A young priest sees a woman at the moment of his ordination and spends the rest of his life living two: a village curate by day, and by night a Venetian nobleman's companion in the palaces, with Clarimonde, who is dead. Gautier trained as a painter and led the Romantics at the riotous premiere of Hernani in 1830; this 1836 story is the most seductive vampire in French, and the seduction is the argument.