"After all, I was like that when I was alive two hundred years ago - the restless one, the one who was always spoiling for love and a good brawl. When I set out for Paris in the 1780s to be an actor, all I dreamed of were beginnings - the moment each night when the curtain went up. "Maybe the old ones are right. I refer now to the true immortals - the blood drinkers who've survived the millennia - who say that none of us really changes over time; we only become more fully what we are. "To put it another way, you do get wiser when you live for hundreds of years; but you also have more time to turn out as badly as your enemies always said you might." (Introduction, p. 4)

"Now, be assured: though I am leaving you, I will return with full...