lady of house of love

• sobbing in a derelict bedroom where a cracked mirror suspended from a wall does not reflect a presence - lady of the house of love


  Reference to Vampire Folklore –> Vampires can’t see their own shadows = Foreshadow of main character.
• the chateau in which the beautiful somnambulist helplessly perpetuates her ancestral crimes - lady of the house of love
• he lays out her inevitable Tarot - lady of the house of love


  Tarot Cards are a motif that represents the Countess being bound to fate
• She rises when the sun sets and goes immediately to her table where she plays her game of patience until she grows hungry, until she becomes ravenous - lady of the house of love
• She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness. - lady of the house of love


  her beauty is a “deformity” as it is part of her nature as a vampire, leading her to feel hollow and depressed in response to her dependency on death. message is that pure perfection is unnatural, hollow and impossible to replicate without dire consequences. 
• her claws and teeth have been sharpened on centuries of corpses - lady of the house of love
• she is the last bud of the poison tree that sprang from the loins of Vlad the Impaler who picnicked on corpses in the forests of Transylvania - lady of the house of love
• the Countess herself is indifferent to her own weird authority, as if she were dreaming it - lady of the house of love
• In her dream, she would like to be human; but she does not know if that is possible - lady of the house of love
• The Tarot always shows the same configuration: always she turns up La Papesse, La Mort, La Tour Abolie, wisdom, death, dissolution - lady of the house of love


  ‘La Papesse’ = ‘The High Priestess with wisdom

  La Mort’ = ‘Death’ but not fr death, more like the end of a cycle

  ‘La Tour Abolie’, = ‘The Tower’, stands for destruction, chaos or a major revelation

   despite the fact that she must kill to ensure her survival, she has the wisdom to know that it is wrong. Death and The Tower also seem to show this sad circumstance, but could also herald her ultimate fate.
• she will creep home, whimpering, with blood smeared on her cheeks - lady of the house of love
• Crouching, quivering, she catches the scent of her prey. Delicious crunch of the fragile bones of rabbits and small, furry things she pursues with fleet, four-footed speed - lady of the house of love
• All claws and teeth, she strikes, she gorges; but nothing can console her for the ghastliness of her condition, nothing - lady of the house of love
• She resorts to the magic comfort of the Tarot pack and shuffles the cards, lays them out, reads them, gathers them up with a sigh, shuffles them again, constantly constructing hypotheses about a future which is irreversible - lady of the house of love
• Everything about this beautiful and ghastly lady is as it should be, queen of night, queen of terror--except her horrible reluctance for the role - lady of the house of love
• She will invite you with smiles and gestures; you will follow her - lady of the house of love
• The Countess wants fresh meat - lady of the house of love
•  But now she is a woman, she must have men - lady of the house of love
• She loathes the food she eats ... but hunger always overcomes her - lady of the house of love
• She sinks her teeth into the neck where an artery throbs with fear; she will drop the deflated skin from which she has extracted all the nourishment with a small cry of both pain and disgust - lady of the house of love
• the Countess's governess brings them into the drawing room where the cards on the table always show the Grim Reaper - lady of the house of love


  foreshadowing death
• The blood on the Countess's cheeks will be mixed with tears - lady of the house of love
• Fee fie fo film, I smell the blood of an Englishman - lady of the house of love


  Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman, Be he alive, or be he dead I’ll grind his bones to make my bread - from jack and the beanstalk - giant was going to eat jack

  Charles Mackay suggests its actually a coherent phrase of ancient Gaelic meaning “Behold food, good to eat, sufficient for my hunger!”
• He has the special quality of virginity ... ignorance ... and, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance - lady of the house of love
• To ride a bicycle is in itself some protection against superstitious fears, since the bicycle is the product of pure reason applied to motion. Geometry at the service of man! - lady of the house of love
•  He has chosen the most rational mode of transport in the world for his trip round the Carpathians ... Beneficial to the health, it emits no harmful fumes and permits only the most decorous speeds. How can a bicycle ever be an implement of harm? - lady of the house of love
• the waxen fingers of the countess turn up the card called Les Amoureux. Never, never before ... never before has the Countess cast herself a fate involving love. - lady of the house of love
• Be he alive or be he deadI'll grind his bones to make my bread. - lady of the house of love


  after the tarot card showing signs of love, she will experience it at any cost
• as soon as they left the village, inducing a sensuous vertigo; a blast of rich, faintly corrupt sweetness strong enough almost, to fell him - lady of the house of love


  feeling sickly after deciding to go to the castle - foreshadowing?
• he knew it was too late to turn back and brusquely reminded himself he was no child, now, to be frightened of his own fancies - lady of the house of love
• He felt a certain involuntary sinking of the heart to see his beautiful two-wheeled symbol of rationality vanish into the dark entrails of the mansion - lady of the house of love
• a dress fifty or sixty years out of fashion but once, obviously, intended for a wedding - lady of the house of love


  shows how long she's been doing this for
• a girl with the fragility of the skeleton of a moth, so thin, so frail that her dress seemed to him to hang suspended, as if untenanted in the dank air - lady of the house of love


  she's like a ghost
• he thought of a child dressing up in her mother's clothes, perhaps a child putting on the clothes of a dead mother in order to bring her, however briefly, to life again - lady of the house of love
•  Her huge dark eyes almost broke his heart with their waiflike, lost look; yet he was disturbed, almost repelled, by her extraordinarily fleshy mouth - lady of the house of love
• At his touch, she seemed to revive a little and almost smiled, raising herself upright - lady of the house of love
• she seemed inadequately powered by some slow energy of which she was not in control; as if she had been wound up years ago, when she was born, and now the mechanism was inexorably running down and would leave her lifeless - lady of the house of love
• it will all be over very quickly. You will feel no pain, my darling. - lady of the house of love
• She does not possess herself; her ancestors sometimes come and peer out of the windows of her eyes and that is very frightening - lady of the house of love
• she hovers in a no-man's land between life and death, sleeping and waking - lady of the house of love