Ritratto
di Giovane Donna, Henry Fuseli, 1781
What better way to celebrate the lost souls of Halloween than a darkly romantic vampire story?
Clarimonde,
(La Morte Amoureuse) by
Theophile Gautier is a rich playing field for the romantic imagination. Written in 1836, it is not the first
exploration of the vampire legend but it is one of the most compelling for its
intricate pas de deux between
reality and disturbed obsession.
Navigating these ever-mutable planes quickens your pulse and feeds your imagination.
When
Lucy Raubertas, at Indieperfumes asked me to join a stellar convocation of perfumers to create perfumes (and in
my case a drink) inspired by a voluptuous tale of desperate passion, how
could I refuse? It’s a tale I
could not help but be drawn to since I love the idea of vampires and have done since I was a child. Reading this gave me an excuse (as if I need one) to find out a little more about vampires.
I
read that the word vampire comes from the Serbian word vampir and that it was not mentioned in the West until the early 18th
century when Russian and Eastern European stories and superstitions began to circulate (the word first came up in a 1734 travelogue
––one wonders if the opening of Russia by Peter the Great had something to do
with the spreading of the myths??).
At a certain point in the 18th
century there was a veritable plague of imaginary vampire attacks that began in
East Prussia and led to graveyards being ripped apart in search of the demons,
lots of garlic, strange herbs and staking.
John
Polidori (1795-1821)
It
is widely acknowledged that the first to tackle the Vampire archetype in
western culture was John Polidori (Byron’s handsome physician). Except –– that
is not completely true. His may have been the first short story on the
subject but the idea had been
swirling around Europe for a century or more and many a creative soul had already been attracted to the myth (there
were earlier German vampire poems like The Vampire by Ossenfelder in
1748 and Lenore by Bürger in 1773).
Until
Bram Stoker’s Dracula demolished the competition in 1897, Polidori’s The Vampyre enjoyed an
enduring popularity, inspiring many later works including Stokers’ and a
penny-dreadful called Varney the Vampire in the 1840’s (that I read many years ago… it was dreadful). All the Twilights and Angels and True Bloods of today have some of the genes of Polidori's work.
Polidori
wrote The Vampyre during the now legendary holiday with Lord Byron, Percy
Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin (soon to be Mary Shelley) at the Villa
Diodati in Switzerland in June,
1816.
Chichester
Canal JMW Turner
1816
was no ordinary year. It was
called “the year without a summer” because of massive volcanic eruptions from
Mt. Tambora in Indonesia in 1815.
To a frightened, superstitious world, this would have seemed
apocalyptic, with psychedelic skies (that Turner captured so brilliantly), a
sulphuric fog (properly called a stratospheric sulfate aerosol veil) and
catastrophic crop failures. No wonder
it sent a group of poets over to the darkside that fateful June.
After
reading aloud from a new translation (from the German) of one of the current
hits of the day called Tales of the Dead, Byron encouraged the company to write their own dark tales…. The most famous of which
is of course, Frankenstein.
Polidori based his vampire tale on a fragment of a story by Byron with
the vampire named Augustus Darvell. Although Byron had mentioned the phenomenon
before, it had not been fully explored.
Byron
became interested in the vampire myth after hearing of it on his grand tour in
1809-10 and Lord Byron himself touched on the subject in a note following his poem The Giaour: A Fragment of a Turkish Tale in 1812:
“The
Vampire superstition is still general in the Levant. Honest Tournefort tells a
long story about these 'Vroucolachas', as he calls them. The Romaic term is
'Vardoulacha'. I recollect a whole family being terrified by the scream of a
child, which they imagined must proceed from such a visitation. The Greeks
never mention the word without horror. I find that 'Broucolokas' is an old
legitimate Hellenic appellation –– at least is so applied to Arsenius, who,
according to the Greeks, was after his death animated by the Devil. The
moderns, however, use the word I mention. The stories told in Hungary and
Greece of these foul feeders are singular, and some of them most incredibly
attested.”
Lord Byron
Polidori’s
vampire is a man named Lord Ruthven (a name first used by Byron’s ex, Lady
Caroline Lamb, for a thinly disguised Byron character in her 1816 Gothic novel
Glenarvon). As Frankenstein was
inspired by Mary Wollstoncraft’s vision of her Shelley, so the character of
Lord Ruthven was
again inspired by Byron in Polidori’s tale.
Fact
and fiction sometimes share the same bed, do they not??
