Four Gothic Dreams from a French Hermit

I have translated the following four dreams in a somewhat old-fashioned idiom—in such a way that I might communicate both with a francophile American in 1771—and with English speakers in the present day. The dreams are identified in the sequence in which they appear in A Dreaming Hermit by Louis-Sébastien Mercier, an epistolary novel first published in French in 1770 as Songes d’un Hermite. Each of them possesses something of the ambient, spooky Gothic-lite spirit of the Halloween season—with the twist that they are from a fictional jaded adult who has retired from the world; this titular hermit is in large part a skeptic—but not in such a way that he joins up with the philosophes of the Enlightenment either. Dreaming and documenting his dreaming are perhaps the main vehicles he has left for feeling hope or even having a macabre fright or two; that way he can fill his time in his seclusion. Perhaps you as an adult this Halloween season 2025 will read this just before going to bed and merely, as so many of us do, be visited by visions that are just a little odd.

Dream VI

As peace abiding as I may be, I have often dreamt of getting into heated arguments. In the dream that I am recounting, I was an antiquarian, and consequently I found myself quarreling with other scholars on numerous subtle matters. I produced folio-sized documents to prove to one of them that an ear from a colossal statue of Faustine that had recently been unearthed had been added and sculpted more than a century after the face at the end of the reign of Severus Alexander instead of having been executed during the era of the Antonines as was demonstrated by the character of the design and chiseling, which was obviously from that century. I cited so many authors that I thought my structured analysis on the ear of Faustine was exempt from any dispute. But my adversary fought back with a more voluminous book than mine. Then I was cast in the role of referee as two others were at odds over an inscription engraved on a mutilated piece of marble that someone had found while repairing a road. One antiquarian claimed it was a pledge to Asclepius; the other thought it marked the grave of a druid; their arguments boiled and they invoked countless authorities. Looking carefully at the marble, I deciphered these words in Gothic letters: Road from Châlons to Vitri. The two scholars were not satisfied with my verdict, and their dispute grew even hotter, so much so that after hurling insults at each other, one threw the marble at his opponent and knocked him out cold. 

After this bloody scene, I came to believe I had assembled one of the finest curiosity cabinets in all of Europe, and I went about spending vast sums on it. I owned unique items, among them two painted clay vases, one blue, the other burgundy; all the enthusiasts admired and coveted them. I had a plethora of canopic jars, statues from antiquity, medals, and bronzes. While I contemplated my bounty in my chair one day in the middle of my cabinet, an Egyptian mummy rose from where he had been lying in his coffin right before me. I trembled and got on my knees. I heard these words come deeply and sadly from the cadaver’s mouth: “Madman, why are you spending a fortune on tasteless and useless things when you could ease the worries of a whole province with your wealth? You ought to learn that the science of antiquarians is as obscure as it is profitless. You believe I’m one of those ancient Egyptians embalmed by their kin and carefully preserved. Hear this:  I’m a murderer. Only three years ago, I was hanged from a gallows in Marseille. A surgeon there knew how much travelers have a mania for mummies, so he embalmed me, bandaged me, and covered me in hieroglyphics he invented, sold me to that German, who sold me to you.” With those words uttered, the cadaver tumbled back into his coffin. [1}

Dream XIII

When I was small, my mother and the old women in my family filled my head with silly little tales, men raised from the dead, and absurdities of that nature. The like do engrave themselves on a tender brain and form scars, so to speak, over time with the arrival of reason but can never fully be erased. One cannot speak out too strongly against people who give children these false impressions or allow what influences an entire life, one’s health, and way of speaking to incubate. 

