New Translations

THE story of Baron Melchoir Von Dronte's experience in the see-thing and chaotic countries of France and Germany in the late Eighteenth Century, the admirable blending of the supernatural and picturesque, the touch of fantasy, and the vigor of its action, place this book well above Bram Stoker's "Dracula" as a tale of a life hereafter. With the well-told description of Von Dronte's early life the author skillfully disarms the reader of his will to disbelieve, and, having gained his confidence and credulity, he adroitly weaves his weird spell.

And this bewitchery, for such it is, not to be cast aside. It clings by a touch of Eastern mysticism, by the directness of the Teutonic mind that created it, and by the deftness with which common experiences are used to support supernatural contentions. We are all affected by this: "It would happen, for instance, that the striking of an old clock, the sight of a landscape, the melody of a song, an aroma, or even a mere combination of words, impressed themselves on my mind, as distinctly as if I had heard, seen, inhaled or otherwise experienced the same thing already; as though this place or that place, which actually I was seeing for the first time in my present existence, had met my eyes in some dim past."

Von Dronte acts and thinks like a character of Defoe or Smollett. His life is a coarse one spent as a student carousing at a German university, as a musketeer, calloused by army life, and as a wanderer, arrogant one moment and miserable the next. He has a taste of intensely pure and happy married life only to be dashed to the depths of depraved vagabondage. He witnesses the great social changes of his time both from the rank of a nobleman and from the position of a beggar.

The scenes of intense vividness are many. Not only is there a brutally distinct picture of the guillotine, but a first-hand description of being guillotined. At this point the author's imagination reaches its greatest height. The spirit aloofly observes the physical phenomena of the body just before it climbs the scaffold. It watches the blade descend, sees the twitching limbs left on the board and the staring eyes of the head in the bloody basket. Then as a vitreous transparent body, seeing and hearing, but not feeling, he travels the world in a search for the mating humans who are to create the spark of life in which he is to be re-incarnated.

The spirit of the book is one of complete disdain for death. Knowing as he does, that his expiration means merely a transition unchecked by fear of retribution. Hence he sweeps through the pages with a colorful vigor; a complete libertine and a consummate lover. Though the cold perspiration of death stands on his body, his spirit has only the taunt: "Non Omnis Moriar--not all of me shall die!"