"carmilla" - читать интересную книгу автора (Fanu J Sheridan Le)

CARMILLA



by Sheridan Le Fanu



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 precis of the learned Doctor's reasoning, or extract from his statement
on a subject which he deseribes as "involving, not improbably, some of the
profoundest arcana of our dual existenee, and its intermediates."



I was anxious, on discovering this paper, to re-open 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
a conscientious particularity.



CHAPTER I