An H. P. Lovecraft Encyclopedia

de Russy, Antoine.

In “Medusa’s Coil,” a Louisiana planter whose decaying mansion is visited by the narrator, who spends the night there. De Russy’s tale about his son and his mysterious wife, whom he buried in the cellar of his house, constitute the story’s narrative.

de Russy, Denis.

In “Medusa’s Coil,” a young man who visits Paris and there falls in love with and marries the mysterious Marceline Bedard, whom he brings to Missouri to live with him. His friend Frank Marsh is captivated by Marceline, and he desires to paint her portrait. De Russy suspects his wife of infidelity with

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Marsh, but later he realizes that Marsh has been trying to inform him of his wife’s tainted background, and he kills her. He is strangled by Marceline’s animate hair.

de Russy, Marceline (Bedard).

In “Medusa’s Coil,” an alluring young woman in Paris who claims to be the illegitimate daughter of the Marquis de Chameaux, but who, after she marries Denis de Russy and returns with him to his estate in Missouri, is revealed to be not only an ancient entity endowed with animate hair, but also “a negress.”

“Descendant, The”

(title supplied by R.H.Barlow). Fragmentary story (1,500 words); probably written in early 1927. First published in Leaves(1938); first collected in Marginalia;corrected text in D.

Lord Northam is thought “harmlessly mad” by the people who know him; he lives with a cat in Gray’s Inn, London, and “all he seeks from life is not to think.” A man of great learning, Northam has been scarred by some harrowing incident in the past. One day a young man named Williams brings Lord Northam a copy of the Necronomicon,at the mere sight of which Northam faints. He then tells Williams the story of his life: he is a member of a family that extends very far back in history, perhaps to one Cnaeus Gabinius Capito, a military tribune in Roman Britain who had supposedly come upon “strange folk …[who] made the Elder Sign in the dark.” Northam himself, in his youth, had sought to penetrate the mysteries of Satanism and occultism, filled with “the tantalising faith that somewhere an easy gate existed, which if one found would admit him freely to those outer deeps whose echoes rattled so dimly at the back of his memory.” (At this point the fragment ends.) It is difficult to ascertain HPL’s plans for this item. In April 1927 he speaks of “making a very careful study of London…in order to get background for tales involving richer antiquities than America can furnish” (HPL to August Derleth, [April 15, 1927]; ms., SHSW), leading one to believe that the fragment was written around this time (not in 1926, as commonly assumed). Some external features of Lord Northam bring Arthur Machen and Lord Dunsany to mind, although in a superficial way. Northam lives at Gray’s Inn, where Machen lived for many years; and Northam is the “nineteenth Baron of a line whose beginnings went uncomfortably far back into the past,” just as Dunsany was the eighteenth Baron in a line founded in the twelfth century. Northam, like Randolph Carter in “The Silver Key,” undertakes a wide-ranging sampling of various religious and aesthetic ideals, allowing us perhaps to believe that the fragment was written after “The Silver Key.”

See S.T. Joshi, “On ‘The Descendant,’” CryptNo. 53 (Candlemas 1988): 10–11.

Description of the Town of Quebeck, A.

Essay (78,000 words); written September 1930–January 14, 1931. First published in HPL’s To Quebec and the Stars(1976), ed. L.Sprague de Camp.

HPL’s single longest literary work—an exhaustive history of Quebec and a detailed travelogue of the city and neighboring regions, based upon his first ecstatic visit to the region in late summer of 1930. HPL relied largely on published

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histories and guidebooks for much of his historical account, but the travelogue section is manifestly based upon first-hand experience. The entire text is written in exquisite eighteenth-century English and reflects a British attitude in recording the defeat of the French by the English in the course of the eighteenth century. The text is filled with HPL’s drawings of typical Quebec architecture, and there is an appendix providing French and English names of prominent landmarks and the origins of placenames and street-names. HPL never prepared the text for publication, nor even a typescript to circulate among colleagues; hence it long remained unpublished. De Camp’s edition contains many mistranscriptions and also fails to correct several instances of HPL’s erroneous French. “Despair.”