French Tales of Vampires (Volume 3)

In the 1850s, when Paul Féval wrote The Vampire Countess, no one in France knew for sure how tolerant the reading public might be of fictions which brought vampirism into the real world. All the French literary works in which vampires had previously been featured had been calculatedly fanciful romances drawn from foreign sources and set in faraway places. A tale of Paris in the final days of the Consulate, which pretended to be true to the facts of history and employed a cast mingling real and fictitious individuals, must have seemed a different matter. There were good reasons to doubt the propriety of placing a "real" vampire in such a setting. The victory of science over superstition, if not yet entirely secure, seemed inevitable. French readers had thrilled to the dark delights of German and English Gothic novels, but French novelists had not been nearly so willing to dabble in such absurdities. The Vampire Countess, was probably the sixth full-length vampire novel to be published, and the first time the word vampire appeared as a feminine rather than a masculine noun. It would be a long time before any other writer contrived a vampire as perversely charismatic as The Vampire Countess or any of the characters featured in this anthology.