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Post by dem bones on Feb 7, 2010 14:36:47 GMT
Alexandre Dumas - Horror At Fontenay (Sphere, 1975) Dennis Wheatley - Introduction Alan Hull Walton - Preface
Murder The Cellar The Report Scarron's Ancient Residence The Mayor Relates Some Facts The Mystery Deepens The Sequel The Black Cat And Other Horrors The Desecration of The Royal Tombs The Body On The Gallows The Bracelet Of Human Hair The Carpathian Vampire ConclusionBlurb: The first translation of Alexandre Dumas’s immortal occult novel. The book opens with a Frenchman who has beheaded his wife … and then surrenders himself, swearing that the dismembered head spoke to him. A highwayman returns to the gallows on which he has hung a victim … to become, himself, the hanged man. Dumas paints a picture of vivid horror and supernatural happenings that is a worthy addition to this collection.
Horror at Fontenay is Volume 25 in the Dennis Wheatley Library of the OccultA set of interlinked stories set around a frame, and translated by Alan Hull Walton, who had quite recently performed the same service for De Sade's Gothic masterpiece Justine. According to those who know about such things, Horror At Fontenay is condensed from a far longer portmanteau work, Les Mille Et Un Phantomes (1849), and it's unclear if all of it was written by Dumas. Murder - The Cellar - The Report - Scarron's Ancient Residence: The year is 1831 and Dumas, then aged 27, is holidaying in the French countryside where he encounters a clearly terrified man heading for the Mayor Ledru's residence. He is Jacquermin, a local quarryman, and he greets the Mayor's wife with the startling news: "I've killed my wife and have come to give myself up ... They'll find the body in the cellar .... and the head nearby, in a sack of plaster." The Chief of Police is called and Dumas is among a small party who escort the prisoner back to his home, where they duly discover the decapitated corpse. But what has horrified a barbaric murderer so that he will only enter the cellar if Ledru agrees to hold his hand? The Chief of Police, a man not given to sensitivity it seems, insists on filing his report in the cellar before the mutilated corpse, and Dumas, being among the first on the scene, is requested to give his testimony. This done, Mayor Ledru, who confesses himself a fan of Dumas's work, invites him to dine at his home, a lavish if rather strange building which once belonged to the distinguished and notoriously debauched author Scarron. As he shows off a somewhat macabre collection of Royal relics, Ledru fills Dumas on the night's colourful guest-list. There is the author, Jean-Louis Alliette, a filthy tramp of a fellow who claims to be in possession of the elixir of life; Moulle, the Abbe of St Suplice, who is scarily well-informed on matters occult: the Chevalier Lenoir, a famous antiquarian who very nearly fell foul of the Revolutionaries on account of his obsessive collecting; finally, an enigmatic lady in black who would disappear in the shadows were it not for her deathly white pallor. The days events lead to a debate as to whether or not a guillotined head can live on to do the executioner a nasty turn, which in turn gives way to a much wider discussion on vengeful vampires, phantoms and some extremely bloody episodes during The Terror. Each of the guests has their own dreadful story to relate .... To be continued ....
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Post by pulphack on Feb 8, 2010 7:41:02 GMT
i've not read this, but would be interested to know if it was the father or son who was responsible... and not necessarily as author.
as i understand it, the Dumas' set themselves up as the first branded fiction factory. alhough there were many grub street hacks churning it out anonymously (and their equivalents across europe), the Dumas were the first to take a 'best-seller' name and then use it to brand a continuous stream of fiction either written, part-written or just overseen by themselves. like james patterson, tom clancy, etc these days.
and that, sad to say, is the extent of my knowledge on the matter at present. it would account for the anomaly of not knowing who penned what - but were they first to do this, and does anyone know more details?
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Post by dem bones on Feb 8, 2010 9:32:43 GMT
In his lively preface, Alan Hull Walton can tell us nothing about the books publishing history - he found a very battered volume among a friend's collection - but his research satisfied him that it was the work of Dumas pere, "almost certainly written without collaboration", and, most likely, abandoned by the author who seems to have lost interest in the project (the Sphere edition runs to a mere 190 pages all in, making it very attractive to most of us, unforgivably stingy to the readership of the day). As the preface continues, it becomes clear that, even if the original was "almost certainly written without collaboration", the same cannot be said of the Sphere which has Mr. Hull Walton's dabs all over it. He adds paragraphs, runs a big blue marker pen through boring bits, tarts it up here and there, even provides an ending. And .... well, this is the third time i've read it which tells you at least somebody likes it. There's a very Penny Dreadful feel to Une Journie a Fontenay-aux-Roses, in that it's incredibly patchy but somehow still holds together. I still reckon Dumas saves the best, and certainly the most famous story 'til last, but for it's atmosphere of madness and sheer dread, the next sequence certainly runs it close.
