help? need info about ghost story.

[verbminx]

Many years ago I read a certain ghost story. A young man in Paris, prior to 1900 (maybe even prior to or around 1800), meets a pretty girl and falls in love with her. But all she wants to do is hang around in his apartment. She wears a red ribbon choker. At the end of the story, he takes off the choker and her head rolls off and across the floor. The girl had actually been the ghost of a guillotined Terror victim.

Does anyone know the title and author of this story? It's a pretty famous ghost story, and I would have read it sometime in the late 1980s. I think it is quite a bit older than that, though; might be by Saki or something. Could as easily be by Tanith Lee.

I'm asking because the topic of the supposed fashion, in late-Revolutionary or post-Revolutionary (my guess) France, for women to wear their hair dressed like Terror victims and specifically for them to wear red ribbon chokers. It's a certain small trope in fiction - if you read a recently-written book set in the Terror, the author will almost certainly throw it in as a "period detail" - but I recall reading that it's not true, despite the many references you'll find about it, that it's something that started out either as a fictional detail or an exaggeration of something that only happened once or twice. This ghost story was certainly the first place I ever heard of it. I think I read something about it being the originator of the "red ribbon choker" story, but I could be misremembering. What I do recall is that the ribbon story got attached to the Revolution in much the same way that clans got attached to tartans in the 19th century, because the idea was popularized in fiction.

Anyway, it came up on a community I read, and now I am smacking myself trying to remember the name and author of the story in question, and remember if it is the source of the legend or if it drew from the source.

ETA - I found it on my own, but cdaae was neck-in-neck! It's "The Adventure of the German Student" by Washington Irving.

ETA2 - You know what? The choker on the girl in the Irving story is black, not red. I'm thinking that the Dumas novel mentioned by cdaae is probably the one that I heard of as the origination of the red-ribbon-choker-fashion story.

Comments

[ex-cdaae.livejournal.com]

It's older than that. I know I've read it. I can't damn well remember who wrote it, though. Except I have a weird vague memory that it could have been in a book of short stories by Gaston Leroux, of all people. Sadly I can't find the book to look it up.

[ex-cdaae.livejournal.com]

Yup, he wrote a story called "The Woman with the Velvet Collar", but it probably wasn't the "original". 1929, that one was.

[ex-cdaae.livejournal.com]

There's also:

The Woman with the Velvet Collar, by Alexandre Dumas
roman/novel, pub:1851

And:

Washington Irving's "The Lady with the Velvet Collar; or, the Adventure of the German Student"

But I don't know if they have the same plot as the Leroux short story. I'm assuming they do, as they're related to the Revolution.
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=http://www.cadytech.com/dumas/works.php&prev=/search%3Fq%3D%2522Woman%2Bwith%2Bthe%2BVelvet%2BCollar%2522%26start%3D10%26hl%3Den%26hs%3DcHN%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-GB:official%26sa%3DN

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

I think I've just found it on my own! It would be the Washington Irving story... his name stuck in my head as the possible author to begin with.

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wirving/bl-wirving-adven.htm

Thanks though. I'll check out the Leroux later.

[boadiccea.livejournal.com]

Permission to repost with a link to your question? I have a friend or two on my list who may know...

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

It's "The Adventure of the German Student" by Washington Irving.

http://classiclit.about.com/library/bl-etexts/wirving/bl-wirving-adven.htm

thanks tho!

[boadiccea.livejournal.com]

It's funny, 'cause I remember reading that one way-back-when.

Glad you found the answer!

[tully-monster.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah! He goes mad in the end, doesn't he?

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

Yeah! It's one of those stories that totally ends, "And he's been CATATONIC ever since." I think Hawthorne did a bunch of those in one way or another, too.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

Washington Irving was really into headlessness, I guess.

I think a lot of what people believe about the French Revolution is shaped by fiction--Tale of Two Cities especially.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

Yes! Especially the ladies knitting at executions.
(It's not improbable that they did, but it wouldn't be an example of their extreme sanguinity at all the... sang. It would just be because knitting people could knit anywhere in the 18th and 19th centuries and would probably have needed to take their knitting with them. Kids need winter socks whether someone's getting executed or not.)

[jenny-dreadful.livejournal.com]

I had a children's book of scary stories when I was a kid, and I lioved that one. In it, the ribbon was yellow, and she wouldn't let him take the ribbon off until she was on her deathbed, when they were both old.

[jenny-dreadful.livejournal.com]

Oooooooh, I love your icon!

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

Take it! Just credit it to whoever made it... it's in the keywords on my icon page. There are other similar ones floating around LJ. :)