Theophile Gautier (1811-1872), one of the French masters of the Romantic novel, wrote one of the early masterpieces of vampire fiction, in the sensuous Clarimonde, or La Morte Amoureuse. The story of a priest named Romuald who falls in love with Clarimonde, a beautiful woman who turns out to be a vampire. From that night my nature seemed to have become halved -- and there were two men within me, neither of whom knew the other. At one moment I believed myself a priest who dreamed nightly that he was a gentleman -- at another, that I was a gentleman who dreamed he was a priest. I could no...

Pierre Jules Theophile Gautier (1811 - 1872) was a French writer and critic. In his youth Gautier was an adherent of Romanticism, but later his work became difficult to classify and he remains a point of reference for many subsequent literary traditions such as Parnassianism, Symbolism, Decadence and Modernism. He rejected bourgeois everyday life saying that it is a kingdom of vulgar men and hucksters. He despised petit bourgeois moralizing and democratic ideological content in literature. This book of poems - Enamels and Cameos - is his last and some consider his most important work. It...