Free The Decadent Cookbook by Jerome Fletcher Alex Martin Medlar Lucan Durian Gray Page B

well-heeled young Parisian woman is standing in the courtyard of the slaughterhouse at La Villette. All about her is carnage. Nearby, a slaughterman, meat cleaver in hand, stands over the body of a freshly despatched cow. The woman, meanwhile, sips delicately from her glass, while others, similarly demure, wait patiently by the gate to receive their portion.
    This puts one in mind of a favourite figure of the Decadent imagination - the Vampire. In Decadent poetry, the vampire is often used as a metaphor for the poet’s mistress. She sucks the lifeblood and vitality out of him, leaving him dull and listless. For this he curses her and wishes her dead, but she has an appalling power over him, from which he can never break free.
    Although the vampire has come down to us as a male character, loosely based on the Romanian king Vlad Dracul, alias Vlad the Impaler, it seems more probable that the original vampire was a woman - the 17th century Hungarian Countess, Elisabeth de Báthory.
    The Countess occupied the castle of Csejthe and belonged to one of the most powerful families in Hungary. She was a vain, sadistic and thoroughly debauched woman, who took delight in pinching the flesh of her serving girls with special silver pincers. Her husband may have curbed some of her more depraved practices, but after his death in 1604, she went on an orgy of blood-letting. By now she was forty three years old and her once considerable beauty was fading rapidly. The creams, lotions, magic herbs and spells were of no avail in this struggle with nature and the Countess was becoming obsessed with her loss. One day, she slapped a chambermaid so hard that blood from the girl’s nose splattered the Countess’s face. On washing it off, she became convinced that where the blood had splashed her, the skin was whiter and less wrinkled than before. Given the properties that had been ascribed to blood in medicine, alchemy and witchcraft, the Countess reasoned that virgins’ blood would be the substance to restore her lost youth.
    With the aid of a sinister old peasant woman named Dorotta Szentes, the Countess began procuring and murdering young peasant girls. They were drained of their blood, which was warmed, and, just before dawn, the Countess would lower herself into a bath of it. She is also said to have drunk the blood of young girls she was torturing, and there was talk of cannibalism at the castle.
    Before long, Countess Elisabeth was requiring at least five serving girls a week to satisfy her terrible obsession, and in order for her sadistic activities to remain undetected for so long must have required considerable complicity on the part of the local people. The local Lutheran pastor, for example, was sometimes having to bury up to nine mutilated bodies a night in the village church-yard.
    Unfortunately, the Countess’s blood-bath was not having the desired effect. Her beauty was not being restored. A local woman with a knowledge of the black arts explained that this was because peasant blood was of inferior quality. Only noble blood had the restorative properties the Countess required. In the winter of 1609 she began taking into her home the daughters of the minor aristocracy under the cover of instructing them in the social graces. The disappearance of these unfortunate girls however became far more difficult to explain than that of peasants’ daughters. The Countess was denounced after the naked bodies of four of them were found at the foot of the castle walls.
    Elisabeth de Báthory is said to have been responsible for the deaths of up to six hundred and fifty girls, but it required an act of Parliament to have her arrested. Even then her social position protected her from being brought to trial. Instead, her cousin, the Lord Palatine of Hungary, ordered that she be walled up in a tiny room in her own castle. She was fed through a small hatch and survived in this way for three and half years.
    The consumption of blood doesn’t always