Quote:
... such a well-wrought tale ...

... I have been unable to trace the source for this episode.
I have never heard of Franz Monar (neither has Google).
Are we sure of the spelling of the writer's name? ...
Bingo. That spelling is wrong. It's Ferenc Molnár.
The Americanized form is Franz Molnar.

In the episode intro, TG pronounces the name Ferenc.
(In the book mentioned below, it is spelled Ferencz.)

Quote:
I would love to track down the original story if I could.
You are in luck! Gutenberg.org has it.

The story is titled "The Living Death".
The story is different from the RMT episode, but
you will recognize the characters of the Professor and the General.

Since this is an anthology of stories by various authors,
you'll need to use your browser's Find function
to search down the file to find "Molnar".
Search for it twice to find the story.

At this time Gutenberg has only the plain-text version
of this file (no nicely formatted HTML or PDF version).
This is the only Molnar story in this volume, and
apparently the only Molnar story available at Gutenberg.

As TG said in the Act 3 intro, "this tale ... goes back
generations. It has inspired many versions, and in fact
was told to [TG] as his own invention by [her] grandfather."