Carmilla

Carmilla

The Project Gutenberg EBook of Carmilla, by J. Sheridan LeFanu This
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Title: Carmilla
Author: J. Sheridan LeFanu
Release Date: November 7, 2003 [EBook #10007] [Date last updated:
December 1, 2004]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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CARMILLA ***

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CARMILLA
J. Sheridan LeFanu
1872

PROLOGUE
_Upon a paper attached to the Narrative which follows, Doctor
Hesselius has written a rather elaborate note, which he accompanies
with a reference to his Essay on the strange subject which the MS.
illuminates.
This mysterious subject he treats, in that Essay, with his usual learning
and acumen, and with remarkable directness and condensation. It will
form but one volume of the series of that extraordinary man's collected
papers.
As I publish the case, in this volume, simply to interest the "laity," I
shall forestall the intelligent lady, who relates it, in nothing; and after
due consideration, I have determined, therefore, to abstain from
presenting any précis of the learned Doctor's reasoning, or extract from
his statement on a subject which he describes as "involving, not
improbably, some of the profoundest arcana of our dual existence, and
its intermediates."
I was anxious on discovering this paper, to reopen the correspondence
commenced by Doctor Hesselius, so many years before, with a person
so clever and careful as his informant seems to have been. Much to my
regret, however, I found that she had died in the interval.
She, probably, could have added little to the Narrative _which she
communicates in the following pages, with, so far as I can pronounce,
such conscientious particularity_.

I
An Early Fright
In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent people, inhabit a castle,
or schloss. A small income, in that part of the world, goes a great way.

Eight or nine hundred a year does wonders. Scantily enough ours
would have answered among wealthy people at home. My father is
English, and I bear an English name, although I never saw England.
But here, in this lonely and primitive place, where everything is so
marvelously cheap, I really don't see how ever so much more money
would at all materially add to our comforts, or even luxuries.
My father was in the Austrian service, and retired upon a pension and
his patrimony, and purchased this feudal residence, and the small estate
on which it stands, a bargain.
Nothing can be more picturesque or solitary. It stands on a slight
eminence in a forest. The road, very old and narrow, passes in front of
its drawbridge, never raised in my time, and its moat, stocked with
perch, and sailed over by many swans, and floating on its surface white
fleets of water lilies.
Over all this the schloss shows its many-windowed front; its towers,
and its Gothic chapel.
The forest opens in an irregular and very picturesque glade before its
gate, and at the right a steep Gothic bridge carries the road over a
stream that winds in deep shadow through the wood. I have said that
this is a very lonely place. Judge whether I say truth. Looking from the
hall door towards the road, the forest in which our castle stands extends
fifteen miles to the right, and twelve to the left. The nearest inhabited
village is about seven of your English miles to the left. The nearest
inhabited schloss of any historic associations, is that of old General
Spielsdorf, nearly twenty miles away to the right.
I have said "the nearest inhabited village," because there is, only three
miles westward, that is to say in the direction of General Spielsdorf's
schloss, a ruined village, with its quaint little church, now roofless, in
the aisle of which are the moldering tombs of the proud family of
Karnstein, now extinct, who once owned the equally desolate chateau
which, in the thick of the forest, overlooks the silent ruins of the town.
Respecting the cause of the desertion of this striking and melancholy

spot, there is a legend which I shall relate to you another time.
I must tell you now, how very small is the party who constitute the
inhabitants of our castle. I don't include servants, or those dependents
who occupy rooms in the buildings attached to the schloss. Listen, and
wonder! My father, who is the kindest man on earth, but growing old;
and I, at the date of my story, only nineteen. Eight years have passed
since then.
I and my father constituted the family at the