“Smarra, or the Demons of the Night” (original: “Smarra, ou Les Démons de la Nuit”) was written by Charles Nodier and first appeared in Smarra, ou Les démons de la nuit, songes romantiques, traduit de l'esclavan du comte Maxime Odin (1821). Jean Charles Emmanuel Nodier (1780-1844) was a librarian, poet, novelist, and author of short stories. He was one of the leading early French Romantics and wrote a number of novels, several in the vein of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Nodier also wrote Jean Sbogar, Histoire d'un Bandit Illyrien Mysterieux (1818), a räuberroman. Nodier’s work, especially “Smarra,” was a significant precursor of and influence on the Surrealists. His best-known individual story is “Smarra.”

“Smarra” is a concentric series of nightmares within nightmares. The story’s frame is the monologue of Lorenzo, who lies in bed beside Lisidis, his bride of a week. Lorenzo suffers from dreams that gradually become nightmares. In his dreams he is Lucius, the hero of Apuleius’ influential picaresque novel, The Golden Ass (c. 165 C.E.). As Lucius Lorenzo describes how, after finishing his studies in Athens, he decided to visit Thessaly, the poetical, magical city. But his overnight ride to Thessaly is accompanied by nightmares. When Lucius at last reaches the walls of Thessaly he sees many beautiful, lyre-playing maidens standing on the city walls. He also sees a somber woman who resembles his dead beloved. Lucius’ time inside Thessaly becomes increasingly horrific and filled with grotesque visions. Lucius sees a crowd of the victims of Thessaly’s sorceresses. In the crowd is Polémon, Lucius’ friend, who took a wound while saving Lucius’ life during the siege of Corinth. Polémon looks haunted, and Lucius tries to cheer Polémon up by telling him about the divine Myrthé, who Lucius loves. Polémon responds by telling Lucius about Méroé, the most beautiful of Thessaly’s women. Polémon, like all the men of Thessaly, had fallen in love with Méroé and pursued her with fervent ardor. She eventually relented and brought him to her palace, where he spent a night of “bliss and terror.” After the lovemaking Méroé summoned up demons, phantoms, and at last and most terrifyingly Smarra, Méroé’s demonic lover, who leapt on to Polémon’s chest and began feeding on Polémon’s heart. Méroé cursed Polémon so that every night, as soon as he feel asleep, he was attacked by terrifying visions. One particularly bad night Polémon was pursued across the world by Méroé, and he was forced to take part in the necrophagic ceremonies of the Thessalian sorceresses. After hearing this Lucius falls asleep and dreams that he has murdered Myrthé and Polémon and is to be executed for the murders. When he awakes Polémon is dead. Lorenzo then wakes up, feeling ten years’ older, and Lisidis tries to reassure him.

More than most stories of the horrible and fantastic, “Smarra” does not suffer from a recitation of the plot. The story is Nodier’s exceptionally successful attempt to describe in words the lived experience of a nightmare. Nodier’s imagery is dark, vivid and poetic, and the story’s narrative structure is an accurate recreation of the confused, byzantine logic of the nightmare. Knowing the plot to “Smarra” ahead of time does not lessen the story’s dark power. “Smarra” is not frightening in the same way that stories like Vincent O’Sullivan’s “When I Was Dead” or J.S. Le Fanu’s “Schalken the Painter” are, but its flood of dark, memorable imagery has a cumulative and dreadful (in the literal sense of causing dread) effect.

“Smarra” is seen as Nodier’s masterpiece. The combination of Nodier’s lyrical prose, the recurring imagery of the dream surrogates and their saintly or demonic female companions, and the knowing (though pre-Freudian) way in which Nodier portrays Lorenzo as working out his guilt and fears and desires through his dreams are all extremely effective. Nodier took the story-within-a-story structure from the eighteenth century contes oriental, or “Oriental stories,” which sprang up in the wake of Antoine Galland’s 1704-1717 French translation of The Thousand and One Nights (see: Vathek). But unlike most contes oriental “Smarra” uses the nested story-within-a-story structure not to create an Arabesque or Gothic story but instead to convey the experience of the nightmare, and the final result is powerful.

Although primarily inspired by Nodier’s viewing of Henry Fuseli’s masterpiece, “The Nightmare” (1790), “Smarra”

draws from Nodier’s reading of Abbé Fortis’s Viaggio in Dalmazia (1776), which details the story of a monk being attacked by a stryge: the classical precursor of the vampire, a half-owl, half-human creature, which, according to Pliny, attacks the heart. While the story may well have existed on the Dalmatian coast in folklore form, its basis is Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, which begins with Aristomenus seeing his friend Socrates attacked by witches and being powerless to intervene.¹

“Smarra” is one of the best-known stories of the frénétique school. Nodier coined the term frénétique to describe those writers who “flaunt their atheism, rage and despair over tombstones, exhume the dead in order to terrify the living, or who torment the reader’s imagination with such horrifying scenes as to suggest the deranged dreams of madmen.”² The frénétique school can be seen as a Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationalism, which was felt to have led to the French Revolution and the Terror. The frénétique writers went the other way, indulging in the passions of Romanticism and the terror and supernaturalism of the Gothic. Frénétique writers, who included Hugo (see: Hans of the Island), Balzac (see: The Centenarian, or the Two Beringhelds), and Arlincourt (see: The Recluse), used violent imagery, evil humans portrayed as monsters (including werewolves and vampires), and scenes of terror in an effort to shock the reader. The frénétique school was popular in France in the early 1820s and influenced succeeding generations of French writers, including Victor Hugo (in The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Charles Baudelaire, and the Surrealists.

“Smarra” is an early vampire story. Although Smarra itself is a demon, he feeds on Polémon in a vampiric fashion. Nodier wrote “Smarra” only two years after John Polidori wrote “The Vampyre,” but the inspiration for “Smarra” was Henry Fuseli’s famous horror painting The Nightmare (1781), not Polidori’s work,³ and the vampiric figures in “Smarra” owe far more to traditional folklore, especially Eastern European folklore, than to Polidori’s modern and literate revision of the character type.

Print: Joan C. Kessler, ed., Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness, and the Supernatural from Nineteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Joan C. Kessler, “Charles Nodier’s Demons: Vampirism as Metaphor in Smarra,” French Forum 16, no. 1 (Jan 1991): 51-66.

Joan C. Kessler, “Introduction,” in Joan C. Kessler, ed., Demons of the Night: Tales of the Fantastic, Madness, and the Supernatural from Nineteenth-Century France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

¹ Matthew Gibson, The Fantastic and European Gothic: History, Literature and the French Revolution (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2013), 25.

² Qtd. in Terry Hale, “French and German Gothic: The Beginnings,” in Jerrod E. Hogle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 78.

³ James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1981), 29.