Midnight!!

Minuit!! recits de la veillee, signed "Claude Vignon," the nom-de-plume of the sculptor Marie-Noemi Cadiot (1828-1888), once briefly married to "Eliphas Levi," was first published in 1856. The six stories contained therein are the work of an intelligent, well-informed and thoughtful author, and are remarkable in mapping out an evolutionary spectrum of Gothic and post-Gothic fantasies that exemplifies certain key phases within the evolution of Romantic fantasy. Two are set in Germany, one in the Middle Ages and one in the sixteenth century, and are described as "legends,"The others is pure Gothic melodrama, deliberately brutal in their supernatural improvisations and their deployment in unusually stark moral fantasies. There are few examples in French Romantic fiction that are as forthright as Midnight!!