Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) wrote the majority of his works between 1880 and 1890, before his gradual descent into madness and his premature death. He was an anxious man of fragile health who strung together fantasy tales, all inspired by repetitive pessimistic themes such as unhappy love, despair, depression and madness. La Chevelure (a short story published in the periodical Gil Blas on 13 May 1884) was no exception: He creates a hero devoured by his obsession to the point of paranoia and expectation of death.
A young man, a stranger to the ardour of love, displays an unusual passion for items of antiquity. Pieces of period furniture and jewellery arouse in him the fantasy of a time gone by, rich in promise and delight. One day, inside a hidden section of a drawer, he discovers a "marvel of female hair", attractive, fascinating. The blond plait, tied with a gold band, gradually comes alive in his fingers, becoming liquid, animal, impassioned, eminently carnal. The hair, a veritable fetish invested with the erotic qualities of its former owner, obsesses the hero who loses sleep and his mind. Until the evening when the beautiful woman manifests herself and yields her body to the insomniac.
The glacial, vampire embrace of this sensual phantom is a reminder that the moving hair is nothing more than a deadly relic. The hero, in love with a dead woman, falls gradually into a madness equal to his necrophilic attachment and ends his melancholic journey, literally bloodless, inside a cell.
The lock of eternal, sacred hair, it alone capable of surviving the grave, crossing time and space, thus asserts its capacity to awaken fantasies and phantoms. Through the writings of Maupassant, Rodenbach (Bruges-la-Morte) and Gautier (La Toison d'Or), to the camera of Alfred Hitchcock (Vertigo), this fascinating theme never ceases to reveal its fantasy nuances, as voluptuous as they are macabre. The atmosphere of the short story also seduced the writer and filmmaker Ado Kyrou (1923-1985), verging on Surrealism. He shot the short film La Chevelure in 1959, with Michel Piccoli.
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