nth before I was born, by the fall of a stone somehow
dislodged from one of the deserted parapets of the castle, and my mother
having died at my birth, my care and education devolved solely upon one
remaining servitor, an old and trusted man of considerable intelligence,
whose name I remember as Pierre. I was an only child, and the lack of
companionship which this fact entailed upon me was augmented by the
strange care exercised by my aged guardian in excluding me from the
society of the peasant children whose abodes were scattered here and
there upon the plains that surround the base of the hill. At the time,
Pierre said that this restriction was imposed upon me because my noble
birth placed me above association with such plebeian company. Now I know
that its real object was to keep from my ears the idle tales of the
dread curse upon our line, that were nightly told and magnified by the
simple tenantry as they conversed in hushed accents in the glow of their
cottage hearths.

Thus isolated, and thrown upon my own resources, I spent the hours of my
childhood in poring over the ancient tomes that filled the
shadow-haunted library of the chateau, and in roaming without aim or
purpose through the perpetual dusk of the spectral wood that clothes the
sides of the hill near its foot. It was perhaps an effect of such
surroundings that my mind early acquired a shade of melancholy. Those
studies and pursuits which partake of the dark and occult in nature most
strongly claimed my attention.

Of my own race I was permitted to learn singularly little, yet what
small knowledge of it I was able to gain, seemed to depress me much.
Perhaps it was at first only the manifest reluctance of my old preceptor
to discuss with me my paternal ancestry that gave rise to the terror
which I ever felt at the mention of my great house, yet as I grew out of
childhood, I was able to piece together disconnected fragments of
discourse, let slip from the unwilling tongue which had begun to falter
in approaching senility, that had a sort of relation to a certain
circumstance which I had always deemed strange, but which now became
dimly terrible. The circumstance to which I allude is the early age at
which all the Comtes of my line had met their end. Whilst I had hitherto
considered this but a natural attribute of a family of short-lived men,
I afterward pondered long upon these premature deaths, and began to
connect them with the wanderings of the old ma