Short Stories
Studies of Death - 1894
Hylas
Narcissus
My father died before I was born, and my mother in giving birth to me, so I was born at once to a title and a fortune. I Merely mention this to show that Fortune, in a way, seemed from the first to smile upon me. The one passion of my life was beauty, and I thought myself specially fortunate that I realised my own ideal in myself. Even now that I am writing I look round the room, and see portraits of myself at varoius stages of my life: as a child, boy and a young man. Never have I seen a face as lovely as my own was. That glorious classical outline, those large lustrous, dark blue eyes, that curledgold hair, like woven sunshine, that divinely curved mouth and exquisite grace of lips, that splended poise of neck and throat! I was not vain in the proper sense of the word, for vanity means desire for the approbation of others, and getting up oneself to please others. But I, on the contrary, did not care what others thought; I would remain for hours before the mirror in a kind of ecstasy. No! no single picture I had ever seen could come up to me.
The Death of a Vocation
Viol d'Amor
The Egg of the Albatross
The True Story of a Vampire
Vampire stories are generally located in Styria; mine is also. Styria is by no means the romantic kind of place described by those who have certainly never been there. It is a flat, uninteresting country, only celebrated by its turkeys, its capons, and the stupidity of its inhabitants. Vampires generally arrive at night, in carriages drawn by two black horses.
Our vampire arrived by the commonplace means of the railway train, and in the afternoon.
The Worm of Luck
The Other Side
Translations from Balzac - Christ in Flanders, A Passion in the Desert
A Secret Kept - 1894 (first published 2002)
The
Child of the Soul & Other Stories - 1890's (first
published 1999)
The Child of the Soul
La Girandola
A Modern St. Venantius
The Story of a Scapular Click here for sound file
The world says charitably that Bernard and I (Francis) were once two very dissipated young men. Dissapated indeed! -- Debauched and deprqaved rather. We were not always so. When we first met we conversed together chiefly on religious subjects. How was it? Did we read latent depravity in one another's eyes?
At first we spoke hesitatingly, then plainly: afterwards we whispered.
Three Letters to Norman O'Neill.
