By the time he had been ten years a vampire, Charles had left far behind him all the misconceptions regarding undeath that he learned on the stage of the Théâtre Porte-Saint-Martin and the pages of romans feuilletons. When the revolution of 1848 had given way to Louis Napoléon’s coup d’état, and the consequent exile of Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas and Eugène Sue, he became convinced that there were more undead among the living than anyone had ever suspected, although their appetite for work had helped to hide their presence. Whether there might be any laboring in the fields or in manufactories he could not tell, but he suspected that an inability to lose consciousness would be less an asset than it might seem in such repetitive occupations. His judgment was that the great majority of the p
