ABSTRACT
7The “foundation of the story was mine; but I was forced to disown the publication, lest the world should suppose that I had vanity enough, or was egotist enough, to write in that ridiculous manner about myself. * Notwithstanding which, the French editions still persevere in including it with my works. My real ‘Vampyre’ I gave at the end of ‘Mazeppa,’ something in the same way that I told it one night at Diodati, when Monk Lewis, and Shelley and his wife, were present. The latter sketched on that occasion the outline of her Pygmalion, story, ‘The Modern Prometheus,’ the making of a man, (which a lady’ who had read it afterwards asked Sir. Humphrey Davy, to his great astonishment, if he could do); Lewis told a story something like 8‘Alonzo and Imogene’; and Shelley himself (or ‘The Snake,’ as he used sometimes to call him,) conjured up some frightful woman of an acquaintance of his at home, a kind of Medusa, who was suspected of having eyes in her breasts.