But what of Clarimonde? The
vampire Clarimonde was born of the mind and heart of Theophile Gautier –– a
poet, painter and novelist. He
spoke of the “sovereignty of the beautiful” in his work and perfected a poetic
technique for recording his impressions of works of art, seamlessly joining two
of his passions. He loved weaving
realism and fantasy together in his stories and believed in the existence of
the unexplainable and mysterious.
This belief system is fully displayed in Clarimonde where the visual and
sensual are worked masterfully.
In
his story, Aria Marcella he declared, “No one is truly dead until they
are no longer loved.” A perfect
sentiment for the immortal vampire (or for their lovers)! Can that not be said
for the immortal characters of literature that are re-animated in every new
reader’s imagination?
Gautier’s
use of the female vampire as his heroine was inspired by Goethe’s 1797 female
vampire story, The Bride of Corinth. The poem predates both Byron and Polidori (it is not known
if they had read Goethe’s poem).
I think the fascination with demon women is in our genes since tales of demonic women date back to the dawn of history. They were often serpent hybrids, out to suck or squeeze the life out of their mostly male conquests (although children were also mentioned as favorite victims of the creatures). They were always beautiful and desirable –– with a terrifying aspect (the serpent side of them was often not immediately perceptible –– only hinted at –– like something you see out of the corner of your eye but can’t quite believe).
I think the fascination with demon women is in our genes since tales of demonic women date back to the dawn of history. They were often serpent hybrids, out to suck or squeeze the life out of their mostly male conquests (although children were also mentioned as favorite victims of the creatures). They were always beautiful and desirable –– with a terrifying aspect (the serpent side of them was often not immediately perceptible –– only hinted at –– like something you see out of the corner of your eye but can’t quite believe).
Goethe’s
veiled bride was no serpent… she was a dead thing that killed her bridegroom by
feeding upon him too deeply. It
was said of Goethe’s poem “An awful and undeniable horror breathes throughout
it. In the slow measured rhythm of
the verse, and the pathetic simplicity of the diction, there is a solemnity and
a stirring spell which chains the feelings like a deep mysterious strain of
music.” No wonder it inspired
Gautier!
Topsell
History of 4-Footed Beasts, 1607
Although
17th c Edward Topsell paints a nightmarish, “Island of Dr Moreau”
portrait of the Lamia or Lilith (ancient vampire cousins), other later
interpretations are ravishing beauties.
Lamia,
Herbert James Draper 1909
Lilith,
John Collier, 1892
I
think Gautier was a little in love with his own creation, channeling Keats and
Coleridge’s demon women with his words. What makes his story different is that his vampire is a loving creature, not a monster. There are no horrors to be found in her declaration to Romuald:
“I loved thee long ere I saw
thee, dear Romuald, and sought thee everywhere. Thou wast my dream…”
You
can feel that spirit as lover/priest Romuald draws a portrait of Clarimonde:
“She
was rather tall, with a form and bearing of a goddess. Her hair, of a soft blond hue, was
parted over her temples in 2 rivers of rippling gold; she seemed a diademed
queen. Her forehead, bluish-white
in its transparency, extended its calm breadth above the arches of her
eyebrows, which by a strange singularity were almost black and admirably
relieved the effect of see-green eyes of unsustainable vivacity and brilliancy.
What eyes! With a single flash
they could have decided a man’s destiny.
…
she elevated her head with the undulating grace of a startled serpent or
peacock”
Listen
to Keats in his poem Lamia
(1819) as he describes his succubus:
She
was a gordian shape of dazzling hue,
|
Vermilion-spotted,
golden, green, and blue;
|
Striped
like a zebra, freckled like a pard,
|
Eyed
like a peacock, and all crimson barr’d;
|
And
full of silver moons, that, as she breathed,
|
Dissolv’d,
or brighter shone, or interwreathed
|
Their
lustres with the gloomier tapestries—
|
So
rainbow-sided, touch’d with miseries,
|
She
seem’d, at once, some penanced lady elf,
|
Some
demon’s mistress, or the demon’s self.
|
Upon
her crest she wore a wannish fire
|
Sprinkled
with stars, like Ariadne’s tiar:
|
Her
head was serpent, but ah, bitter-sweet!
|
…
or Coleridge in Cristabel (1797)
writing of his succubus, Geraldine:
There
she sees a damsel bright,
Dressed
in a silken robe of white,
That
shadowy in the moonlight shone :
The
neck that made that white robe wan,
Her
stately neck, and arms were bare;
Her
blue-veined feet unsandal'd were;
And
wildly glittered here and there
The
gems entangled in her hair.
I
guess, 'twas frightful there to see
A lady
so richly clad as she--
Beautiful
exceedingly!
