The world is in order
                     The dead below
                     The living above

This is the epigraph to Anne Hébert's novel Héloïse…. And the dead do indeed come to us in this novel….

Héloïse is no ordinary femme fatale; she's the Real Thing, a vampire and a revenant, as well as a tall, pale, beautiful woman with "night-dark hair." She needs to drink the blood of men in order to stay "alive."…

I do not think this novel will come as a surprise to anyone who read The Torrent, Hébert's collection of novella and short stories, or her novels, The Silent Rooms and Kamouraska. Sex and death, or passion and death, have always been linked together in her works, and she has often explored the theme of "mastery." Hébert's characters, if they give in to their strange passions, often suffer death of one kind or another. The image of the vampire is a brilliant "objective correlative" for the passionate possession of one human being by another….

In the hands of an artist less skilled than Anne Hébert this could have been a very silly book. Bottereau is hard to take sometimes…. But when he says how "simple" it all is for him ("I rape and I kill") we feel his awful amorality. He is procurer and "dealer" and psychopath and very, very believable.

The way Hébert uses present-day Paris, with its crowded Métros, its underground musicians, its girls in long skirts and Tshirts saying "I'm feeling free," its noise and pollution as a background for this tale of enchantment and death is really wonderful. (p. 11)

There are a lot of references in the book that would probably have more significance—or would be more quickly recognizable as significant—to someone really familiar with Paris. I've only been there once, but I did remember that the subway stop at the very end of the novel ("Through the mist, one can read the name of the station, Père-Lachaise") is the name of the most fashionable cemetery in Paris. Gertrude Stein is buried there, Victor Hugo, Proust, Balzac, Sarah Bernhardt, Oscar Wilde, and a host of others. It's a regular village of the famous dead. And in this cemetery there stands a monument to Abelard and Héloïse.

It's no good trying to see this novel as a simple allegory, but that little bit of information is interesting, as is the fact that Abelard's passion for Héloïse got him emasculated (something we all seem to know, even if we've never read a word he wrote)….

But in the end that really doesn't matter. Héloïse is full of Hébert's usual superb writing, striking imagery, and careful observation of human (and inhuman) nature. And, like most of her work, it is not a book that I would like to read on a dark night, in a big house, all alone. (p. 12)