From yesterday to a hundred years ago, he lives in the world and walks among us. He enjoys the finest things in life, including beautfiul women, well-aged wine, and the finest classical composers. He has no guilt—he has no need of it. Neither good, nor bad, neither angel nor devil, he is a man, he is a vampire. And this is his story. . . . “Women are my weakness. Or to be more accurate, I should say they are my greatest weakness, for I have many. Travel. Books. Classical music. Art. Excellent wine. And, formerly, cocaine. I admit these things without a sense of guilt. I am, as my friend from Vienna says, a man with a man’s contradictions. I am neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil. I am a man. I am a vampire.” —From I, Vampire ay to a hundred years ago, he lives in the world and walks among us. He enjoys the finest things in life, including beautfiul women, well-aged wine, and the finest classical composers. He has no guilt -- he has no need of it. Neither good, nor bad, neither angel nor devil, he is a man, he is a vampire. And this is his story.... ay to a hundred years ago, he lives in the world and walks among us. He enjoys the finest things in life, including beautfiul women, well-aged wine, and the finest classical composers. He has no guilt -- he has no need of it. Neither good, nor bad, neither angel nor devil, he is a man, he is a vampire. And this is his story.... Michael Romkey is a newspaper editor and author of the cult classic I, Vampire, as well as The Vampire Papers, The Vampire's Violin, The Vampire Princess, The Vampire Virus, Telluride Blood, and others. He lives in Bettendorf, Iowa. Chapter 1   PARIS, JUNE 1, 1989—Women are my weakness.   Or to be more accurate, I should say they are my greatest weakness, for I have many. Travel. Books. Classical music. Art. Excellent wine. And, formerly, cocaine. I admit these things without a sense of guilt. I am, as my friend from Vienna says, a man with a man’s contradictions—“ein Mensch mit seinem Widerspruch.”   I am neither good nor bad, neither angel nor devil.   I am a man. I am a vampire.   I have found the perfect place to spend this warm spring evening.   I am in Paris, the City of Light, sitting alone in an outdoor café with nothing much to do until the Wagner Festival begins in Bayreuth. At the festival I finally will be reunited with Tatiana, and Mozart will introduce me to the Illuminati, who comprise the innermost circle of the secret race to which I now belong.   Paris is as beautiful as people say, yet there is one thing about it that repulses me: It is a city of ghosts. I am unaccustomed to the heavy atmosphere of history that surrounds me here. Everywhere I walk, echoes of the past come back to me with the sound of my footsteps.   Tonight I wandered through the Tuileries gardens, then down the Rue de Rivoli past the Hotel Crillon, where Benjamin Franklin had rooms, to the seventy-five-foot-tall Egyptian obelisk in the center of the Place de la Concorde. The pink granite stiletto is covered with hieroglyphics written 3,300 years ago. I did not understand the literal message inscribed in the falcons and jackals and other carved images, but the secondary message—the one yearning for life beyond the few years allotted mortal flesh—cried out to me in the night. The obelisk seems as at home in Paris as it must have been amid the ruins at Luxor.   I walked on to the far end of the Champs-Elysées to visit Napoleon’s Arc de Triomphe, which is crumbling and draped with netting to catch bits and pieces when they fall.   Such folly. Men contrive these artifices to cheat mortality, but no monument is permanent enough to stop time from washing away all traces of its builder’s existence. Time is a scouring river that transforms the past into a smooth, featureless landscape where only a slight rise on the horizon betrays the place an indomitable mountain range once stood, until eventually even that disappears.   The gardens and palaces and fountains remain in this historical city, but the people who built them have long departed, their bones turned to dust, their public works left behind to delay a little longer the anonymity of the grave. These monuments to men’s egos were made of mortar and stone and timber, but their builders were made of flesh and blood and bone. Flesh and blood and bone cannot resist time’s ravages.   Except in the vampire.   Paris, June 2, 1989—I have never understood what motivates people to keep diaries, and I am not exactly sure why I have started this one. I suppose it is a way for me to work through questions that have troubled me ever since I fell in love with Tatiana on a night just like this one almost exactly one year ago.   What is a vampire? I have spent the past twelve months studying this question from the inside out, but still I do not know the answer. I can make a list of the vampire’s primary characteristics—superhuman strength, fierce intelligence, great stealth