In a Glass Darkly
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
Language: English
Pages: 247
ISBN: 1537669842
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
This remarkable collection of stories, first published in 1872, includes Green Tea, The Familiar, Mr. Justice Harbottle, The Room in the Dragon Volant, and Carmilla. The five stories are purported to be cases by Dr. Hesselius, a 'metaphysical' doctor, who is willing to consider the ghosts both as real and as hallucinatory obsessions. The reader's doubtful anxiety mimics that of the protagonist, and each story thus creates that atmosphere of mystery which is the supernatural experience. This new annotated edition includes an introduction, notes on the text, and explanatory notes.
very well. He used to visit the schloss generally twice a year. It was the figure of a hunchback, with the sharp lean features that generally accompany deformity. He wore a pointed black beard, and he was smiling from ear to ear, showing his white fangs. He was dressed in buff, black, and scarlet, and crossed with more straps and belts than I could count, from which hung all manner of things. Behind, he carried a magic lantern, and two boxes, which I well knew, in one of which was a salamander,
inn-yard under my window. I took a turn or two up and down my room, and sighed, looking at myself in the glass, adjusted my great white "choker," folded and tied after Brummel, the immortal "Beau," put on a buff waist-coat and my blue swallow-tailed coat with gilt buttons; I deluged my pocket-handkerchief with Eau-de-Cologne (we had not then the variety of bouquets with which the genius of perfumery has since blessed us) I arranged my hair, on which I piqued myself, and which I loved to groom in
in Paris; and the rascals who played the trick were never found out." In this Monsieur Carmaignac, as I afterwards discovered, spoke truly; for, among my books of French anecdote and memoirs, the very incident is marked by my own hand. While we were thus talking the waiter told us that dinner was served, and we withdrew accordingly; my guests more than making amends for my comparative taciturnity. Chapter XVIII — The Churchyard * OUR dinner was really good, so were the wines; better,
stooping over me he looked earnestly in my face. He touched my forehead, drew his hand across it, and then looked in my eyes for a time. "Well, doctor, what do you think?" whispered the Count. "How much did you give him?" said the Marquis, thus suddenly stunted down to a doctor. "Seventy drops," said the lady. "In the hot coffee?" "Yes; sixty in a hot cup of coffee and ten in the liqueur." Her voice, low and hard, seemed to me to tremble a little. It takes a long course of guilt to
"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