Guy de Maupassant 
Bertha 

Laying the foundations for films, such as ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, ‘ starring Jack Nicholson, ‘Bertha’ is a study on mental illness.While the narrator visits his old friend, Dr Bonnet, the doctor asks him to wait while he visits a patient. The patient is Bertha, a woman who was once young and beautiful but with no way of communicating with the outside world. Rightly or wrongly, Dr Bonnet subjects her to a series of experiments before her family decides there’s an answer to her problems. A haunting and tragic short story from the pen of one of the fathers of the genre, ‘Bertha’ is the perfect introduction to Guy de Maupassant’s authorship. —