To get to my point, one of the tales that struck me hardest was about a type of dead man who comes to suck the blood of the living at night, drying them out as he has his fill; and I recall some nights of mine were awful for that reason. I had the feeling I was being sucked by wicked cadavers; in reality, I was visibly losing weight but that was on account of being frightened. I do not know how my imagination portrayed these objects in dreams that night; it has been so long since that left my memory. I believed I was surrounded by sepulchres in a cypress grove. I saw desiccated corpses exiting their tombs. In their upright position they resembled folk who were sniffing the foam of a wine or liqueur. I did not spend long guessing what they were up to. I saw a vast plain where a mass of men were doing rough tasks fit for the countryside. Some were harvesting, others were planting, tending to grapevines and fruit trees; some were seeding for the coming year; all of them were covered in sweat and dust. I could see rays made from their inner substance leaving them and heading into the mouths of the vampires. As these specters appeared to drain them, I could see how the woe-begotten farmers were losing their strength, becoming dry and sick, and finally feeble. The fruits of their labour, harvests, flocks, and herds all went down the mutating throats of the undead, whose faces were becoming plump with bright, rosy cheeks, short and pudgy bodies, and their plumpness swelled to greater extremes. Before my eyes were characters in voluminous wigs, with golden canes, fur-lined and embroidered outfits dripping with jewels. Most of them sat in large armchairs with what seemed to be gout. I asked someone who these men were and whether they were the same crowd I had seem come out of the ground a moment earlier, and was told they were superintendents, assessors, inspectors, tax collectors, and provincial intendants; I was shocked how their faces changed as they sucked with so much hungry desperation that it was though they had just begun. Their girth was a prodigy. They began to suffer from indigestion and I saw them vomit up the food that had so filled them. [2]

Dream XIV

Back when I was a society man, so often I pitied soft women who let their joy depend upon an endless array of minutiae and who go through agony when these tiny things are lost. My view is that they were never happy—or their pleasure was as brief as lightning. These may have been old ideas, but they came back to me in yet another wholly unique dream.  I saw the heart of one of these ladies laid bare, bound together in various places by a multitude of wires, tethered to everything she loved. The most tension was on a wire connecting her to a parrot belonging to the rarest of species. Every time it seemed a little sad, her heart was rattled. A porcelain chimney embellishment, a chandelier made out of the same material, a writing desk, a smart carriage, a little daffodil-yellow capuchin monkey were on the other end of chains tautly connected to the tenderest parts of her heart. Jewelry, gems, mules that made feet look tiny and elegant were also pulling so hard on her heart that the slightest tremor was excruciating. A finer and resoundingly slack network of threads terminated in her husband and children. The most incredibly peculiar thing was that the farther away the spouse drifted from her, the more relaxed that string became and only bothered her heart when he came closer to her again. 

Meanwhile, the capuchin lost an eye in a fight with a cat, an accident that set a chain shuddering. The lady’s heart bled and her eyes welled with tears. This affliction was soon followed by the no less bitter scenario of a chunk of the chimney decoration coming loose and losing its beauty in the fall. Her heart had barely begun to recover when the parrot swallowed a poison pill; its chain pulled away a large share of her heart when it came loose and the lady fainted; when she returned to her senses, the wounds multiplied. There were yet more wires that pulled loose and ripped her heart. I pitied her for being such a needy victim, and began to philosophize about the illness that comes from being too vainly attached to possessions. Right next to her, I noticed a girl from a village. She was lively and gay, no worry or regret on her face as in the case of the lady. Her heart only had five strings, and I was pleased to see the main one was tied to the heart of her husband, a young, vigorous peasant with radiant complexion and mighty pleased with his wife. Another string gripped a pretty child, another led to a crowded henhouse. The others were thinner, attached to cattle, and the last stretched to a flock of goats. Nothing rattled them in all the time I watched. I sensed the peasant girl was happier than the lady, her heart at peace with these legitimate objects of affection. Heaven saw to their preservation.  [3]

Dream XXIX

When one of my old friends learned where my abode was, he brought me blood sausages. I ate too many, the sole transgression against temperance that I have committed in my retirement from the world. I went to sleep with an indigestion that gave me dreams analogous to the heavy food that burdened me. I beg doctors to not call this comparison into doubt. 

