The Hand
(Guy de Maupassant)
The judge of instruction Bermutier discusses with a group of women the crime that in those moments is holding Paris in its grip. One of the women qualifies the event as supernatural and the magister, remembering a case to which the adjective would apply better to, decides to tell them the story of the cut off hand. Bermutier was the instructional judge in a city of Corsica, where the vendettas were common events, when he met Sir John Rowell, an Englishman who hired a chalet in the vicinity and was the object of curiosity of all the local people. The rumour circulated that he was hiding on the island after having committed a crime in his country. The judge was also curious and decides to investigate a little, getting closer to the mysterious stranger until he is invited to his home. To his astonishment Bermutiez discovers that the stranger conserves the cut off hand of an enemy, hung on the wall of the sitting room and Sir John assures him that the hand is chained to the wall because it is always trying to get away. The judge does not know for sure whether the man has a morbid sense of humor of whether he is really mad, but one year later the corps of Sir John is discovered, on his back,in his sitting room. The man was strangled and the hand had dissappeared. This story forms part of a series of horror stories written by Guy de Maupassant, a genre in which the French auteur distinguishes himself.
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