the two friends visit the vault. “As if by mutual understanding, we both turned toward the coffin on our left. It belonged to the grandfather. We unplaced the lid, and there lay the old Holroyd. He appeared to be sleeping; his face was full of colour, and he had none of the stiffness of death. The hair was matted, the moustache untrimmed, and on the beard were matted stains of a dull brownish hue. But it was his eyes that attracted me. They were greenish, and they glowed with an expression of fiendish malevolence such as I had never seen before. The look of baffled rage on the face might well have adorned the features of the devil in hell.” They drive a stake through the living corpse, which shrieks and writhes, whilst the gushing blood drenches coffins and floor spurting out in great jets over the very walls. The head is severed from the body, and “as the final stroke of the knife cut the connexion a scream issued from the mouth; and the whole corpse fell away into dust, leaving nothing but a wooden stake lying in a bed of bones.” The remaining three bodies are treated in the same way, and thus the thrall of the curse is lifted from the old house, ten miles from the little town of Charing.
Although the genius of Charles Baudelaire, when his art required it, shrank from no extremity of physical horror, yet in his exquisite poem Le Vampire, he has rather portrayed the darkness and desolation of the soul:
Toi qui, comme un coup de couteau,
Dans mon coeur plaintif est entrée;
Toi qui, forte comme un troupeau
De démons, vins, folle et parée.
De mon esprit humilié
Faire ton lit et ton domaine;
—Infâme a qui je suis lié
Comme le forçat a la chaîne,
Comme au jeu le joueur têtu,
Comme à la bouteille l’ivrogne,
Comme aux vermines la charogne,
—Maudite, maudite sois-tu!
J’ai prié le glaive rapide
De conquerir ma liberté
Et j’ai dit au poison perfide
De secourir ma lâcheté.
