Gabriele D’Annunzio was another firm believer in their existence. In his _Triumph of Death_, translated by Georgina Harding, we read: “What have they not done? Candia told of all the different means they had tried, all the exorcisms they had resorted to. The priest had come and, after covering the child’s head with the end of his stole, had repeated verses from the Gospel. The mother had hung up a wax cross, blessed on Ascension Day, over a door, and had sprinkled the hinges with holy water and repeated the Creed three times in a loud voice; she had tied up a handful of salt in a piece of linen and hung it round the neck of her dying child. The father had ‘done the seven nights’—that is, for seven nights he had waited in the dark behind a lighted lantern, attentive to the slightest sound, ready to catch and grapple with the vampire. A single prick with the pin sufficed to make her visible to the human eye. But the seven nights’ watch had been fruitless, for the child wasted away and grew more hopelessly feeble from hour to hour. At last, in despair, the father had consulted with a wizard, by whose advice he had called a dog and put the body behind the door. The vampire could not then enter the house till she counted every hair on its body.” Calmet’s explanation of the spectres so much talked of in Hungary, Moravia, Poland, and elsewhere is that they are nothing but persons that are still alive in their graves, though without motion or respiration; and that the freshness and ruddy colour of their blood, the flexibility of their limbs, and their crying out when their hearts were run through with a stick, or their heads cut off, were demonstrative proofs of their being still alive. “But this,” he says, “does not affect the principal difficulty at which I stick, namely, how they come out of and go into their graves, without leaving any mark of the earth’s being removed; and how they appear to carry former clothes. If they are not really dead, why do they return to their graves again and not stay in the land of the living? Why do they suck the blood of their relations, and torment and pester persons that should naturally be true to them and never give them any offence? On the other hand, if it be nothing but a mere whim of the persons infested, whence comes it that these carcases are found in their graves uncorrupted, full of blood, with their limbs pliant and flexible, and their feet dirty, the next day after they have been patrolling about and frightening the neighbourhood, whilst nothing of this sort can be discovered in other carcases that were buried at the same time and in the same mound? Whence is it that they come no more after they are burned or impaled?”