, fingerprints, wounds, and eyewitness testimony all belong to the rational world, yet none can explain what happened.
Even Pierre’s subsequent madness does not settle the question, because his terror may be either the product of supernatural persecution or the psychological consequence of an encounter he cannot comprehend. Maupassant therefore leaves the reader suspended between the supernatural and the pathological.
Finally, the ending gives the story a satisfying circularity. Pierre returns to the village from which the hand originally came, and the discovery of the severed hand beneath the earth provides a grim confirmation of the story’s opening legend without explicitly explaining its mechanism.
The dead man’s missing hand has literally survived him, suggesting that the past is not as securely buried as the living would like to believe. In this respect, the story’s real subject is less the hand itself than the dangerous assumption that death renders the dead powerless.