The Vampires of Morève: A Family Chronicle
Raoul Champfleury returns from Boston, where his aristocratic family had fled during the French Revolution, to his ancestral chateau of Morève reclaimed by the family during the Bourbon Restoration, and now lived in by his brother and sister-in-law, the Count and Countess of Morève, and his mother, Dowager Countess Régine-Rosemonde. His lifelong friend, Christophe Béranger, whose family had fled Morève with the Champfleurys, accompanies him. Before they know it, they are caught up together with the town’s mayor, lawyer Maître Littré, and the village’s one police officer, the intelligent and resourceful Pierre Dupont, in trying to solve the mysteries behind the disappearance of people and the discovery of bodies who appear to have been murdered by vampires. What they discovered horrifies them beyond words.
Memories of a Vanished Time
My mother, Ruth Blumenfeld, née Korn, was born on January 15, 1915; and died on August 18, 2015, aged one hundred years, seven months, and three days. My father, Max David Blumenfeld, was born on February 25, 1911 and died on December 26, 1994, about two months shy of his eighty-fourth birthday… I love my parents so much and I don’t want them to be forgotten, which is why I am writing this book. And I am writing this memoir for myself as much as for anyone else, because in doing so I bring my parents back to life in my memory. I do the same when it comes to my grandparents and aunts and uncles. I write also for my family members, who may wish to know more about our background. And I am writing for the general public, who may find this memoir of interest as being the embodiment in specific people of the history of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in the United States… When my father was born, World War One was several years away, and when my mother was born, World War One was raging. They lived through the Roaring Twenties and Prohibition, the Great Depression, and World War Two, and the subsequent wars… They lived through the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. The technological changes in their lifetime were the greatest in human history, from the evolution and ubiquity of the telephone, and of electricity and electric lighting, to airplane travel and the proliferation of the automobile, the invention and spread of radio and television, and the invention of such conveniences as frozen orange juice, the electric clothes drier, and the electric dishwasher, and, later on, of the internet, the computer and the smartphone, and of so much more… The world was a better place because Mom and Dad were in it. They did much political and social good in their time because they cared, and they wanted to help create a kinder, better, more loving world for everyone, a world where the ideals of equality and justice for all would at least begin to be fulfilled. When people like them disappear from the earth, the world is a poorer place.
TWO PLAYS
The Count of Sainte-Hélène: A Balzacian Melodrama takes place in 1817-1818 in Paris, during the Bourbon Restoration when Louis XVIII had been placed on the throne of France at the decree of the Congress of Vienna after the defeat of Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. This play is based on one of the most sensational cases solved by the first great detective in history, Eugène-François Vidocq, the ex-convict who became head of the French Sûreté (the Security Service of the French police). An altogether extraordinary individual, he was an acquaintance of Victor Hugo, who based both Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert in Les Misérables on Vidocq; and a friend of Balzac, whose character Vautrin is even more closely inspired by and modeled on Vidocq than Hugo’s characters are.
Interludes of the Hear: A Play about Marcel Proust, his life and loves, was inspired by my love for that author’s most famous book, In Search of Lost Time. The play goes back and forth in time, as the Student interviews Céleste Albaret, Proust’s housekeeper and general factotum, for his doctoral dissertation. When I read the book, I felt it was as if he were talking directly to me. I am sure many readers have had the same experience. Proust’s penetrating picture of the society of his day in pre-World War One France, and of Paris during the war itself, and his amazing, psychologically insightful portrait of each of his characters, his understanding of psychology that in some ways parallels that of Sigmund Freud, makes his book still relevant in today’s world.