As
a woman, I have always found it interesting that a man’s excuse for being
utterly obsessed by a woman is that she is a demon possessing him, not that his
obsession comes from his own mind!
Perish the thought!
The
Shepherd’s Dream Henry Fusili, 1793
In
our hero’s case, Romuald is a young priest whose piety is forever poisoned by his vampire Clarimonde.
“Yes
I have loved as none in the world ever loved–– with an insensate and furious
passion-so violent that I am astonished it did not cause my heart to burst
asunder. Ah what nights – what
nights!”
It
would be hard to go back to a lonely life of chastity and poverty in the
priesthood after such a pronouncement.
Clarimonde
is beautiful and desirable beyond imagining and young Romuald is lost from the
moment she gazes upon him –– but did she?
Vampire,
Edvard Munch, 1893-4
The
great thing about the tale is that we are never sure whether this ever happened
or if it is all in his imagination.
Is she in fact a succubus that he has invented –– or a real incarnation of
temptation?
Could
it be his blood/imagination is the animator of this vampire who only exists in
his mind as his eternal torturer?
“The error or a single
moment is enough to make one lose eternity. Lose eternity
the end”
For
poor Romuald, this apparition has remained with him as real as memory can be. For the readers of the tale... it is for us to choose what to believe... or not.
Countess
de Castiglione photo by Pierre-Louise Pierson, 1860's
Now that we have learned a little about vampires in literature, what
dark obsessions can be called up with a scent?
How can you not be inspired to attach perfume and scent to the story as a way of fixing it in our Clarimonde group’s shared experience. Our memory of scent is perhaps our strongest fixative, isn’t it?
Who does not remember a lover with a fragrance… a perfume, a smell of wood fires that brings us back like a wormhole to moments in our history.
When I write about history, the question that always comes to my mind is, how did they eat? If I can’t find specifics, I imagine what it would be and create it to make the history come alive for me.
I
imagine doing the same thing with perfumes. As artists in this field often do… an inspiration creates a
scent or a person requests a special elixir and the perfumer tries to make
something that is their perception of the person –– their scented incarnation
or manifestation.
In
this case it is a fiction, a mood, a melody. The mention of perfume in Clarimonde is brief yet potent:
“In lieu of the fetid and
cadaverous odours which I had been accustomed to breathe during such funereal
vigils, a languorous vapour of Oriental perfume––I know not what amorous odour
of woman––softly floated through the tepid air….
The air of the alcove
intoxicated me, that febrile perfume of half-faded roses penetrated my very
brain, and I commenced to pace restlessly up and down the chamber, pausing at
each turn before the bier to contemplate the graceful corpse lying beneath the
transparency of its shroud.”
For this, I decided food
would not be appropriate, since she “… swallowed the blood in little mouthfuls,
slowly and carefully like a connoisseur”.
I wanted something darkly perfumed, warm like blood with an air of the
ancient. I chose an old port as my base because it has always
reminded me of old leather. Next
rose–– to honor the half-faded roses Gautier describes. For Orient perfumes I used musk,
ambergris, oud wood. I finished
the brew with nutmeg and chocolate for their affinity to the port.
The result? It is dark and mysterious. The fragrance lingers in your mouth
long after the glass has been emptied.
Like a great vampire story –– or the memory of a great love.
Liqueur de Clarimonde
1 cup of vintage port
2 t honey (depending on your
taste, the port and the chocolate you may want more
2 drops Aftelier Rose essence or 2 t rosewater
pinch of nutmeg
2 T chocolate, chopped fine
1 pea size piece of ambergris from Ambergris Co. NZ, grated (optional)
1 piece of oud (2 “x ½”) crushed (optional)
Warm the port and honey and
add the rest of the ingredients.
Stir till chocolate is dissolved.
Allow it to sit for a few hours or until the following day.
For a simpler version, leave
out the ambergris, oud and musk.
This drink was inspired by a port-flavored chocolate truffle that I had
long ago in Paris and loved. I added the rare and exotic hippocras flavors to
make the drink feel like Clarimonde… but know the ingredients are not easy to
find. You will love the simpler
version too!
Re-heat, strain and serve.
Very Old Transylvanian decanter
PS~ As some of you know, I have been on a sabbatical from my day job in the film business as a production designer. I am doing a little project for a great director that he has written. Not much money, great cast and a big dinner scene. I was wondering if any NYC area bloggers would like to contribute a beautiful dish to the effort for screen credit? Email me if this interests any of you. This would happen somewhere between the 8th and the 19th of November. Details to follow.
