“Clarimonde” (1836)

This long story by 19th-century French man of letters Theophile Gautier has a number of points to recommend it, though it’s a bit of a sloggy, slow-moving read, with long preambles and asides. Published originally as “La morte amoureuse,” it’s fun to look at how translators have treated the title over the years: “The Deathly Lover,” “The Amorous Corpse,” “The Dreamland Bride,” “The Beautiful Vampire,” “The Dead in Love,” and of course “Clarimonde,” the given name of this beautiful, strange lover / corpse / bride / vampire / dead / creature. It’s a lovely name for an obviously breathtaking beauty, if the reaction of our young priest is anything to go by. He’s all in a tizzy. One of the best details here is how Romuald, the priest and first-person narrator, shuttles back and forth between embracing the church and his calling, and abruptly rejecting them. Clearly he is a concern to his superiors, as he is basically too callow to hide his feelings. Just as clearly, to them, he is locked in pitched battle with Satan or a minion—objectively true by the standards of this story. Stories this old just seem to have their own ways of going and the glacial pace and hanging for long paragraphs on more or less incidentals are weak points for me, nearly capsizing the story at some points. The seduction must be taken as given—it says the young priest is in love with her, so he is—but at least his naivete with women makes his befuddlements more believable. She is clouding his mind, after all. Clarimonde has a remarkable dream-like presence all the way, even in indirect conversations about her. Certain logistical things about the story don’t add up, such as the priest’s close oversight by a superior who lives three days’ journey away. He seems to drop in a lot. There’s a quite memorable blood-sucking scene, once we get to all that, neatly done for shock. “A few drops of thy rich and noble blood, more precious and more potent than all the elixirs of the earth, have given me back life,” Clarimonde says after Romuald’s accident cutting fruit for breakfast has opened the floodgates of her appetite. It takes a while getting there, but finally the story begins to move swiftly, with the corpse of Clarimonde disinterred in a reasonably stunning finish and all the scales finally falling (I think—we can hope) from Romuald’s eyes. He’s telling the story as a 66-year-old, but you can never be too sure about these things.

Vampire Tales: The Big Collection, pub. Dark Chaos
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