Summary
Summary of The New Terror
Key ideas
Key idea 1
A promise meets a strange silence
Hector and Cordélia have been promised to each other since childhood, but they see the world differently. He loves sport and practical things; she paints, plays music and believes a portrait should reveal the soul. While Hector is abroad, her letters begin to puzzle him, especially when she asks him to return the portrait she painted from memory.
When he finally comes home, she is absent. Her father asks him to wait at Vascoeuil, leaving their expected marriage surrounded by questions Hector cannot answer.
Key idea 2
A wedding gift reveals a rival
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Key idea 3
The portrait seems to carry feeling
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Key idea 4
An unseen companion leaves a reflection
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Key idea 5
Travel cannot keep the rival away
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Key idea 6
Love becomes a struggle for possession
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Key idea 7
Two more tales begin with secrets
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Key idea 8
Plain details make hidden things matter
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The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
Read the rest freeWho it’s for
Readers who love ghostly love stories, Gothic houses and moonlit parks, and who enjoy a narrator who explains his strange case to the reader. Fans of French tales of mystery will find three of them here.
What this book is
The New Terror is a collection by Gaston Leroux, the French novelist and journalist. It centres on a novella told by a man named Hector, and it adds two short tales, A Terrible Tale and The Gold Axe. The novella follows a happy young couple, cousins who have waited all their lives to marry, and a painter whose gift to them on their wedding day changes everything.
Hector is an athlete with no taste for dreams. His bride, Cordélia, loves painting, music and the unseen. When the two meet at the altar, a strange science of the soul, with its auras, its trances and its roaming minds, steps between them. Leroux plays this against a plain, good-natured husband who tries to understand it in order to keep his wife. In this summary you will meet the main people and the turns of each tale, and you will learn what the book is really about. First, the childhood promise that begins it all.
In this summary
- 1A childhood promise and a puzzling portraitFree
- 2A shadow at the gate, then a wedding gift
- 3The portrait is cold on the wedding night
- 4Two nights, a golden chamber and a skiff
- 5Rome, Venice and a lit window
- 6What the stories are about, and two shorter tales
Key point 1 of 6
A childhood promise and a puzzling portrait
Hector and Cordélia are first cousins, and their families have all but promised them to each other since infancy. He is big, freckled and fond of every sport, and he is lazy in class. She is slender and green-eyed, with an Italian mother, and she paints, draws and plays music with ease. She also fears nothing, and she leads him on horseback wherever she likes.
The parents will not allow an early marriage. They send Hector to America, then to his military service, then to America again, to study at a technical institute where sport counts for as much as engineering. His parents die in an influenza epidemic while he is away. His uncle, Cordélia's father, takes over his business affairs, and Hector decides to live on his income.
At twenty-four he sails home for Havre. He keeps a little account book in which he jots notes about Cordélia beside his daily spending, and these notes will matter later. Her letters have been changing. She has sent him a portrait of himself, painted from memory, and then she asks him to send it back. She writes that a portrait must show the soul and not only the features, and Hector cannot make head or tail of it.
When he steps ashore, Cordélia is not on the pier. An old servant named Surdon meets him in a small steam tug and says that she and her father have left on an urgent journey abroad. A letter from his uncle asks him to wait at Vascoeuil, the family's old manor, and promises that Cordélia still loves him and that the wedding will come before the year ends.
That’s 1 of 6 key points.
The rest of the summary, written and spoken, and the whole book: free to start.
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Check yourself
Why does Dr. Thurel blame the portrait for Cordélia's condition?
Right. “He names the state a hypnotic sleep with muscular rigidity and blames the portrait, through which Patrick can still reach her.”Not quite. “He names the state a hypnotic sleep with muscular rigidity and blames the portrait, through which Patrick can still reach her.”
What central question lies beneath Hector and Patrick's rivalry?
Right. “At its heart the title novella asks what it means to possess another person.”Not quite. “At its heart the title novella asks what it means to possess another person.”
How does Leroux build dread across these tales?
Right. “What you keep is a sense of how Leroux builds dread from plain details, a locked door, a table set for two or a gate that opens by itself.”Not quite. “What you keep is a sense of how Leroux builds dread from plain details, a locked door, a table set for two or a gate that opens by itself.”
Questions about The New Terror
What is The New Terror by Gaston Leroux about?
It follows Hector, a sporty young man, on his wedding night, when a rival's portrait of his bride draws her mind away from him. The book also holds two shorter tales of strange gatherings and hidden secrets.
Who is Patrick in The New Terror?
Patrick is an English painter who gives Cordélia painting lessons and paints her portrait. He believes in a union of minds and claims a spiritual bond with her that reaches across great distances.
What do the O and the polygon mean in The New Terror?
Dr. Thurel borrows these terms from the writer Grasset. The O is the deliberate, thinking self. The polygon is the automatic self that can act on its own when the O is distracted or under another's influence.
Which stories does The New Terror include?
It includes the title novella, narrated by Hector, and two short tales, A Terrible Tale, set in Toulon, and The Gold Axe, set at Gersau beside Lake Lucerne.
Is The New Terror easy to read?
Yes, in the sense that it is brisk and conversational. Short chapters, a talkative narrator and plenty of dialogue carry the story, and Dr. Thurel explains each odd idea in plain terms.
