qui suce le sang des petites filles et qui offre des Tableaux qu’une honnête femme ne peut voir sans rougir, est l’ouvrage de MM. Ch. Nodier, rédacteur du Drapeau Blanc; Achille Jouffroy, rédacteur de La Gazette et auteur des Festes de l’anarchie; et Carmouche autre rédacteur du Drapeau Blanc.” This censure is, however, wholly inspired by political feeling which thus inveighed against the royalist Nodier, and which not unmingled with green jealousy we also find prominent in the Conservateur littéraire of April, 1820 (Tome II, p. 245) where we had: “Pour balancer le succès du Vampire mélodrame dégoûtant et si monstreux que les auteurs MM. Ch. Nodier et Carmouche m’ont pas osé se faire connaître, le théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin se prépare à représenter la traduction littérale, en prose, de la Marie Stuart de Schiller.”
Yet another critic is even more trenchant and severe: “Le Vampire Ruthwen veut violer ou sucer dans les coulisses une jeune fiancée qui fuit devant lui sur le théâtre: cette situation est-elle morale? … Toute la pièce représente indirectement Dieu comme un être faible ou odieux qui abandonne le monde aux genies de l’enfer.”[39]
Yet all these attacks served but to enhance the attraction, and it is remarkable for how many years this continued undiminished. In 1823 a revival of Le Vampire with Philippe and Madame Dorval again thronged the Porte-Saint-Martin to excess. Alexandre Dumas, who was present at this production has recorded how vast was his delight, how ineffable his thrills during the sombre scenes of this sepulchral melodrame. How the theatre applauded the lean livid mask of the Vampire, how it shuddered at his stealthy steps! There are, perhaps, to be found throughout the whole of the many works of Alexandre Dumas few pages more entertaining than those chapters in his Memoires which relate with rarest humour and not a few flashes of brilliant wit his adventures at a performance of Le Vampire at the Porte-Saint-Martin in 1823. It would be difficult to find a livelier, and yet at the same time entirely serious and even critical, account of a theatrical performance. Unfortunately it is too long to give in full. In the edition of Mes Mémoires, Troisième Série, Michel Lévy, Paris, 1863, it occupies no less than five chapters, LXXIII–LXXVII, and these are none of the shortest, (pp. 136–193). One is tempted to quote some delicious passages, but the
