Guy de Maupassant's Was it a Dream? (La Morte, aka, The Dead Girl), Explained: A Detailed Summary and a Literary Analysis

It is perhaps fitting that we commence a survey of de Maupassant’s macabre fiction with a story that deftly interweaves his chief thematic concerns: the infidelity of mankind, the bipolarity of human character, and the instability of reason and sanity. “Was It a Dream?” is an excellent example of de Maupassant’s cynical fixation with mistrust and deceit—particularly, as we shall see, in his treatment of women.

Women are depicted as fickle, malicious, inconstant, and diabolical throughout his oeuvre. His story “The Unknown” studies the case of a woman who enchants a man with a magical talisman, seemingly for the sheer pleasure of possessing his attention. As we will find out, the examples of de Maupassant’s bitter misogyny are not rare, nor are they limited to the female of the species—if any writer carried the title of misanthropist, it was Guy de Maupassant.

Yet “Was It a Dream?” also reveals the broader philosophical machinery beneath de Maupassant’s misanthropy. His distrust is not merely directed toward romantic partners or toward women, but toward the stories human beings tell about themselves and one another. Civilization depends upon such stories: the good husband, the faithful wife, the honorable father, the respectable citizen. We construct identities from these flattering descriptions, and then preserve them in the rituals of society, even after death. De Maupassant’s macabre imagination delights in imagining what might happen if those comforting fictions were stripped away. The cemetery, traditionally a place of mourning and remembrance, becomes instead a place of revelation.

The story consequently occupies an important place in de Maupassant’s supernatural fiction, where the fantastic frequently serves not to introduce an alien world but to expose something ugly that was already present in ordinary human life. Beneath his supernaturalism lies a distinctly naturalistic pessimism: people may disguise themselves, but their appetites, resentments, betrayals, and cruelties remain.

SUMMARY

The narrator begins by recalling the woman he loved passionately. He describes his devotion in almost obsessive terms, saying that he had become completely absorbed in her presence, affection, and words. “I had loved her madly!” he declares. But she died unexpectedly after becoming ill with what seems to have been a brief fever. The narrator remembers almost nothing of her final illness, except her burning forehead, sad eyes, the doctors who came and went, and finally the nurse’s cry of “Ah!” that told him she was dead.

Overwhelmed by grief, he reacts bitterly when a priest asks about “your mistress,” feeling that the priest has somehow insulted her. He barely remembers the funeral, except for the coffin and the terrible sound of the hammer as they nailed her inside it. Unable to bear the thought of her being buried, he flees Paris and travels for a time.

When he returns, the sight of their former room and possessions renews his despair. Nearly suicidal, he prepares to leave, but pauses before a large mirror in which his lover had often admired herself. He imagines that the mirror must somehow have retained her reflection, having “contained her entirely,” and the thought intensifies his grief.

He eventually wanders to the cemetery and finds her grave, marked by a simple white marble cross bearing the inscription: “She loved, was loved, and died.” He collapses in grief beside it. As evening approaches, he decides that he wants to spend the night near her grave. To avoid being discovered, he hides among the trees and waits until darkness falls.

Once the cemetery is completely dark, he begins searching for her grave but becomes hopelessly lost among the tombs. He gropes through the cemetery like a blind man, touching gravestones and reading their inscriptions with his fingers. Surrounded by graves, he becomes terrified and hears an indistinct, mysterious noise that he cannot determine is coming from inside his head or from beneath the earth.

Suddenly, the tombstone beneath him seems to move. A skeleton emerges from the grave and reads the inscription on its own tomb. It then takes a stone and carefully erases the flattering words, replacing them with the truth: Jacques Olivant had been cruel, greedy, dishonest, and miserable.

The narrator watches as all the graves open and the dead emerge. Each skeleton erases the complimentary inscriptions placed upon its tomb and replaces them with the hidden truth of its life. The dead are revealed as “malicious, dishonest, hypocrites, liars, rogues, calumniators, envious.”

