The Count’s terror showed itself in fits of hysterical laughter and outbursts of crazed blasphemies. His fear had a theatrical intensity not at all out of the character of a self-created demiurge – which is how I saw the Count. I did him the courtesy of seeing him as he wished to be seen, as the living image of ferocity, even if sometimes I found him risible. And yet his fear infected us all with such a quaking fever I wondered again if he might not be the Doctor in disguise, for he could communicate to us so well his own imaginings.