I was transported in some manner unknown to me to a horrid island called the Isle of Blood. No expression can do justice to the terror that this country awakened in me. It was governed by a chief known as the Sansudourph, whose reign there was absolute; other chiefs ruled beneath him, spread throughout the villages, and these chiefs, known as the Sansuminadourphs, enjoyed great power, each in his own district. All these great characters feasted on human blood, but only the Sansudourph could drink it straight: the Sansuminadourphs mixed it with billy goat blood. 

All the residents—men, women, and children, were forced, on each full moon, to draw the blood the chiefs of the nation needed: the tax was proportionate to age and declined from age forty to death. 

There was an additional tribute. The Sansudourph and the other chiefs gathered their subjects to busy them with various jobs: they were motivated as the chiefs whipped them with iron rods until they fell, bathed in sweat: sweat that belonged to the masters, who appointed officers to harvest it with sponges, and these officers had a right to claim three quarters of it. The women of that land were especially predisposed to using it; they had it distilled into a cream they used to add redness to their elbows and heels. They also would turn it into a beverage that enlivened the color of their flesh. 

The wives of the head chief wore two hearts from little children on their ears, studded with gems, and this was a third tribute that the people of that land owed their master at the end of a certain number of moons. 

Unfortunately for me,  the very day my deranged imagination took me to that heinous island was the day the Sansudourph demanded his people pay his heart tax. 

I saw him leaving his palace, licking the blood from his disgusting lips right after he had swollen a whole vase’s worth. Those officers were drunk on it. He sat down, and right on schedule they brought him the child whose heart they were supposed to give him. It was a little six-year-old girl. I had never seen anyone so beautiful: ravishing hair, the skin on her face like white satin painted pink. She smiled and looked at her mother, who held her by the hand, and that smile made me pour out a torrent of tears. Sansudourph was asked if he wanted the blood tribute at the same time as the heart tribute. He said he did, but added, out of common benevolence, that he only wanted half of his blood tax. They opened the vein in the right arm of the child, and the Sansudourph, throwing aside the vase he normally used for blood, took up a type of siphon, inserted it in the open vein, and drank such that no one knew what he had taken out. I could not stop crying and yet I could not look away from the scene. The child fainted, and they rubbed her own blood on her to bring her back to her senses: her pretty face turned hideous, like a rose bud dragged through the mud. When she regained her senses and they had put the device on the bleeding wound, the hangman drew close; that is what I would call the man charged with removing her heart. When I saw him taking out his tools, I pulled out hair from my head, I felt like pulling out his arms. Unlucky blood sausages, look at the cruel night you forced upon me! The little girl was in the arms of her mother, who drenched her in tears. And her father held her head. All of this was the price they had to pay. The first blow made her let loose a cry that has such an effect on mothers. 

I had the good fortune in that moment to lose my sight and hearing. That is why I do not know how the operation ended. I regained my senses when everything was over and I saw the unlucky parents who staggered away carrying their girl, surely dead, but who was supposed to come back to life because the executioner, under pain of losing his job, was forced to keep children alive or bring them back to life after they passed through his hands. 