The narrator then rushes to his lover’s grave, certain that she too must have written the truth. Her original epitaph—“She loved, was loved, and died”—has been replaced with a brutal confession:

“Having gone out one day, in order to deceive her lover, she caught cold in the rain and died.”

At daybreak, the narrator is found unconscious beside her grave.

ANALYSIS

“Decieved” is a Victorian-era euphemism for “cheated on.” The French word tromper used here has the additional meanings of to delude, fool, cheat, mislead, and deceive. This term pairs splendidly with de Maupassant’s life philosophy (one of bitter mistrust and resentment), which saw humanity as innately stupid, self-absorbed, fickle, and deceitful. His caustic pessimism could rival Twain, Poe, Lovecraft, and Bierce, and his morbid writings would strongly influence the latter two. In “Was It a Dream?” (published as “La Mort,” or “The Dead Girl”), de Maupassant opens the floodgates of symbolism to make a very grim statement: the human heart—the source of love and tenderness—is little more than a putrid grave stinking with the secrets that sleep there, and the epithets we assign to the departed are mere deceptions—delusions, tromperie—as distinct from the truth of the human heart as a puffy corpse is from its living past. The story’s most vicious joke is that the cemetery does not contain the dead person’s secrets; it contains the truth about them. The living have already constructed a sanitized version of every life, reducing complicated and often ugly human beings to a few flattering words. “He loved his family, was kind and honorable,” says one epitaph, only for the dead man himself to erase those words and replace them with an account of cruelty, greed, and calculated selfishness. The tombstone thus becomes a miniature representation of society itself: a public surface designed to conceal the private reality underneath.

II.

This makes the epitaph on the narrator’s lover particularly devastating. “She loved, was loved, and died” is not merely inaccurate; it is almost absurdly perfect in its sentimental simplicity. It transforms a complicated human relationship into a three-part monument to romantic devotion. The narrator has invested his entire understanding of her in precisely this kind of idealization. He has mourned her as the perfect beloved, and the epitaph appears to confirm the story he has been telling himself. When that inscription is replaced, the horror is therefore not simply that she was unfaithful. It is that the narrator’s entire emotional reality has been built upon a falsehood.

There is a broader cruelty here as well. Death is conventionally imagined as the great equalizer, the point at which worldly quarrels and imperfections cease to matter. De Maupassant reverses this comforting idea. Death is the moment when the masks finally come off. The dead no longer need to maintain reputations, flatter their families, or preserve the social conventions that governed them in life. Their graves become confessional spaces in which the flattering lies of civilization are replaced by what the narrator calls “the truth, the terrible and the holy truth.”

III.

That phrase—“the terrible and the holy truth”—is deliberately paradoxical. Truth is treated almost as a sacred thing, yet it is horrifying precisely because human beings have spent their lives avoiding it. De Maupassant’s cemetery becomes a kind of inverted church: instead of receiving comforting promises about virtue, forgiveness, and eternal rest, the visitor encounters an apparently supernatural revelation of human depravity. The dead are not purified by death. They are exposed.

The story also complicates its own title. “Was It a Dream?” initially seems to offer the reader an escape hatch: perhaps everything that happened in the cemetery was merely a nightmare produced by grief. But the title never provides certainty. Even if the narrator dreamed the entire experience, the emotional revelation remains. His idealized vision of the woman has been shattered, and the possibility of betrayal has become impossible to separate from his memory of her. The supernatural question is consequently less important than the psychological one. Whether the dead actually rose from their graves matters less than the fact that the narrator can no longer trust the comforting story he had constructed around his love.

This is quintessential de Maupassant. His horror rarely requires the supernatural to be genuinely supernatural. Instead, the fantastic becomes a weapon for stripping away illusion. The ghosts, corpses, doubles, and apparitions of his fiction are often less frightening than what they reveal about ordinary human beings. In “Was It a Dream?,” the graveyard merely performs openly what society performs politely: it tears away the flattering language with which we conceal the ugliness of human nature. The dead have nothing left to gain by lying. The living, de Maupassant suggests, have every reason to do so.

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated edition of de Maupassant's best horror fiction HERE!