What a Count

 'He looks like a man who could tame anything.  If he had married a tigress, instead of a woman, he would have tamed the tigress...'*

I've been romping voraciously through the eras in my reading matter lately, and after spending time in a surrealistic, folk horror near future, 1950s science fiction and a 1970s urban childhood (perhaps more on those another day), have just finished the highly successful 1860 'mystery thriller', The Woman In White by Wilkie Collins.  

I loved it for many reasons but, oh, against my better judgement perhaps, I've also become curiously enamoured with the most charming and flamboyant of villains, as well as with the author's fantastic ability to so lucidly conjure up and colour in a particularly unique character: Count Fosco.  How on earth do you come up with such an imagined person?  Once he'd made his first appearance, I longed for the Count's presence on every page, picturing and hearing him so vividly, perhaps more strongly than any other literary persona I've come across - and yet he is unlike anyone I could ever know in real life.  Hopefully!

Count Fosco is sixty years old, as corpulent as Henry the Eighth, plump-fingered, with a facial resemblance to Napoleon, appears to wear a wig, possesses a double chin, has a devilish fondness for a fruit tart or four, and yet...

'...I think the influence I am trying to find in him is in his eyes.  They are the most unfathomable grey eyes I ever saw, and they have at times a cold, clear, beautiful, irresistible glitter in them which forces me to look at him, and yet causes me sensations, when I do look, which I would rather not feel.'*

This Italian nobleman is superbly cultured, highly intellectual, urbane and well-dressed too...

'A blue blouse with profuse white fancy-work over the bosom covered his prodigious body, and was girt about the place where his waist might once have been with a broad scarlet leather belt.  Nankeen trousers, displaying more white fancy-work over the ankles, and purple morocco slippers, adorned his lower extremeties.'

But it's his eccentricity which really sets him apart.  He can sleep and awaken at will, plays the concertina (most theatrically!) in the garden and keeps his beloved pet white mice (which he lets scamper all over him and pop in and out of his waistcoat) in a tiny, colourful pagoda which he designed and made himself.  What's not to like?

Count Fosco (just as I imagined him before seeing this!) with Marian Halcombe,

wood engraving by John McLenan 1860

Have you read it - if so, did Count Fosco mesmerise you as he did me?  Do you have a favourite literary villain whom it's impossible to dislike in spite of their evil-doing?  Please point me their way!  I am ready to be led astray.

*As written by the book's plucky feminist heroine, Marian Halcombe