This chapter explores the antecedents, critical episteme, contemporary politics, and other issues relating to Théophile Gautier’s vampire tale of 1836. Beginning with a description of the plot, it moves to consider the role played by writers like Charles Nodier and Jacques Cazotte – founders of the French conte fantastique – in establishing much of the raw material of the tale, and then looks in some detail at both the importance of Hoffmann to Gautier as well as the importance of aesthetic theory in the period as discussed in Gautier’s Mademoiselle de Maupin. Surveying the attitudes to religion, contemporary politics, art, and also the trend for expressing androgyny in literature as discussed by a raft of critics both past and present, the chapter finishes by observing the potential for psychoanalytic criticism in the short story, and its further impact on other writers. Above all, the chapter argues for the tale being the first to present a female vampire as an ambiguous seductress, and thus a watershed in the history of the vampire theme’s development. The work draws upon critics such as Chabanne, Castex, Apostol, Butler, Todorov, and Cornwell, and as such also manages to give a survey of the range of critical opinion on “La Morte amoureuse.”