As a child, Charles Nodier had witnessed the guillotine in bloody action in Revolutionary France. Decades before Freud, the knowledge that nightmares could come to life made him sensitive to the irrational as an important part of experience. Rebelling against the devotion to Classical Reason hailed in 18th century France as the best way to think about any topic, Nodier championed Romanticism and Fantasy as a way to look at experiences demanding more intuitive understanding, such as beauty, terror, or love. The hell-demon Smarra (1821) was only a nightmare, the menace of a single night for the...