Carmilla, chapter eleven

Chapter twelve is called A Petition, and the title already tells you the joke. A petition is what you make to someone who can grant it. But the Countess’s request arrives in the tone of a person conferring, and the General says so himself, in the plainest sentence in the chapter: she asked like someone doing him the favor. He agrees to take a stranger’s daughter off her hands for a few weeks, tonight, no name, no house, no references. And he knows it is audacious while he is doing it.

Then the fatality. His ward walks up and asks for the visit too. The mother’s request and the girl’s wish close at the same moment, and it stops mattering who is asking. So he consents. This is the novel’s real instrument. Not the fangs. The etiquette. Nobody in this book is bitten because they were weak; they are bitten because it would have been rude to say no.

The rest is a rehearsal, in advance, of every excuse they will need. Before she leaves, the mother gets the General to promise to ask nothing about her, and to keep her daughter from asking either. An alibi, arranged politely, before the crime. And at the carriage, the girl leans out to wave goodbye and goes still: her mother does not look up. The General offers the child an out at once, unasked. The Countess had taken off her mask, he says, she could not have seen you. He comforts her by explaining away the one moment she is right. Same move as the last three chapters. The person in danger covering for the thing that wants them.

Then the ball, and the girl vanishes into it, and stays gone until two the next afternoon, and comes back with a story about a housekeeper’s bed. He believes it because he has to. He is already responsible.

The last line is one of the best closings Le Fanu wrote. That day Millarca came home with us. Would to heaven we had lost her, he says one paragraph earlier, and then he ends on how happy he was to have found his dear girl a companion. Two lines apart. The whole book is in that gap.

Nine minutes and fifty-three seconds. Chapter eleven of Le Fanu’s numbering, and still the General talking: the same account that started in house chapter ten, no break in speaker. Millarca’s few lines stay in Laura’s voice, the way the masked lady’s did. She has not been named Carmilla yet, and the reading will not name her early.

Le Fanu’s novel is in the public domain.