The Mayor Relates Some Facts - The Mystery Deepens - The Sequel: Next up, a poignant ghost story set against ....
"... We were at the height of the Terror: hundreds upon hundreds were being executed - day after day, week after week, while the crowds roared and applauded and shrieked with delight ... Ah, but they were dreadful times - times when virtue or nobility were guarantees of prison or the guillotine: when debtors paid their debts by denouncing their creditors; when criminals pursued by the law denounced their judges to the Revolutionary Committees; when those who had no work denounced those who had, and heirs denounced the relatives whose fortunes would eventually becomes theirs. It was a time when husbands - or wives - found the guillotine a convenient way of ridding themselves of unwanted partners; and when children, for no better reason than malicious spite, denounced their parents ....."
Much to the astonishment of Dr. Roberts, Ledru says that he believes Jacquermin's seemingly lunatic account of how his wife's severed head attacked him, citing odd goings on at the execution of Marat's murderer, Charlotte Corday, and, from personal experience, his doomed romance with Solange, the beautiful daughter of an Aristocrat he'd helped smuggle out of the country. Ledru had secured passports for father and daughter, but, fatally, Solange chose to remain in Paris out of love for him.
As a young, influential and increasingly disillusioned Revolutionary, Ledru had set out to disprove Dr. Guillotin's assertion that his invention was a more humane method of execution than the rope, in the hope he could persuade the Revolutionary Committee to abolish the death penalty. To this end, he'd built a laboratory next to the cemetery at Clamort where the bodies of the slain were daily thrown into the huge communal pits. His vocation is a depressing one at the best of times, but how much worse when he recognises the head of his loved one among the day's latest sackload ...
The Black Cat And Other Horrors: Dr. Roberts, a cynic in matters supernatural, argues that Ledru's terrible experience was merely a hallucination, and relates the story of a Judge who was haunted to madness and death by a tomcat, a cadaverous usher and, finally, a skeleton with glaring eyes, after a vicious criminal cursed him from the scaffold.
The Chevalier's story takes us back to Saint-Denis in 1794 when, as curator of the Museum of National Antiquities, he reluctantly supervised The Desecration of The Royal Tombs, the bodies of all the Kings of France exhumed by order of the Revolutionary authorities and unceremoniously reburied in quicklime. When a workman defaces the immaculately preserved corpse of Henry IV, "the best of the few worthwhile King's France ever had", he is shunned by the entire community until a mysterious woman lures him back to the scene of his crime. The very angry dead monarchs await ...
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Post by shonokin on Feb 8, 2010 21:28:36 GMT
Wow, this sounds really interesting!
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Post by dem bones on Jun 24, 2010 16:23:30 GMT
damn! i was getting right into Horror At Fontenay and then forgot it existed!
The Body On The Gallows: Moulle, the Abbe of St Suplice, recalls how he saved the soul of L'Artifaille, a notorious master thief he surprised in the act of looting the church. L'Artifaille was so moved by Moulle's offer to pay him not to steal the chalice that he walked away empty handed save for a medallion of the virgin which the Abbe gratefully blessed for him. Some years later, L'Artifaille is hung for his persistent pilfering, and his executioner returns to the gallows after nightfall intent on stealing the medallion. The corpse isn't about to let it go without a fight ...
The Bracelet Of Human Hair: Not my favourite in the book, it has to be said. Aliette's is another benevolent ghost story. An old man's love for his wife survives the grave. At least when the strand of hair goes missing we get a fairly tasty exhumation scene to alleviate the joy and niceness.
from memory, the next and last is the best of the lot.
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Post by Anthony Hogg on Jan 23, 2020 5:36:27 GMT
According to M. M. Carlson, "What Stoker Saw: An Introduction to the Literary History of the Vampire," Folklore Forum 10, no. 2 (1977): 27, hdl.handle.net/2022/1630: "The vampire captured Dumas' imagination. Dennis Wheatley recently discovered a long-lost Dumas novel, The Horror at Fontenay an interesting little volume which adds two motifs to the tradition of the literary vampire: the vampire casts no shadow and has no reflection." Is this correct? If so, which page(s) mentions this?
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Post by dem bones on Jan 24, 2020 20:14:28 GMT
It is a different translation of the story which appears in Peter Haining's The Vampire Omnibus as The Pale Lady. Horror At Fontenay appears to be a translation of tales from Les mille et un fantômes, 1849, possibly the entire volume? Some relevant passages from Alan Hull Watson's version, The Carpathian Vampire, in The Horror at Fontenay, Sphere, 1975. These lines are very different in the version included in The Vampire Omnibus. It could be that AHW's is a faithful translation of Dumas, but it's equally plausible he tweaked certain passages for dramatic effect?
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