Clarimonde by Theophile Gautier (1839)

This vampire tale was originally published in a volume of novellas called A Tear of the Devil. Its title is La Morte Amoureuse, perhaps translatable as something like The Deathly Lover (Clarimonde is the invention of the translator, the celebrated Lafcadio Hearn). It is Gautier at his most sensual. A young priest, Romuald, notices at his confirmation a splendid woman of dreamlike beauty, who stares at him in a desiring manner. Her eyes are an almost luminous and trancelike green. Romuald has never been overly bothered with women before, but this is somehow different. His mind is enchanted and captive. He can't stop thinking about her. A day or so later, his Abbe comes to send him off to his first position, and they speak of her. He names her as Clarimonde, an infamous courtesan. Romuald is deeply disturbed inside himself but tries not to give in to thoughts of her. He is struggling on in his new position out in the country, when the Abbe comes on a visit and mentions that Clarimonde has died. Romuald is stricken and upset; he 'dreams' that night (but the dream almost seems more real than reality) that he is visited by a servant of Clarimonde, who whisks him off in a dark equipage with steaming horses galloping at an astonishing rate to an unknown castle. Here he meets Clarimonde, who berates him with his choice of God over her, and enraptures him once again, this time to fulfilment. Their relationship is all that Romuald had hoped for, and fantasised about; Clarimonde too is deeply affected and starts to focus in on her love for him as proof that she is far more honourable than she was ever portrayed. Romuald and she continue in this vein, to the point where he is unsure which is the true reality - his daily life as a country priest, or his nightly life as Clarimonde's votary. Romuald gets more and more worn out in trying to encompass both worlds. One night he cuts his finger and Clarimonde, who had been seeming more and more white, wan and empty, suddenly bounds up like a maniac and sucks at the wound. She is restored to blushing life. A few nights later, he spies her in a mirror putting a powder into his drink. He feigns drinking it, and throws it away. That night, aping sleep, he witnesses her vampiric ways, as she very slightly punctures his arm to suck his blood, thinking he is drugged. All the same, though, she utters loving thoughts for his continued health, as he is her wellspring of life. Finally, confronted by the Abbe, who has entertained deep suspicions of their connection, Romuald is persuaded, exhausted, to pursue her second end. They exhume her coffin and see her there well preserved with a drop of blood at the corner of her mouth. The Abbe makes the sign of the cross over her with holy water, at the slightest touch of which she disintegrates. Romuald 'sees' her only once more; she tears at him for his disloyalty and asks what she did to deserve this fate, then disappears like smoke. In the end, he tells us, he has lived to regret this action, for her love was the key of his life. In its wild language and eroticist exaggeration, this is textbook sensualism, and fun as such without being particularly edifying.