Maupassant's stories of madness, akin to Poe's analyses of mental decay, of the slow corruption of the brain, are among his most dreadful triumphs of style, and have influenced various English stories of insanity. In Maupassant's own tottering reason we find the tragic explanation of his constant return to this type of story. Such tales as _Mad_, where a husband goes insane from doubt of his wife; _Madness_, where a man has a weird power over human beings, animals, and even inanimate objects, making them do his will, so that he is terrified of his own self, of what his horrible hands may do mechanically; _Cocotte_, where the drowned dog, following its master a hundred miles down the river, drives him insane; _The Tress_, a curdling story of the relation between insanity and the supernatural, so that one is unable to say which is cause and which effect, illustrate Maupassant's unusual association between madness and uncanny fiction. Who but Maupassant could make a story of ghastly hideousness out of a parrot that swears? As Maupassant was influenced by Poe, in both subject matter and technique, so he has affected the English writers since his time in both plot material and treatment of the supernatural. And as his _La Horla_ strongly reflects FitzJames O'Brien's _What Was It? A Mystery_ that anticipated it by a number of years, so it left its inevitable impress on Bierce's _The Damned Thing_ and succeeding stories of supernatural invisibility. A recent story by Katherine Fullerton Gerould, _Louquier's Third Act_, seems clearly to indicate the De Maupassant influence, reflecting the method and motifs of _La Horla_ and _The Coward_. Maupassant's tales have a peculiar horror possessed by few, partly because of his undoubted genius and partly the result of his increasing madness. Other French writers have also influenced the uncanny story in English. Théophile Gautier has undoubtedly inspired various tales, such as _The Mummy's Foot_, by Jessie Adelaide Weston, which is the match, though not in beauty or form, to his little masterpiece of that title. A. Conan Doyle's _Lot No. 249_, a horrible story of a reanimated mummy, bears an unquestionable resemblance to Gautier's _The Romance of the Mummy_ as well as _The Mummy's Foot_, though Poe's _A Word with a Mummy_, a fantastic story emphasizing the science of miraculous embalming of living persons so that they would wake to life after thousands of years, preceded it. Something of the same theme is also used by F. Marion Crawford,[45] where the bodies in the old studio awake to menacing life. This motif illustrates the prevalence of the Oriental material in recent English fiction. Gautier's _La Morte Amoureuse_ has exercised suggestive power over later tales, such as Crawford's vampire story,[46] though it is significant to recall that Poe's _Berenice_ preceded Gautier's story by a year, and the latter must have known Poe's work. [45] In _Khaled_. [46] _For the Blood Is the Life._