The black thoughts that the vapours of the blood sausage grew inside my brain did not end with that spectacle. I went into a hut where a large family lived. The bad smell coming off it twisted my belly: I counted twenty people in there, men, women, and children: all of them corpselike. They staggered around on their feet, barely capable of speech. An old man was resting on the ground, ready to breathe his last sigh. It was the paterfamilias and he could see the fourth generation of his offspring around him. He wanted to kiss them before dying but lacked the strength. The patriarch begged his eldest son to raise his arms, and carry them to the necks of his children. Just as two of them were stuck between his hands and his swollen belly, I saw three officers of a Sansuminadourph step in, the most impudent lot, who exuded brutality and barbarism. They informed the unlucky old man that they had come to collect the arrears he owed their master. It was an exorbitant sum since the fellow had not paid in ten years, not for himself or his family, since several illnesses had exhausted them all and the Sansuminadourph had made him a loan. The dying man could not give a response. He made a motion for his family to uncover his arms to show them to the officers. So the entire family fell at their feet: a younger daughter spoke up to ask them to spare a life that would only last a few more hours. “The blood that you will draw from my father,” she told them, “would not be worth the trouble to open up his veins. You’ll only get a few drops. And what’s more they won’t taste good. Grant us the consolation of seeing him die in peace. If you slit his throat, several of us, already cried dry from sadness, will die of grief, and those who survive will be unable to give you anything for a long time.” But the impatient officers demanded silence: “Give us your children,” they told them. “We’ll start with them. It is time to pay our master. He has simply waited too long.” At that, they opened the veins of the children and mother and left them petrified. They walked over to the old man, but he had given up the ghost at the moment he had seen his family’s blood be spilled. They continued executing the rest and left only a young man of eighteen alive. I remained alone with him, consoling him as best I could. And I dared, despite his grief, to ask him to make some things clear about the loaning of blood. He had the courage to oblige me. 

Our Sansuminadourph, he told me, is a fragile man. “He wants only good blood. When he found several disease- or poverty-stricken families in his district, he waits several years without demanding any tribute from them. But he has slaves that he keeps for that reason, and draws the blood that exhausted familes have not been able to pay him. He calls this blood “loan blood.” You have to pay it when you’re in a condition to do so. The tax doubles each moon that passes without you paying. When a head of family is about to go without paying his arrears, they rush over to get all the blood he has to give and blood from his children too. But they leave one or two people in each cabin to continue the line and the blood tax. “That’s simply awful,” I shouted. “And so unjust.” “No,” he told me, “It’s only unjust in some districts on the island, and not in this one. Our priests have passed laws so that blood interest is legitimate; without that, our Sansuminadourph wouldn’t accept it since he’s religious and has a fragile conscience. We even feel glad that he leaves us alone for several years without demanding anything from us. The amount of blood we owe him on each full moon belongs to him. It is his property, and when he does not ask for it, this blood profits us in our veins. So returning what he has loaned us is fair, and so is the benefit we’ve gotten from it. The weaker we are, the bigger the advantage, since leaving a dying person the only drops of blood keeping him alive means giving him an entire life: that’s why he owes the Sansuminadourph his life and something more beyond that.” “And that’s also why you have just seen your whole family breathe their last,” I said. [4]

[1] The eighteenth-century was part of an era of ongoing mummy mania, owing in part to a widely shared sense that mummia (petroleum bitumen), supposed to be a cure-all, was found in the preparations of age-old Egyptian mummies, though this connection was based on a misconstrual of the word mummy.

[2] Note the distancing effect, heightened in what is already a dream, accomplished by framing the story as the memory of old wives’ tales—casting suspicion on women was relatively tolerated in France. As such, the hermit and Mercier have an extra layer of deniability about a vision that is clearly about predatory ruling classes.

[3] The fourteenth dream contains a muffled message about Louis XIV. It was under the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, that nobles fell under the obligation to follow the high intricacies of etiquette at the court at the Palace of Versailles. In corresponding manner, the protagonist of this dream is both leading a life of luxury and is enslaved by her refinement. The peasant woman, the even-tempered base of the physiocratic economy, lives, by contrast, a mild and pleasant life.

[4]  Embedded in the names of the Sansudourph and Sansuminadourph is the polysemy of not being aware: sans su and not having a cent—sans sou—and perhaps being summoned as well as mine—as in avoir bonne mine—to look good—as well as mine—the excavation that extracts an ore—minable—adorer—to adore—a dowry—a dot—-as well as that cruel German modal verb—dürfen—that expresses that one ought to do something mixed with the German word Dorf, meaning palace. Overall a sense of an aristocratic class taking what it feels belongs to it.