On the 23d of September, 1763, the Abbé Prevost, the French novelist
and compiler of travels, was seized with a fit in the forest of
Chantilly. The body was found, and conveyed to the residence of the
nearest clergyman. It was supposed that death had taken place through
apoplexy. But the local authorities, desiring to be satisfied of the
fact, ordered the body to be examined. During the process, the poor
abbé uttered a cry of agony.—It was too late.
It is to be observed that cases of sudden and unexplained death are, on
the one hand, the cases most likely to furnish a large percentage of
death-trance; and, on the other, are just those in which the anxiety
of friends or the over-zealousness of a coroner is liable to lead
to premature anatomization. Nor does it even follow that, because
the body happily did not wake while being dissected, the spark of
life was therefore extinct. This view, however, is too painful to be
followed out in reference to the past. But it imperatively suggests
the necessity of forbidding necroscopic examinations, before there
is perfect evidence that life has departed—that is, of extending to
this practice the rule which ought to be made absolute in reference to
interment.
Thus comes out the practical importance of the question, how is it to
be known that the body is no longer alive?
The entire absence of the ordinary signs of life is insufficient to
prove the absence of life. The body may be externally cold; the pulse
not be felt; breathing may have ceased; no bodily motion may occur; the
limbs may be stiff (through spasm); the sphincter muscles relaxed; no
blood may flow from an opened vein; the eyes may have become glassy;
there may be partial _mortification_ to offend the sense with the smell
of death; and yet the body may be alive.
The only security we at _present_ know of, that life has left the body,
is the supervention of chemical decomposition, shown in commencing
change of colour of the integuments of the abdomen and throat to blue
and green, and an attendant cadaverous fetor.
To return from this important digression to the former subject of the
Vampyr superstition. The second element which we have yet to explain
is the Vampyr visit and its consequence—the lapse of the party visited
into death-trance. There are two ways of dealing with this knot; one is
to cut it, the other to untie it.
It may be cut, by denying the supposed connexion between the Vampyr
visit and the supervention of death-trance in the second party. Nor
is the explanation thus obtained devoid of plausibility. There is no
reason why death-trance should not, in certain seasons and places, be
_epidemic_. Then the persons most liable to it would be those of weak
and irritable nervous systems. Again, a first effect of the epidemic
might be further to shake the nerves of weaker subjects. These are
exactly the persons who are likely to be infected with imaginary
terrors, and to dream, or even to fancy, they have seen Mr. or Mrs.
such a one, the last victims of the epidemic. The dream or impression
upon the senses might again recur, and the sickening patient have
already talked of it to his neighbours, before he himself was seized
with death-trance. On this supposition, the Vampyr visit would sink
into the subordinate rank of a mere premonitory symptom.
To myself, I must confess, this explanation, the best I am yet in a
position to offer, appears barren and jejune; and not at all to do
justice to the force and frequency, or, as tradition represents the
matter, the universality of the Vampyr visit as a precursor of the
victim’s fate. Imagine how strong must have been the conviction of
the reality of the apparition, how common a feature it must have been,
to have led to the laying down of the unnatural and repulsive process
customarily followed at the Vampyr’s grave, as the regular and proper
preventive of ulterior consequences.
I am disposed, therefore, rather to try and untie this knot, and with
that object to wait, hoping that something may turn up in the progress
of these inquiries to assist me in its solution. In the mean time, I
would beg leave to consider this second half of the problem a compound
phenomenon, the solutions of the two parts of which may not emerge
simultaneously. The Vampyr visit is one thing; its presumed contagious
effect another.
The Vampyr visit! Well, it is clear the Vampyr could not have left his
grave bodily—or, at all events, if he could, he never could have buried
himself again. Yet in his grave they always found him. So the body
could not have been the visitant. Then, in popular language, it was the
ghost of the Vampyr that haunted its future victim. The ghostly nature
of the visitant could not have been identified at a luckier moment.
The very subject which I next propose to undertake is the analysis of
ghosts. I have, therefore, only to throw the Vampyr ghost into the
crucible with the rest; and to-morrow I may perhaps be able to report
the rational composition of the whole batch.