Théophile Gautier 40 min read

An aged priest confesses the great sin of his life: three years living a double existence, by day a country cleric, by night the lover of the beautiful, undead Clarimonde.

Théophile Gautier's 1836 masterpiece ('La Morte amoureuse') is one of the finest vampire tales ever written, a lush, sensuous meditation on desire, damnation, and the thin line between dream and reality. A cornerstone of Romantic supernatural fiction. Read it for exquisitely written, hauntingly erotic horror from a giant of French letters.

In its time

Published in 1836, during the 1830s, poe and the german romantics.

Reading it

40 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).